by Standerinfamilycourt

Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, and that you may live long on the earth.   – Ephesians 6:2-3

Mother’s Day 2018 has come and gone, and it’s now Mother’s Day 2019.   In sharp contrast with Mother’s Day 1968, here are a few miserable facts:

• Over 40% of children are born into fatherless homes outside of civil wedlock, and in some races this is as high as 70%
• Over two-thirds of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by WOMEN, yet most of these same women never recover financially and may easily retire impoverished
•  Some 80% of those filed petitions are non-mutual – that is, opposed by an innocent spouse who has not objectively done anything to harm the filing spouse or the marriage
• Taxpayers, including divorcees, foot a bill for well over $100 billion per year in state and Federal costs arising from the social expense of state-accelerated family breakdown

What would beneficial reform look like?   From a constitutional standpoint, allowing for the restoration of our right of religious conscience and free religious exercise under the 1st Amendment, and allowing for 14th Amendment equal protection with regard to parental and property rights, our suggested reforms are:

(1) All petitions that are not mutual filings would require evidence-based proof of serious, objective harm to the marriage or to the offended spouse.     For example, “emotional abuse” would be professionally defined in the statutes in terms of specific behaviors, with professionally documented admissible evidence legally defined

(2) All divisions of property and child custody / welfare arrangements that are not agreed as part of a mutual petition would be determined based on objective evidence of marital fault being the key consideration, with a view to leaving the non-offending party and the children as whole as possible in comparison with pre-divorce conditions

(Yes, we readily concede that this would be creating substantial economic disincentives to dissolution of the marriage, and we make no apologies.   The present system actively rewards the one seeking the divorce and actively punishes the innocent spouse who dares resist in any way.)

So what are the specific benefits to families and society (hence, to mothers) from these reforms?

Benefit #10 –  They’d be more prone to have marriage as a realistic and durable option in their life.
We hear this from the cohabiting young adults all the time, including households with kids but unmarried parents: “what’s the point of getting married?”   Despite the social do-gooders who cheerlead with shallow slogans like “put a ring on it”, the kids sense the government power-grab that unilateral “no-fault” divorce imposes on their lives and pocketbooks, and many of them have been saying “no thanks” for several years now.    Even if they’re not old enough to remember a time when the marriage contract was binding (absent some provable serious fault), they know the current civil contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, especially when they see 50 and 60-year olds who have been successfully married for decades suddenly unable to stay out of the jaws of the “family court” machinery.

Benefit #9 – Their kids and life companions would be less likely to commit suicide.
This is not to say that in the halcyon days when the marriage contract was reasonably binding, there weren’t murders and suicides of wives.   All one has to do is watch the old “Twilight Zone”, “Perry Mason” and “Alfred Hitchcock” episodes from the early-1960’s to know that this was an issue which probably justified some measured reform of divorce laws to allow for mutual consent  “no-fault” grounds — and arms-length property and child settlements.  But, certainly not the travesty we wound up with: unilaterally-asserted “irreconcilable differences” grounds, where the innocent was assumed guilty by the courts upon the allegation of one spouse, and no evidence to the contrary would be tolerated or heard or appealed, and where the guilty party was rewarded while the innocent party was smeared and robbed by the court (and sometimes even jailed).

The apologists for this robbery of fundamental rights from the entire class of innocent spouses claim it’s “justified” because the suicide rate in wives reportedly dropped by 20% following unilateral divorce enactment.   But who’s to say that this improvement would not have comparably happened as a result of mutual-consent “no-fault”?
In the meantime, spousal murders have not abated, while estranged husband and young adult child suicides, and accidental deaths due to drug addictions, have skyrocketed.   Mother’s Day is not such a happy day for some mothers for this horrible reason, even though they extracted their personal sexual and financial autonomy under the civil law.   For other mothers, it’s not such a happy day because their husband decided to trade them in, and as a consequence they find themselves alienated from their children (perhaps even losing one to suicide or worse), even though they were the responsible parent who did nothing wrong.

Benefit #8 –  Their kids would be less likely to become gender-confused and gender-dysphoric.
Speaking of high suicide and addiction rates, and looking back 50 years, we had this amazing phenomenon of rapidly increasing numbers of LGBTQ(xyz)-ers suddenly being “born this way” — when markedly fewer of them were “born this way” back in the days when it just so happened the civil marriage contract was legally enforceable.   Ditto concerning the amazing inverse correlation between the demand for “marriage” among homosexuals and the legal enforceability of the marriage contract (while we’re at it).

Some moms opt for lesbian relationships themselves after being rejected by a husband, thinking this relationship will be more stable than her marriage was.   Those relationships are actually shown to be more volatile than male homosexual relationships (which tend to be more promiscuous, and to survive longterm only on that basis).    In any event, the bad outcomes greatly compound when mom is setting that kind of example for her children.

Benefit #7 –  Their kids would be less likely to be killed at school or (even worse) become the shooter.
Sadly, we’ve come to have so many school shooting incidents in the past 20 years that they no longer shock us the way they used to.   In 2013, CNN compiled a fairly exhaustive list of all such reported  incidents, and has kept it updated since.   Only three such incidents occurred between 1927 and 1970, according to the list, and only one of those involved a minor as the perpetrator.   However, from 1974 to present, CNN reports  such incidents, most of them involving minors, and since the late 1980’s it’s consistently been 2 or 3 per year, most of them carried out by a “son of divorce”.    In his 2013 article, “Sons of Divorce School Shooters”, W. Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia writes,

“From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.”

This makes for dozens of mothers, on both sides of the gun, for whom each Mother’s Day is unimaginably painful.

Benefit #6 – Reproductive abuses, from profiteering abortionists to abominable surrogacy, would stop victimizing so many of them.
“standerinfamilycourt” was shocked and outraged to see the U.S. listed in an article, Surrogacy by Country, by the organization, Families Through Surrogacy, where this practice is legal (but expensive).   What most countries have in common where both surrogacy and abortion are legal (the latter often government-funded) is that they also have unilateral divorce-on-demand, and by extension, removal of fathers’ rights and responsibilities because he’s often been forcibly severed from his marriage and family.   Where there are strong natural fathers favored by society and the legal structure, there is less room and demand for commercialized reproductive abuses that exploit and traumatize women — and commoditize children.

Hungary, in particular (not on the above surrogacy list), has recently decided to bank on this relationship between easy divorce and negative population implications, implementing conservative national family policies to avoid having to resort to open borders to resolve its demographic issues (to the angst of its feminists).   If conservative family policies work there, they’ll probably work in other western countries and the U.S.   Hungary only has “no-fault” divorce available by mutual consent, according to websites by Hungarian family law attorneys.   Abortion is legal in Hungary, but it’s broadly reported as being very difficult to access, and its constitution states that “life begins at conception”.  Look for God’s blessings to be on Hungary as a nation.

Benefit #5 – The national debt would begin to decline, improving the national security of mothers and their children.
The national debt clock shows that the U.S. is over $22 trillion dollars in debt as of this writing.  In a study released in 2008 by the Institute for American Values (which was 7 years pre-Obergefell and badly need to be updated),  the combined state and Federal annual taxpayer cost of family fragmentation due to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws was $122 billion per year.   Compounded by the Treasury’s borrowing cost over those years since enactment, unilateral “no-fault” divorce could easily account for at least one-third of the total.   

Benefit #4 – In-home child abuse would decline at the hands of the mothers’ boyfriends so their children could grow up safely again.
Forcibly removing the rights and authority of natural fathers (in some cases, mothers) from the lives of their children has come at a very high moral and safety cost to those children.    W. Bradford Wilcox (cited above) writes in a 2011 article for Public Discourse,

“This latest study confirms what a mounting body of social science has been telling us for some time now. The science tells us that children are not only more likely to thrive but are also more likely to simply survive when they are raised in an intact home headed by their married parents, rather than in a home headed by a cohabiting couple. For instance, a 2005 study of fatal child abuse in Missouri found that children living with their mother’s boyfriends were more than 45 times more likely to be killed than were children living with their married mother and father.

“Cohabitation is also associated with other non-fatal pathologies among children. A 2002 study from the Urban Institute found that 15.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems (e.g., depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.), compared to just 3.5 percent of children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents. A 2008 study of more than 12,000 adolescents from across the United States found that teenagers living in a cohabiting household were 116 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, compared to teens living in an intact, married family. And so it goes.”

Benefit #3 – Family and national wealth would markedly improve, leaving fewer of them poor in old age
Wedlock (emphasis on the “lock”) creates wealth and staves off poverty, many studies have shown.    Yet, close to 70% of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by women, who don’t realize until too late, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
If, on the other hand, they had to prove fault, and if they bore the cost of their own fault, they wouldn’t so readily fall prey to the deception of feminist ideologies.  All too often they find themselves in unanticipated poverty after buying into the empty feminist promises and discarding their spouse, after which, they come to think the only way out is to throw another woman into poverty by seducing her husband onto the legalized-adultery-merry-go-round.

In terms of national wealth, this is a hand-of-God matter.   Deuteronomy 28 tells us (vicariously, since this was spoken to His most-favored nation):

“Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.   All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the Lord your God:

“Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.

“Blessed shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground and the offspring of your beasts, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.

“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.

“The Lord shall cause your enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you; they will come out against you one way and will flee before you seven ways.   The Lord will command the blessing upon you in your barns and in all that you put your hand to, and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.   The Lord will establish you as a holy people to Himself, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways.   So all the peoples of the earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will be afraid of you.The Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.The Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you only will be above, and you will not be underneath, if you listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I charge you today, to observe them carefully,and do not turn aside from any of the words which I command you today, to the right or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.”

The Apostle John channels the words of Jesus in Revelation 2 to confirm this Deuteronomy 28 warning as still being true in the last days among the Gentile church:

But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.   I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality.  Behold, I will throw her on a bed of sickness, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds.  And I will kill her children with pestilence, and all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your deeds.

Sexual autonomy is a contemporary “other god” that is served by immoral family laws.    Notice that both blessings and curses passively overtake a nation according to the national choices made by clergy and government.   Reading on in Deuteronomy 28, the opposite curse to each blessing is recited by Moses, except the curses far outnumber the blessings, showing that His protective hand over a nation holds back far more curses, which flood us when He removes it after many prophetic warnings go unheeded.   Most of us would agree that God has allowed most of these poverty-from-disobedience consequences to fall on the U.S. and other western countries in increasing intensity as the Sexual Revolution has become increasingly entrenched in our culture, unopposed by the church.

Jesus was very clear about God’s commandment, which if we truly obeyed as a nation, there would be no humanist legal provision for divorce:

“…What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate…Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. ”

 

Benefit #2  –  Their pastors would quit lying to mothers (and fathers) about biblical instruction concerning remarriage
It is a documented fact that commercially-published bible text has been “evolving” since at least the late 1800’s, that seminary faculties have been increasingly overrun with sexual liberals since the post-World War II period, and that academic freedoms have been increasingly on the wane in the last 10 years with regard to conservative biblical scholars.  We now have free online bible study tools that enable just about anybody to conclusively demonstrate the liberal violations of Revelation 22:19.  Back in the 1970’s, pastors in several denominations went on record as demanding that the church stop teaching that remarriage is adultery in every case where an estranged spouse is still living (even though that’s quite accurately what both Jesus and Paul taught), demanding the removal of denominational rules that would disfellowship them for performing weddings Jesus would call continuously adulterous.   There were also demands for pastors in such an adulterous “marriage” themselves to no longer be denied ordination credentials, even though that’s the standard that the Apostle Paul himself implemented in the churches he established.

It’s also a well-documented fact (per the minutes of denominational conferences) that the chief cause for this was primarily economic – i.e., the fear of loss of church membership as legalized adultery supplanted holy matrimony going forward.   But it was also emotional and reputational now, as falsified bibles (and pastors themselves commonly living in ongoing legalized sexual sin) emboldened a lot of church women to bully their own pastors if they didn’t take a liberal stance and shrug off God’s word to the contrary.    If it’s true that the cause of doctrinal unfaithfulness was the pursuit of unrighteous mammon, the effect will eventually reverse to the extent the civil laws comport again with biblical morality concerning marriage.   (Luke 16, from beginning to end, needs to be read as an integrated unit, rather than a random cluster of miscellaneous sayings of Jesus.)

Benefit #1 –  Fewer mothers (and their adulterous partners) would die on the broad road that leads to hell
It became culturally uncouth to speak of hell sometime back in the 1960’s, especially in churches, as if eternal moral consequences for persisting in wicked life choices were suddenly declared passe’ from On-High.    The Apostles clearly did not hold this attitude, nor did most of the 1st through 4th century church fathers, even when speaking of the born-again.

Circa 100 A.D., the Bishop of Antioch said this in his Epistle to the Ephesians,

“Do not err, my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. And if those that corrupt mere human families are condemned to death, how much more shall those suffer everlasting punishment who endeavor to corrupt the Church of Christ, for which the Lord Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, endured the cross, and submitted to death!  Whosoever, ‘being waxen fat,’ and ‘become gross,’ sets at nought His doctrine, shall go into Hell. In like manner, every one that has received from God the power of distinguishing, and yet follows an unskillful shepherd, and receives a false opinion for the truth, shall be punished.”  –St. Ignatius 

No, this wicked idea that “remarriage” while an original spouse was still alive could ever be accepted by God as holy matrimony was an unfortunate time-bomb, a product of 16th century Reformation humanism (as was “replacement theology”, against which the Apostle Paul also warned).    Eventually, this heresy removed inhibitions against enacting immoral family and reproductive laws in western nations, and deceived the lawmakers who today uphold these laws into having the audacity to call themselves “Christians”.   This was also the reason why some conservative denominations made the eternally fatal choice in the 1970’s to revise their once-biblical doctrine to accommodate the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, instead of standing strong against them anywhere close to the way they stood against gay “marriage”.

Jesus preached a 3-part definition of adultery, and part 3 actually precludes any notion of “biblical exceptions” we hear so much about:

(1) to lust in one’s heart after someone other than our living spouse (Matt. 5:27-28)
(2) to divorce a spouse in order to remarry (Mark 10:11-12)
(3) to marry any divorced person (and by corollary, to marry someone after being involuntarily divorced – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18b)

In Matthew 5:27-32 Jesus tell us that adultery doesn’t just occur extramaritally, but it occurs just as much inside of the “remarriages” of seemingly respectable church-going people, and by His reference to cutting off of our hands and gouging out our eyes rather than taking the first step toward this abomination, He alludes to this conduct leading to hell as the (unrepentant) destination.   Later on, He directly and graphically says so in Luke 16:18-31.

Picture credit:  Sharon Henry

While it’s not strictly necessary for pastors and lawmakers to visualize their sheep (and constituents) in the hell-flames to get the former onboard with moral divorce reforms in civil law, it sure doesn’t hurt.   Pastors who do see this connection usually don’t perform the kinds of weddings that directly drive the demand for “no-fault” divorces.   If lawmakers could see their adulterously remarried constituents in the resulting hell-flames as a repeal bill is before them, and if they knew that what the martyred Ignatius had to say was a certainty concerning the corrupters of families, it wouldn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, they would vote for the repeal of marriage “dissolution” laws altogether.   Getting the state “out of the marriage business” would include getting the state out of the divorce business to the same extent!

Nine of these benefits to mothers (and future mothers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word.   The #1 benefit to mothers, however, is eternal.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who can celebrate today.   Joyous Mothers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord.

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.   – Hebrews 13:4

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!