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
A few weeks ago, SIFC wrote about the potential impact of badly-needed divorce reform on the nation’s mothers. In many ways, that was a hard piece to write, because women consistently file over two-thirds of the unilateral “no-fault” petitions that shred their own families, year in and year out. They always have a heart-tugging excuse, usually involving some degree of what they perceive to be abuse, from which the children “must be shielded at all costs” (including the violent destruction of the family). When they take up with another man shortly thereafter (as though that behavior wasn’t even more abusive of the children), it’s only “coincidental” and “he’s who God really had for me”.
Writing that piece felt a bit like saying, “Outlawing your unilateral rebellion against God (and your husband), will benefit you by saving you from God’s wrath.” In many cases, that’s the actual truth. On the other hand, when speaking of fathers who give “family courts” permission to shred their own families, such men would be a much smaller proportion of the petitions that have historically been filed. This law has always been a militant feminist contrivance, and a vehicle for social Marxism, rather than for freedom and human thriving (which, incidentally, God specifically set men in charge of, not women).
Dr. Stephen Baskerville stated quite profoundly that the ultimate goal of the Leftist “social engineers” is to sever fathers from their families. In fact, according to Dr. Baskerville (@ 7:23-8:33), the only legitimate reason for government to presume to regulate God’s holy ordinance is to preserve its original purpose – to firmly glue fathers to their families for life.
We explained in that earlier piece what a desirable reform in the law would look like, and we repeat it here:
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 due process and 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.
In many ways, the benefits to fathers from these reforms, are made obvious just by looking at what “family courts” routinely do to fathers, and imagining those things being undone. Totalitarian family policies are never good for anyone, but on average, fathers as a group have been hit with the most severe overall human suffering resulting from them.
Benefit #10 – Men would no longer need for fear that marriage will wreck their life and literally criminalize what used to be universally-expected fatherly and husbandly behavior in civilized societies.
We all owe our first loyalties to the eternal kingdom of God, and not to the civil laws of men when they directly conflict with God’s law. St. Augustine expressed this in his writings, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also evoked this 5th century thought in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he wrote:
“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’
“Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law… “
State policies designed to do anything but encourage national repentance and sustainably raise future citizens...(namely, to instead try to fiscally “manage” the whirlwind consequences of legalized immorality) have degenerated to the point where lawyers deliberately whip up hostility between troubled spouses for their own future profit (which lies not in their reconciliation) , and where states act against taxpayers’ best overall interests in order to secure Federal Title IV-D funds from the men they slanderously label as “deadbeat dads” (although some women have also been finding themselves in this horrific nightmare, as well.)
Benefit #9 – Dads could serve their country overseas when duty calls, with reasonable assurance there will be a family to come back to, instead of coming back to a perjurous “protective order”.
As unbelievable (and despicable) as it sounds, “family law” attorneys have been known to attend continuing legal education (CLE) classes – such as by this Texas Assistant D.A. – to learn how to abuse the domestic violence protective order system, and to coach their clients on how to gain leverage for their divorce petition settlement (children, property, etc.) through allegations centered around actual or fabricated post-traumatic-shock syndrome (PTSD). Tragically, this is routinely used against veterans whose spouse got tired of their deployments in the service of our country and found someone else. In many states, the wronged spouse has no option to bring a counter petition where adultery (fault) is actually with the petitioning spouse, because that state’s law only provides for “no-fault” grounds, and because it (separately) bars all consideration of marital fault in either child custody or property division orders. Many states have also repealed or gutted their “alienation of affections” civil cause of action against spouse-poachers in recent years.
Benefit #8 – Dads would have more authority and influence to prevent a third party from endangering their children, and would no longer need a court’s permission to do so.
One of the most egregious human rights crimes against families (after the Title IV-D organized crime racket, of course) is banning marital fault as the key consideration in child custody decisions.
We can thank the Sexual Revolution, of course, for outlawing moral judgments on adults in the best interest of the character development of the children. We can also thank the Sexual Revolution, therefore, for the high level of emotional damage to two generations of children (and counting).
If mom unilaterally divorces dad because he doesn’t make enough money to suit her, won’t lose his beer gut, or whatever, and plans to shack up with whoever enticed her away, it should be a no-brainer that all other factors being equal, dad should get the kids, and mom should get supervised visits because of her immoral lifestyle.
That’s the way it used to work, and there was nothing wrong with it. The kids came first. Unfortunately, as it stands, dad is even not allowed to tell the court about mom’s contributing adultery in the most evil of the states. He’s barely allowed to tell the court that the new boyfriend is endangering the children, (and that’s if he’s lucky enough that mom didn’t invent some abuse charges and slap him with a restraining order so that he can’t even gain awareness of what’s going on with his kids.) No, instead of the authority GOD gave him, he has to go through CPS — who stands to make the state a little money by selling the kids off to strangers called “foster parents”, bypassing dad altogether if he doesn’t happen to have 6-figures in cash to go to court with after he brings forward an abuse or neglect complaint. When human governments come between a worthy father and his children, God will judge them severely! In fact, that’s precisely why the analogous slave trade was such an existential threat to the viability of the United States (and other involved countries) to continue as sovereign nations.
Benefit #7 – Dads would no longer be financing their estranged wife’s illicit subsequent household.
When mom gets custody of the kids in a unilateral forced divorce, dad gets to empty his wallet, regardless of his own fitness as a parent. The court applies a formula to determine how much he pays, and generally it can (and often does) go up, but if his circumstances like health or employment take a hit, there’s no guarantee in a lot of states that the amount will ever go down until the last child is 18. If he doesn’t pay up, the state often can come after any licenses (including professional licenses) that he holds, can publish his name in the paper as a “deadbeat”, and can even jail him for a period of time. If dad holds all or most of the family retirement funds, a “QDRO” (qualified domestic relations order – in a system that bars consideration of marital fault, a.k.a. – “license to steal”) is drawn up to give a good chunk of it to mom (again, without regard to consideration marital fault in a most states), and if dad was lucky enough to have vested traditional pension benefits, he ludicrously winds up paying mom by the month some day to live in her ongoing immorality. Responsible Christian husbands sorrowfully dread that this is potentially paying their wife by the month, by court order for life to die in her ongoing immoral state, and thereby have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. This is the exact opposite of the responsibility God assigned to authentic covenant husbands, and a man might prayerfully consider declining to cooperate with pension QDRO’s and enduring the humanly lawful consequences of civil disobedience, as suggested by St. Augustine and MLK, Jr.
Folks, what the state has actually done here, in banning moral judgments against the petitioner, is facilitate and incentivize spouse-poaching! (That which is financially rewarded in public policy, you tend to get a lot of, but who wants to live in that kind of a society?)
Benefit #6 – Dads who save for their children’s education, will have better assurance that this is where the funds will actually go.
For countless corrupt attorneys, obtaining the initial divorce decree tends to function as the “loss leader”, knowing that the real paycheck for them comes for the next several years following that that “dissolution” when the conflict over the children may continue until the last one reaches age 18. It is not uncommon for the non-custodial parent to complain that they’ve spent $200,000 or more just to secure the right to see their child enough to carry out their rightful parental role following a forced divorce. Where does this money come from? Typically it comes from retirement assets and college savings plans that were supposed to benefit the children. Instead, the funds must be diverted to attorney fees and court costs.
Benefit #5- Dad’s wife will no longer be incentivized by “family court”, nor rewarded for, filing a divorce petition against their innocent husbands.
Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbyist recently testified before the (liberally-skewed) Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee, that requiring mutual consent to access “no-fault” grounds, as HB 922 (2019) and HB93 (2017) would have done, deprives the petitioner of their leverage. So far so good, since one would have to be brain-dead not to realize allowing the petitioner a little less “leverage” is not quite the evil thing Mr. Bresnan painted it to be. Where he drifted off into outright falsehood is claiming that non-consensual “no fault” grounds of today’s status-quo in Texas “provides a level playing field”. We’re frankly not so sure Mr. Bresnan’s nose was finished growing, two weeks later! Yes, the leverage will shift as a result of requiring mutual consent for “no-fault” grounds. The U.S. and state constitutions demand that it shift, because what we have now is anything but a level playing field. But despite the special interest bellowing and subterfuge, it won’t shift nearly enough until “living apart” grounds that accrue in Texas three years later, to the benefit of the abandoner and forced upon the innocent spouse when the latter were neither consulted about the separation nor were they remotely supportive of it. (There was no 2017 nor 2019 bill addressing back-door “no-fault” grounds via willful abandonment.)
Benefit #4 – Dad’s covenant family will have a much better chance of surviving the apostasy of the family pastor.
Not only is contemporary “family law” a wildly lucrative business model that its beneficiaries feel must be protected at all costs, so is the operation of some local churches – sadly. Churches don’t tend to become mega-churches by being too choosy who they take money or volunteer efforts from, or how much sin they take onboard right along with the sinner(s). If that means ignoring or obfuscating God’s word concerning the no-excuses indissolubility of original holy matrimony, or concerning the ongoing adulterous nature of all remarriage while an estranged original spouse is still living, or concerning the clear biblical qualifications for pastors and deacons, so be it! (After all, we don’t want to be “Pharisees”, do we?) In fact, most seminaries today teach future pastors an apostate gospel when it comes to divorce and remarriage, and most contemporary English bible translations have been crafted to back that apostate gospel up accordingly. Indeed, Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox together created an origin point for that false gospel, which was relatively easy to do when the masses were illiterate and bibles were too expensive for most people who could read at the time. Hence, most pastors today reject what Jesus made clear in the original texts, that humans have no power from God to “dissolve” holy matrimony, and there are no “biblical exceptions” to this. Such pastors have blinded eyes when it comes to seeing how their performing an adulterous wedding over mom and her new boyfriend (likely, another living woman’s legally-estranged husband) absolutely crushes the souls of the covenant children of the real marriage(s).
Dr. Ryan Anderson, co-author of “What is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense” (2012) famously said, “the law is a teacher”. This was not exactly original, he borrowed this observation from St. Paul, but logically extended the application of that scripture from the Apostle’s original thought:
“Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.” – Galatians 3:24-25
Dr. Anderson argues that even an immoral law takes on an air of pseudo-righteousness when it has police power and court decrees behind it, because we are usually raised to respect civil authority…(indeed, some Christians go so far as to apply Romans 13 to blatantly immoral civil laws.) This legality in the eyes of men gives pastors a lot of “cover” over time to forget souls and give people what their flesh wants, especially if carnal believers are now in the majority and what they want has been temporally legal for a long time. True disciples who challenge them based on God’s word can then be pasted as “dividers of the brethren” and treated roughly. This actually happened to a 15-year old girl from Canada who visited a Missouri apostate church full of divorced and remarried folk, and spoke up while there about one such couple, according to the account of her marriage permanence pastor, Phil Schlamp (see sermon 5, @ 33.50). Something similar, but much more severe happened to a covenant wife when a megachurch in Florida colluded with her prodigal husband to stage an “incident” on their premises and had her falsely arrested for “battery” a few years ago when she simply quoted scripture in the pastor’s office challenging the church for installing this adulterous man as a deacon and agreeing to his adulterous wedding to a harlotrous woman in that church. “What about my husband’ soul?” she asked this hireling. Although Jesus would firmly disagree, he responded: “There’s no such thing as an adulterous marriage.” This prodigal husband tragically died of cancer, still in his sinful union and without Christ, a handful of years later.
The closer man’s laws can be brought to reflect God’s laws, the better it is for avoiding corruption in both families and pastors.
Benefit #3 – Dads will be far less likely suffer alienation from their children if they themselves lead a morally upright life, rather than having routine “family court” abuses remain entirely out of their control, as it is now.
Even with the most moral civil laws that can be drawn up, there’s no stopping mom from leaving if that’s what she wants to do. At best, there’s only economic deterrence from doing so, and moral protection of the children from normalized exposure to her adulterous or sodomous partner. Under current law, when mom leaves, the kids are going to be exposed to her immoral life choices regardless of who gets custody. It behooves dads to realize that heavy-handed government was never delegated any authority from God over a man’s children that would exceed his own authority over them. The best interests of the child is meaningless drivel in a pagan courtroom, with judges driven by illicit Federal subsidies to break up families, and by enforcing coercive sexual autonomy in favor of selfish people. However, if despite the profoundly immoral environment, dad lives before his children a godly example, and continues to teach them right and wrong from the bible, he is occupying the territory God assigned exclusively to him. God will “have his back” in it, and will move mountains in his behalf. Just remember, if you don’t want your son running after another woman should his future wife divorce him, don’t do so yourself.
Benefit #2 – Dads will have a restored legal basis for discharging the higher duty God has charged them with, as the spiritual head of the (biblical, covenant) wife and the covenant children (a basic Bill of Rights protection: the free exercise of religion).
There is an Old Testament story that is very sad, because it demonstrates how seriously God takes a father’s assignment from Him, and doesn’t take excuses for shirking this responsibility based on the surrounding environment. We read in 1 Samuel 2 about the priest, Eli who had two grown sons who were also priests in the temple of the Lord, but abused their priesthood by being sexually immoral and misusing the animal sacrifices brought by the people. The two sons are described as “worthless men who did not know the Lord and the custom of the priests with the people.” And why was that, if their father was a judge, and a priest of God who lived with them?
Scripture doesn’t elaborate any further, but clearly the implication is that their father had not very faithfully carried out his responsibility to train them. In fact, the implication in the next chapter is that Eli did a better job of training Samuel, who was sent to the temple as a boy to serve there. Scripture tells as that Eli sharply rebuked his sons as adults, but by then it was too late to change either their behavior or their ultimate fate in posterity. Another man of God came to Eli with God’s pronouncement of judgment on the house of Eli: “Why do you kick at My sacrifice and at My offering which I have commanded in My dwelling, and honor your sons above Me, by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of My people Israel?’ Therefore the Lord God of Israel declares, ‘I did indeed say that your house and the house of your father should walk before Me forever’; but now the Lord declares, ‘Far be it from Me—for those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me will be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days are coming when I will break your strength and the strength of your father’s house so that there will not be an old man in your house…all the increase of your house will die in the prime of life….This will be the sign to you which will come concerning your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas: on the same day both of them will die.”
The story picks again up in chapter 4 when the adult Samuel is now in charge (rather than either son), Eli is now 98 years old, and Israel is in the process of being defeated in battle by the Philistines. Both “priestly” sons died in battle after the Ark of the Covenant was misused then captured by the enemy. A man came to inform old Eli…“When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell off the seat backward beside the gate, and his neck was broken and he died, for he was old and heavy….” The Lord held Eli responsible for failing to teach his sons properly as boys, and wasn’t taking any excuses. Today, under the Messianic covenant, every household is a mini-church and every father of that home a priest. Today the cutting off of manhood is taking a very different form, but the overall effect is the same. Blessed is the man who asks the Lord to do battle for him to make a way through and around our immoral family laws, so that he can carry out this priestly and fatherly duty, despite the outward circumstances.
Benefit #1 – Dads will have a reduced risk of falling into the sin of remarriage adultery and forfeiting their own soul by dying in that immoral state.
For those who don’t follow our blog on a regular basis, we make no apologies for regularly talking about heaven and hell here. It’s truly regrettable that we have to do so, because God really gave that job to His shepherds, most of whom have not only rejected the responsibility, but also rejected an enormous body of biblical truth-telling in order to appease the Sexual Revolution and keep warm buns with full wallets in their pews. We make no apologies for not leaving God out of the “no-fault” reform debate, nor out of the more general “culture wars”. We don’t think, due to the demonic nature of this fight, that the war can possibly be won any other way. You won’t hear much about “natural law” around here. Instead, you’ll hear about God’s law!
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 is 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.
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 fathers (and future fathers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word. The #1 benefit to fathers of biblically-moral family laws, however, is eternal.
Happy Father’s Day to those who can celebrate today with their children. Joyous Fathers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord, and greater dependence upon Him.
A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.
– Proverbs 13:22
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!