Category Archives: Divorce

Divorce, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

The Other Side of the “No-Fault” Appeals Coin: Activist Family Court Judge in Mississippi (2017) Shot Down

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by Standerinfamilycourt

You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.
– Leviticus 19:15

Earlier this year,  “standerinfamilycourt” shared a detailed analysis which showed that the State of Mississippi was the only state in the nation that substantially respected the 1st and14th Amendment fundamental rights of Respondents ( religious free exercise and conscience, parental and property rights, equal protection and substantive due process rights )  as well as the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of state government.

Little did we know at that time that a case had been filed in 2017 with amici by domestic violence activists asking the state Supreme Court to affirm a family court ruling that Mississippi’s mutual consent-restricted statutory “no-fault” grounds for divorce (Code Section 93-5-1) was “unconstitutional”.      Though the outcome of this case (which, according to news reports, and the resulting opinion, was not a case alleging any sort of abuse).    The record shows that the wife who backed out of a mutual consent petition before it was finalized was serially adulterous, including in prior marriages.   This case, triggered by, Judge Jennifer Schloegel, an activist “family court” judge from Harrison County, and appealed by the innocent, rejected husband,  was ultimately unsuccessful in its claim of “unconstitutionality”.

Per the Clarion (October, 2017):

“The Harrison County case does not include allegations of domestic violence, but anti-domestic violence advocates and others have said Mississippi’s antiquated divorce laws make it difficult for an abused spouse to escape a marriage and help prolong dangerous family situations.”  (Translation:  this is as good a vehicle as we’re going to get for our ideological straw-man, so we’d better run with it.)

Under the Mississippi court system, such appeals go directly to the state Supreme Court.

Little did we know as well, that by the time our February, 2019 piece was posted, the Mississippi state legislature was heading for adjournment in March of their annual legislative session, while the only divorce “reform” bill that had been on the agenda was defeated in committee in early February.   Rather than seek repeal of the mutual consent provision of the statutory “no-fault” grounds, SB 2529 sought to add non-cohabitation grounds that even the abandoner could trigger after a period of time.    This Senate defeat constitutes two pieces of good news in one development.      The legislative measure would hardly have been a “reform”, and would have added a decidedly unconstitutional provision to the statute, one that had no available due process defense, beyond perhaps a token right to produce evidence that the charge of non-cohabitation was false in some regard.

Certainly, as borne out in this very case, there would be many more innocent Respondents upon whom this non-cohabitation was imposed against their will than abusive Respondents from whom a battered spouse was fleeing.    It would have been a decidedly anti-family measure, and redundant of the existing provisions for a battered spouse to bring objective evidence of abuse under fault-based grounds, or pursue a criminal remedy that didn’t seek to “dissolve” the marriage.  No abandoner of a marriage should ever be preemptively and automatically rewarded for the abandoning act.   Fault-based abandonment remedies, where they exist, should be exclusively available to the abandoned party.   We are grateful that the 2019 legislature did the right thing by the state’s families, after the high court also did.

Several studies of the causes of divorce have discredited the “abuse” and domestic violence lore, consistently showing that adultery or the desire to adulterously remarry is by far the most common driver, and placing abusive marriages far down the list.    Yet the unjust expectation of the media and Leftist activists is that this one assumed cause should control family law policy as if it were dominant.  Some ascribe “emotional abuse” to all the other traditional “legitimate” grounds, in order to justify this.


(Please click to enlarge)

This case also showcases the biased obnoxiousness of the liberal press around this “issue”, as media outlets from Thailand to Seattle, Detroit, Memphis (and back), including the Associated Press,  all parroted verbatim the original  Clarion article, which crowed its approval of the rogue, overreaching family court ruling , but went dead silent about both the Supreme Court outcome and abortive result of the ensuing legislative effort they had so confidently hyped.  Why?   It doesn’t exactly fit the “abuse” narrative when it turns out the truly “abused” person is actually the cuckolded Respondent, does it?

But just how obnoxious was the media over this case when it broke?  Here’s a 2017 sample:

“Lawmakers are expected again to debate divorce law reform and other measures to reduce domestic violence and related issues.

“Last year after much debate, lawmakers passed a measure that allows judges to grant a divorce for “spousal domestic abuse” based on testimony of the victim spouse.

“But Mississippi and South Dakota remain the only two states without a unilateral no-fault divorce ground. An investigative report by The Clarion-Ledger last year showed how Mississippi divorce laws, little changed over 100 years, trap spouses and children in abusive situations and financial limbo. One spouse who does not want a divorce or wants it only on his or her terms can hold up finalizing one for years — in some cases a decade or more.

“State Sen. Sally Doty, R-Brookhaven, the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence and others are vowing to continue to push this year for divorce law and other reforms to combat domestic violence.”

(  SIFC:  Anybody care to hazard a guess who the unnamed “others” are who vowed to fight on for divorce law “reform” in this news story?)

This case would have been even more satisfying to read if it had been the case of a God-fearing husband and father forgiving his “wife” (she had been previously divorced and this was an adulterous remarriage in itself, by biblical standards).    But true to the way of the culture, it was a case of retaliatory adultery also within the marriage, with no clear evidence of who started it or who retaliated. The Gertzes were in the process of finalizing a mutual petition under the existing (supposedly “unconstitutional”) law when she decided to withdraw her consent to the terms of the previously-agreed property settlement and child custody arrangements, leading both to charge each other with adultery.   The media clucked about how the case had “unconscionably dragged on” as if the husband had been responsible for that.

The actual facts per the high court:

“In January of 2015, Michael informed Joesie that reconciliation was impossible and that he wanted her to sign and finalize the divorce papers.  Joesie, upon the advice of her attorney, surreptitiousy told Michael that she also was ready to complete the irreconcilable differences divorce.  Based on the advice of her counsel, Joesie waited until her summer [2015] visitation had begun pursuant to the [2013 property settlement agreement] until her son was physically in Mississippi before withdrawing her consent to an irreconcilable differences divorce…”

It gets crazier from there, with the account of Judge Schloegel’s arbitrary actions, with which neither the husband nor the wife agreed:

“After a temporary hearing on July 13, 2015, the chancellor granted physical custody to Joesie. The trial began in December 2015 and concluded May 2016. Six months later, in November 2016, the chancellor entered a final judgment and decreed that a divorce should be granted, but that neither party was entitled to a fault-based divorce. She found that Joesie had failed to establish adultery. She found that Michael had proved adultery because Joesie had admitted it, but that Michael had condoned Joesie’s adulterous conduct. Then the chancellor sua sponte declared the statutory scheme under Mississippi Code Section 93-5-2 (Rev. 2013) unconstitutional and granted an irreconcilable-differences divorce. Joesie was granted custody of their child…. After the chancellor’s November 15, 2016, final judgment was entered,
Michael and Joesie, along with the State of Mississippi,

(  SIFC:  Well, yeah, the state AG is supposed to be given advance notice – 30 days in most states – when a constitutional challenge is being brought against an enacted statute – why would a family court judge not also be held to this same standard which common citizens and their attorneys are required to observe?)

…asked the chancellor to reconsider her judgment, because no party had asked for, pleaded, argued, or offered proof on the unconstitutionality of the statute….The State appealed the chancellor’s sua sponte adjudication of Section 93-5-2 as unconstitutional. Michael also appealed, arguing that the trial court erred by (1) declaring Section 93-5-2 unconstitutional, (2) failing to award Michael a divorce on the ground of
adultery, (3) reducing Michael’s summer visitation, (4) awarding Joesie a portion of Michael’s retirement benefits, and (5) awarding custody to Joesie. We affirm the chancellor’s finding regarding custody and child support, but we reverse the remaining judgment and remand the case for proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

It would have been nice to wave this ruling under the nose of the Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbying Stephen Bresnan when he got away with making the opportunistic claim before the Texas Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee last week, that “no court in any U.S. state had ever declared [unilateral] ‘no-fault’ divorce unconstitutional” (even though most honest constitutional attorneys say that it certainly is on numerous counts – the real issue is fair access to the appeals courts and applying the correct standard of review due to political fallout for elected judges.)   It would have been nice to follow up with a witness who said, “maybe not, in 2018, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that state’s mutual consent-only ‘no-fault’ grounds, which has stood since 1972, to be constitutional.   They can’t both be constitutional.”

But, alas, this was only a technical ruling, and can’t really be considered a ruling on merits due to the lack of substantive arguments or evidence either way.    The ruling was only that the Mississippi statute was not proven to be unconstitutional, by the trial judge or anyone else who was party to the case.

So what was the Judge Schloegel’s basis for determining on her own that mutual consent-restricted “no-fault” grounds was unconstitutional?    Only her own subjective opinion, apparently:
“the chancellor sua sponte declared that “the present Mississippi statutory fault-based divorce scheme . . . unconstitutionally restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms. . . . although “the parties did not execute a formal consent for the
Court to adjudicate contested matters on this basis . . . , [t]he parties are constitutionally entitled to a divorce without the mutual consent of the other.”    

Au contraire, said the Mississippi Supreme Court.

This appeal was also important due to the high court remanding the case back and requiring the trial judge to consider marital fault (attributed by the high court to the wife who failed to prove her husband committed either adultery or cruelty and inhuman treatment), also failed to prove–in light of her repeated lying and deception about her own adultery, that  her husband had condoned her illicit relationship while he attempted reconciliation, and had admitted her own adultery, she was not entitled to all of the alimony the trial judge attempted to award her.   The high court also determined that Judge Schloegel could not arbitrarily set aside the couple’s previous mutual custody agreement in order to reduce the husband’s time with their son for no just cause.

Perhaps it’s not so much that the mutual consent statute is actually “unconstitutional” but more accurately, the feminist judge (chancellor) had a problem ideologically with assigning legal fault to an adulteress, somebody merely exercising their sexual autonomy when she would have been perfectly free to do so with minimal legal and financial consequences in several other surrounding states.   If a surrounding state legalized (or, in fact, incentivized) murder or infanticide, does it really follow that this would automatically make Mississippi’s law penalizing those acts “unconstitutional” because its law…”restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms” ?   That’s not really too far-fetched a question these days, given recent successful infanticide legislation.

As for the bid by the domestic violence activists to hitch their opportunistic wagon to this case, the high court tossed their amicus brief to the side, saying:  “The amicus called for affirming the chancellor, because the statute deprived domestic-abuse victims of constitutional rights. However, no domestic violence was pleaded or proved in this matter.”     Given the ideological outrageousness of Schloegel’s ruling, who knows but that connections might run a bit deeper with this MCADV organization than meets the eye?   SIFC struggles a bit with the feminist fantasy of a “constitutional right” not to have to prove allegations with evidence just because one is an alleged domestic violence victim, but after both the Brett Kavanaugh and Roy Moore episodes (“believe the woman”) this virulent, unconstitutional ideology had obviously taken hold in a lot of places.

Lastly, it’s not hard to see this case as the flip-side of the debate that has been going on in Texas about emulating Mississippi’s law, which appears to have operated fairly well in this particular case in levelling the playing field between an offending wife and a her offended husband.    It’s refreshing to see a veteran get fair treatment for once, and for the militant feminists to lose for change.

Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God.
– Ecclesiastes 8:11-13

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

 

 

Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture

Pet “Parenting” Trend: How Has “No-Fault” Divorce Contributed?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“I’m gonna buy me a dog…Why?  ‘Cause I need a friend now….”  
The Monkees (1966)

Culture seems to have made a subtle shift in the past 20 years or so.   Many of us no longer own pets, we parent them.   We wear “dog mom” sweatshirts.    We no longer build them a dog house or cat tree and relegate them to the back yard with their water bowl and Alpo.   Instead, we spend a fortune on their advanced training so that they’re better behaved in the house than our kids were.   We no longer settle for the standard spay or neuter job:  concerned about their heart health, their bones and their cancer prospects, we’d rather they keep their hormones, so we search a wide radius around our homes for a wholistic vet who will do a vasectomy or an ovary-sparing spay on our fur kids, to the disgruntlement of our regular vet.   We buy them health insurance.  We’re thrilled to find out that there are ways to feed them where they might live 20 years or more, if they don’t meet with some mishap we can’t control.    We dress them up in costumes and take them with us to social events.    Some of us turn down invitations when we can’t bring them along.   We join Facebook groups on all sorts of “pet parenting” advice.   We buy them health insurance (courtesy of our employers, even).   Heck, some of us even sign them up for pet sports!   In fact, a couple of years ago, somebody dreamed up a new kind of “Mother’s Day”, observed the day before the actual one.   (It will be interesting to see if they do the same for “dog dads” in June.)

SIFC will say right up front that hopefully this post won’t offend the many abandoned spouses who are honestly struggling just to feed their kids, in a different season of life, after unilateral “no-fault” divorce was selfishly forced on them.    May you never arrive here because the Lord has brought your prodigal spouse home repentant, and born again or recommitted, to Himself and to you, both.    You are blessed to have your human children still in the house, as chaotic and difficult as that is making your days right now.   Perhaps the information here will be helpful to a not-so-fortunate friend or two.   One statistic from 2017 sets the average percentage of 1-person households in the U.S. at about 30%.

“standerinfamilycourt” adopted an eight year old brother and sister pair from a dachshund rescue eleven years ago, in a process that took 6 weeks and required the formal interviews of two other human family members, plus a “home study”.

Blessedly, they were already superbly trained, and came with the full vet records, meticulously kept since their puppyhood by their deceased former owner.    At the time, the half-serious, half-joke was, “it’s either these two or an illicit affair.”    None of us enjoys coming home night after night to a dark, empty house when the human kids have long since flown the nest, and the spouse prefers to “identify” as a kid again.   I strongly suspect that much of the pet parenting not only happens because of the forced-divorce trend, but because so much of that trend is “gray divorce” after decades of successful marriage and child-launching, and also because of the trend of Christian spouses to stand for their ransacked marriages and stay out of subsequent, biblically-unlawful human relationships which no amount of man’s paper can legitimize before God.  It can get a bit scary in these circumstances to read all the “helpful” articles that inform us about what our ordeal is allegedly doing to our health and life span.

Since cycling was the thing to do in SIFC’s town, a framed nylon kiddie carrier was purchased to hitch to the back wheel of the bike, and a little “license plate” on the back read:  WENR-WGN.     Not expecting to see fur kids inside, half the fun was cracking people up as we passed.    There is some counterbalancing information about pet ownership and human health, by the way.

The “doggers” helped me sleep better and wake up better….and socialize better as an introverted person, as I expected would be the case when I spotted them online and applied to the dachshund rescue.    Even so, this first pair led a pretty “old-school life” most of their time with me:  high end normal pet food, conventional vet,  insurance purchased only after a really close, expensive call, and doggy day care for the survivor of the pair, since I was really worried he’d go downhill after losing his sister and I was not yet retired from work.       I started to put on weight again several months before the passing of the second one, because he could no longer do the walks at age 17 and I was concerned about leaving him for long.    I took a year off from “pet parenting” while I waited on the next pair,  and since I was by then retired, I decided on actual infant pups this time.    Within a month of bringing the little hellions home last year, all the weight magically fell off of me.

It turns out, that in circumstances of chaste estrangement, caring for and having the company of a pet is one of the best things someone otherwise living alone can do for both our physical and emotional health.     Time will tell if the benefit goes so far as to substantially replace the benefit God intended of living with our spouse, til death do us part.   We can’t control much in our own lives, but we can create a happy world for our furry family members.    They make messes, but they don’t try to tell us we’re messing up their lives by not “moving on”.    The grandkids can’t get enough of them, which means we get to see our children’s offspring once in a while.

SIFC’s former state even changed its divorce laws last year in a trailblazing way to make sure “family law” attorneys wring out fees attributable to the fur babies wherever possible (since fees from fighting over human children is a market sector that was obviously maturing for them, as younger people have responded to immoral “family laws”, both by having fewer children and by not getting married at all).

There’s a pretty good chance unilateral forced divorce has led to “pet parenting” on the part of the discontented folks doing the divorcing as well.     We can only hope their pooches (as well as their illicit partners) fart and snore!   And chew up their shoes – or worse.


“Lifestyle” pharmaceuticals gone
to the dogs 

 

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.
– Psalm 68:6

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Substantive Due Process

What Happened When a Covenant Marriage Stander Wrote His State Legislators About Forced Divorce

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by  Guest Blogger, Billy Miller of Louisiana

In 2013 I sent the following email to every Louisiana legislator, and some statewide leaders. I did not get one reply.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

While you are at work your wife could file for divorce, get a Protective Order based on her word that she is afraid of you, and you couldn’t get into your own house…not even get some clothes, shave kit, etc., and you would have to sleep somewhere else tonight.

That is divorce according to current law. Staying apart for just 6 months would guarantee her a divorce, and that is when you would start paying for something you didn’t even want…the divorce.

You wouldn’t hear any charges against you and proof of guilt, no defense because there aren’t any charges, and no way to appeal the judge saying “Divorce granted”…because there is no Case to appeal.

Now you see why I am an Advocate for Divorce Reform…fighting our ILLEGAL laws…that make you “like it or lump it” in divorce.

The lawyers in 1969 in California who came up with the current No-Fault divorce laws were told by an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court was present and told them that what they were doing was illegal, and they did it anyway.

Louisiana has had these illegal laws on the books for 40 years, destroying marriages and families…ILLEGALLY. These same laws are in effect in all 50 states.

I hope that concerns you IMMENSELY, and that you will initiate actions to put a stop to these ILLEGAL laws.

(  SIFC:   Billy Miller is a Baptist pastor, family patriarch, covenant marriage stander and family law reform activist who lives in Louisiana.)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Legislative Learning Curve: The Fate of Texas HB 922 To Scrap “Insupportability” Grounds

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by Standerinfamilycourt

This will be a good news / bad news account of the third consecutive unsuccessful try in Texas to restore fundamental constitutional protections to “Respondents” sued by their own spouses in “family court”.     Re-introduced into the 86th Legislative Session by Rep. Matt Krause, HB 922 would have limited the “no-fault” grounds for divorce to cases of mutual consent and have required cases where the spouses do not mutually agree to the divorce to submit proof of existing fault-based grounds, while HB 926 would extend the waiting period for “no-fault” divorce to 180 days.   Testimony for these bills occurred at a very late evening hour on May 1, 2019 with just 2 business days’ notice of scheduling.    More about that unfortunate circumstance follows below.

The latter bill extending the waiting periods made it out of committee on Thursday, May 2 and still has a remote chance of being scheduled for a floor vote in the House in time to go to the Senate before the 2-year adjournment.   During the 85th legislature, this bill made it out of committee unanimously (versus 5-3 this time), but was killed by adverse lobbying of someone in the Calendars committee.   HB 922 was killed by the Democrat-dominated JJFI committee, and will need to be re-introduced in the 87th session in 2021.    It also passed out of this committee in the 85th session but met the same special-interest lobbying fate before it could come up for a floor vote or proceed to the Senate.

This blog post will be something of a post-mortem:  what went well, and not so well, and will shine some light on some long-festering process issues in the Texas legislature that has, over time, made legislative reform of family laws a bit of an uphill battle structurally.    Family structure activists are not deterred, even though the demographic trend in Texas points to an even more liberal-dominated legislature in 2021 when it next convenes.

Is a Constitutional Amendment Needed to Allow the Texas Legislature to Convene Annually?
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL),  46 state legislatures meet annually today.  The remaining four states—Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas—hold session every other year, each in the odd year.   Illinois convenes annually but holds approved, pending bills open for two years, rather than require them to be reintroduced each session, which seems to be a cost efficiency to the taxpayers, not to mention, a bit of a safeguard against the effects of voter fraud and rapid demographic change (such as via unchecked illegal immigration) in elections, and possibly curbs the sort of Calendar Committee chicanery the Texas House is bloody infamous for.  In each span between legislative sessions, committee membership changes along with the makeup of the House, with a definite recent “bluing” trend in this (once) deep-red state, as people move into Texas from economically-failing liberal states losing several large employers each year.

The frequency of legislative sessions is set by the Texas Constitution, which reads as follows:

Sec. 5.  MEETINGS; ORDER OF BUSINESS.  (a) The Legislature shall meet every two years at such time as may be provided by law and at other times when convened by the Governor.

Hence, any change would require passage of a measure to put a statewide referendum on the ballot to change Article 3, Section 5.   This actually brings up one key example of the effect of biennial legislative sessions in Texas:  we are coming up next month on 4 years elapsing since the capricious Obergefell decision legislated a “right” to gay “marriage” from the Federal bench, and nullified all of the DOMA (defense of marriage) amendments passed by citizen referenda  a decade or so before, in numerous states.   Although a bill, HJR 64 was debated to put the DOMA repeal measure the ballot in the fall, astonishingly it still sits in committee, with only three weeks remaining in the session.   It appears that both the Texas marriage statute and the Texas constitution will continue to officially define marriage as being only between one man and one woman well into 2021, the 6th anniversary of Obergefell, since the constitution must be amended before the statute can be changed.

As the moral fabric of society has continued to fray, at least in part due to the societal destructiveness of divorce-on-demand, so has the legislation load perceived by citizens and their state leaders as necessary to manage all of the ever-worsening symptoms from this disease, now in its 3rd and 4th generations since enactment (boomers, gen-X, millennials, nextgen).    The NCSL article cited earlier makes this interesting observation:

“In the early 1960s, only 19 state legislatures met annually.  The remaining 31 held biennial regular sessions.  All but three (Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia) held their biennial session in the odd-numbered year.  By the mid-1970s, the number of states meeting annually grew tremendously—up from 19 to 41.”

Gun rights activist Rachel Malone provided  her Facebook followers this statistical breakdown of Texas bill activity as of May 1 or so:

722 bills passed by the House (693 are HB’s)
640 bills passed by the Senate (632 are SB’s)
37 bills passed by BOTH chambers (but some still in process / conference)
16 bills sent to Governor

In the past 6 sessions, an average of . . .
– 6,363 bills were filed
– 1,382 bills were passed by both chambers (trending downward to the 1200’s)
– 1,342 bills were signed by the Governor / went into effect
– 389 bills died in Calendars (about 25% of the bills sent there)
– 258 bills passed the Senate but died somewhere in the House
– 368 bills passed the House but died somewhere in the Senate
– 11 bills died on the House floor
– 0 bills died on the Senate floor

How does this compare with other populous states that meet annually, such as Florida and California?  A good topic for study!
In the meantime, anyone can see that there’s basically only a 5% chance per biennial session that any bill in Texas would make it to the governor’s desk, including (apparently) a SCOTUS-dictated matter from 4 years ago– and plan their activist activities accordingly.

The power of life and death is literally in the hands of the Committee Chairman’s scheduling choices
Attorney Harold Dutton has been the Chair of the Juvenile Justice and Family Issues committee for the past several legislative sessions.   He is a man with a very checkered family life of his own, and has apparently treated this standing appointment as a personal fiefdom, according to a 2007 article in the Houston Chronicle.  The Chair of each House committee controls the hearing calendar for that committee, a fact which is absolutely key to the difference in what occurred this year with HB’s 922 and 926.

Not that Rep. Dutton had all that much to fear in terms of a repeat of the 4-3 party line committee approval that occurred in 2017 for HB 93, the predecessor bill to HB 922, since the Democrat majority on that committee was now 5-4, with 100% turnover in the rank-and-file members.    But just to be on the safe side, a bill filed in January was not scheduled for a hearing until May 1.    Two business days’ notice of the scheduling was given after business hours on the Friday before.    The hearing was scheduled on a day when there was a very heavy agenda on the House floor, typical for this point in the year when the session’s calendar days are dwindling, so the hearing scheduled for 10:30 a.m. didn’t actually start until after 7 p.m.   That was tough enough, but these bills were heard alongside a litany of bills whose numbers indicated they were filed substantially later on, including an albatross of a bill opposed by an army of LGBT activists: HB2109 which sought conscience-based protections from liability for wedding officiants to recuse themselves from certain weddings.    This testimony was, of course, prioritized to lead off (and, cynically, it set the political tone for) the entire evening.   

SIFC expects that Chairman D was giving himself high-5’s for preventing the parade of constitutional law attorneys who testified in 2017 before his committee that Texas’ divorce law is profoundly unconstitutional, and replacing that with a literal Gay Pride parade twice as large.    Despite the bills being introduced for the 3rd time by a practicing constitutional attorney, and despite ever-faithful veteran constitutional attorney Shelby Sharpe reprising an abbreviated portion of his 2017 testimony (given only 2 minutes this time instead of 3 minutes), and despite another family law attorney echoing the unconstitutionality with handouts to the committee,  what wound up resounding from the testimony was the technically-true but woefully-incomplete declaration of Texas Family Law Foundation head lobbyist Stephen Bresnan that “no court in the United States has ever found  no-fault divorce to be unconstitutional.”

The final injury came in the departure from the room of most of the GOP members shortly after the gay rights debate, which ended around 8:30 p.m.   After powerful reprise testimonies by Kristi Davis and Jeff Morgan and a few other excellent witnesses, none of them got any questions from the committee members, mostly because there were few or no Republican committee members present any longer to give them a hand.   Ditto for when Texas Values Sr. Policy Analyst Nicole Hudgens was peppered by feminist committee members with repetitive ideological “questions” she couldn’t quite handle to everyone’s satisfaction (partly due to coming off as being a bit unprepared).     Last time, executive director Jonathan Saenz testified in favor of the predecessor bill.    Whereas the victim witnesses got no questions, Ms. Hudgens’ 2-minute debut testimony evoked 6 contentious minutes of questions from the remaining committee members.

Another pivotally-damaging moment in the testimony questioning….

Rep. Callani to Ms. Hudgens:   “Why do people get divorced?” (@1:57)

Texas Values’  Nicole Hudgens:  “There are a number of reasons you can get divorced, but you have ‘insupportability’ which is no-fault divorce but this is not talking about…in the case of abuse or in the case of neglect..others, this is simply talking about ‘no-fault’ divorce…”

Rep. Callani:  “Right, but what do you think the reason for that is?”

Hudgens: (pause) “It can be a number of reasons.”

Callani:   “Just one of them”….(after longer Hudgens pause)…”Like a reason that people would get divorced…other than abuse?”

Hudgens: “Other than abuse?”  [Way to affirm Callani’s pet ideology there, Ms. Hudgens!]

Callani:  “So in your work for the Texas Family Law Foundation….”

Hudgens:  “That’s Texas Values”

Callani:  “OK, Family Texas Values…and you’re against divorces…so when…what types of divorces have you seen being…that were insupportable…what was their reason for wanting to get divorced?”

( SIFC:   Noooo, Nicole, please don’t assent to her rhetoric again!!   Proper response:  “there can’t be any ‘insupportable’ marriages in the legal sense because the term has not even been objectively defined in the statute.”   Legislator lecture coming in….4, 3, 2, 1… )

Hudgens: “There could be a number of reasons.  We’re for government promoting a policy that keeps families intact as much as possible, so…it could be a number of reasons…right now you can just get divorced for pretty much any reason.”

Callani: “All I want you to do is just give me one reason why people would get divorced.”

Hudgens:  “A lot of people would say ‘it’s complicated’…”

( SIFC: Callani could easily have gone in for the kill right here, but she was having herself a ball playing like a cat with her helpless prey….)

Callani:  “But what do you think is complicated about it?”

Hudgens:  “One person says they don’t want to be in the relationship anymore….”

Callani:  “So if that’s reason, if this bill were to pass, it defeats the whole purpose.”   (She didn’t say of what, but it’s clear that she believes in the “force people to stay married” dogma.)

( SIFC:  While every question couldn’t have been anticipated, less than two minutes invested in a Google search would have produced this fairly accurate study information, courtesy of AARP, which places “abuse” far down the list, and would have put up a far better fight against Callani’s media-driven assumptions…the fact is that the vast bulk of divorce is driven by adultery, and in a lot of cases, deliberate spouse-poaching in older, more affluent couples with older kids, and often grandkids….creating massive retirement problems, and rewarding the offenders while severely penalizing the non-offenders.   If this kind of informed content had filled those 6 minutes, they would at least have had something substantial to chew on, and it would have raised the opportunity to educate the committee on at least two important points that almost never get talked about!)

(Please click to enlarge)

Perhaps the most harmful moment that carried the evening, as a result of the GOP lawmakers all leaving the room, is the patently false statement by TFLF lobbyist Bresnan which went shamefully unchallenged because nobody remained present who was both entitled and motivated to debunk it at that point:

Bresnan: “And the third thing I’d like you to consider is leverage.  If I’m in a relationship with someone and they can’t leave without my permission,
I have extraordinary leverage over them.  I want the kids, I want the car, I want the house, I want the business.   I want everything.   If you want out bad enough, that’s what you’ll give me.  Right now, people are on an equal basis and they can dissolve their marriage, and in no way should you allow the law to..uh..change the leverage in a relationship.”

But suppose GOP Rep. Faithful had been in the room, wide awake and on the ball — despite it being 9 p.m. by then (since the liberals somehow managed not to take a dinner break, no doubt because of the wherewithal for campaign contributions that were on the line here)….

Rep. Faithful:  “that’s certainly an interesting point of view, Mr. Bresnan.  Let’s probe that a bit further, if you don’t mind.   Do you think it’s really necessary, in the best interest of the family as a whole, for the idea of “leverage” to be a zero-sum game, where the petitioner has 100% of the leverage and the respondent has zero percent?   How do you see this as being an ‘equal basis?’  The AARP has rightfully been growing concerned because the most recent studies show that due to the effect of no-fault divorce laws on younger adults opting not to marry at all, the only growing category of no-fault divorce is what is commonly called “gray divorce”, often where a couple has been successfully married for decades.  Often these divorces leave an innocent spouse, who wanted to save their marriage, with half or less of their retirement savings, 401K’s, IRA’s and pensions.  So, AARP published a 2004 study report showing that the chief driver for these gray divorces is adultery and / or the selfish desire to marry someone else, and the divorce petition filer is typically the adulterer.   Let me ask you:  should the adulterer have 100% the leverage over an innocent spouse who has done nothing substantial to harm the marriage?   Should they get the house, the business, the kids?   Could you tell us how that is good for society, Mr. Bresnan?

Of course, back in December, following the disastrous 2018 mid-term election results which reflected the changing demographics in Texas, Rep. Krause tried to warn us (privately) that there “would be little appetite for” family law reform in the 86th session.    He was a little reluctant to re-introduce the bills, but thankfully was persuaded (late).    The video feeds showed him  looking a bit disengaged, overtaxed and disinterested throughout the May 1 committee proceedings, and he apparently did little to encourage his conservative peers to stay in the room when their pushback against commercial / special interest testimony was absolutely crucial.  

Taking the picture as a whole, SIFC believes it was still right to keep re-introducing the bills despite the formidable obstacles to enactment rehearsed above.    William Wilberforce did this before Parliament for more than 20 years, across the entire spectrum of political circumstances, in order to engage the uphill battle to abolish the slave trade.  The activist community can do a much better job of supporting Rep. Krause’s political courage by taking all of the following steps:

(1) praying for Dutton’s defeat in 2020.  He’s been over the JJFI committee for far too long, and was morally ill-qualified for that pivotal Chair to begin with

(2)  making a lot of off-session visits to allies for educational purposes, especially Texas Values, but also sympathetic family law attorneys like Cecilia Wood (who seems as well-informed as anyone).    Ideally, we’d be visiting those same committee members with educational materials, but historically each session typically sees new faces under Dutton on that committee, so perhaps the only solution is to see all incumbent Reps in the off-session season, and from Nov. – Jan. 2020 visit the newly-elected (who are likely to wind up on the committee).   This means Jeff Morgan, who has purposed to focus on enlisting the support of the state’s churches in the off-season, will need a lot more hands.

(3) re-courting the constitutional attorneys who testified in 2017

(4) entreating Rep. Krause to file his bills on Day 1 of filing rather than in January, so that testimony in both chambers can occur by March

(5) prioritize the courting of Senate concurrent sponsorship

(6) recruiting the testimony of once-divorced couples who remarried each other (#somuch4irreconcilabledifferences)

(7) solidify ties now with the Constitution Party of Texas who might be able to help Jeff Morgan with some of the ground work over the next two years

(8) write Rep. Krause a heartfelt thank-you now, hoping for his re-election, and advising him how we will be doing our part to better support his efforts next session

For just one example of potentially effective connections, HB 2109, the wedding officiant recusal bill, which had six co-sponsors (Reps. Flynn, Bonnen, Dean, Schaefer, Springer and White) has already died on the vine this session, which really need not become a tragedy that leads to a similarly ill-considered Alabama-style reaction.  Would these gentlemen not be great candidates for some timely education on why the successful repeal of unilateral forced divorce would make their issue go away altogether — by quickly killing the demand for gay “marriage”?    This is before even mentioning the budgetary heroes and rock stars they would become over the next few years!   According to a 2008 study, unchecked unilateral divorce was costing Texas taxpayers almost $3 billion each and every year.   This might be a great conversation to have with these gentlemen even before this session adjourns at the end of the month, if their attention can be had during crunch-time.

The debate on HB 2109 was (in reality) about compelled moral approval for sodomy-as-marriage, and by extension, the morality of sodomy in general.   May 1, 2019 needn’t have become Gay Day in Austin, and it needn’t have been a Democratic committee member pointing out how this bill reflected a “fire, ready, aim” mentality
(Flynn testimony: “I thunk it up mahself”) behind it.   Passage of HB 922 (accompanied by the future repeal of Sec. 6.006 – forced divorce with a 3-year delay in redundancy of Sec. 6.005) would have made that whole debate moot and unnecessary.   Hence, there seems little reason why all six should not have been co-sponsors on Rep. Krause’s bills during the 86th session, and why they shouldn’t be courted by our team to become co-sponsors during the 87th session.

“standerinfamilycourt” is retired from corporate life, and lives several states away, but would have loved to spend part of 2018-19  in Texas for the reasons mentioned above.   Steps are being taken to find a way to monetize Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional so that the finances to do so, and to start working other states, become available in 2019-2020.    Prayers are appreciated for success and God’s direction in this fundraising vision.    We have a formidable adversary, but a mightier Lord, so it all boils down to: who’s hungrier to win?

Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.  For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
– Hebrews 10:35

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

 

 

 

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

#RuthSummit 2019 – How Did It Go?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

For by wise counsel you will wage your own war,
And in a multitude of counselors there is safety.
– Proverbs  24:6

As soon as the speaker list was released, this blogger knew that this conference was simply not to be missed, come hell or high water (SIFC literally experienced a little of both before arriving there, but that’s a story for another day).    “Standerinfamilycourt” has always had the greatest respect and admiration for its sponsor, The Ruth Institute.   Many of the scheduled speakers have long been personal heroes (and heroines).   The trip to Lake Charles is easily 15 hours each way by car, but that was no obstacle.    This will by no means be a post about “buyer’s remorse”.   There is no question that some very important connections were made at the Summit, and much cross-awareness “landed” for the participants, SIFC included.

And, there’s no question that what transpired in that venue absolutely fulfilled the objectives for the gathering that the Ruth Institute promised in the promotional information…

“Discover why the Church has been right all along about marriage, family, and sexual morality!
Stories from:
  • Children of Divorce
  • Abandoned Spouses
  • Children of Same-Sex Parents
  • Refugees from the Gay Lifestyle
Learn what it’s costing: in child trauma, clergy sex abuse scandals, runaway government power, and more.”

 

But…a day after returning, some of us were still feeling the effects of a few unmet hopes, including the action-oriented hope that it would be considerably more “shirt-sleeves” and interactive in its format, at least for the sessions involving “activist” panels.    Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse was careful to explain to participants that The Ruth Institute is not a lobbying organization (according to IRS rules for 501c3 and 501c4 educational organizations, TRI being the former).    However, the distinction seems to be more philosophical than strictly legal in how “Ruth” defines her mission and organizes the organization’s engagement with issues and social change.   For example, according to the website:

“In the summer of 2013, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases signaled a new level of governmental commitment to the Sexual Revolution. Dr. Morse and the team at the Ruth Institute concluded that the opponents of natural marriage hold a commanding position on the legal and political fronts.  At that time, the Ruth Institute made a strategic decision to enter into the cultural and social fray in a new way.

“With Ruth’s renewed focus on the social and cultural arenas (as opposed to the political and legal arenas)…”

Tidy strategy, this is: hoping to drive culture change in order to ultimately reform the vicious “teacher” that this law has become —except that, all the signs of the times ( for example, 70 years elapsed since Israel’s re-establishment as a nation, the emergence in Europe of mandatory RFID chipping of corporate employees,  Russia’s renewed aggression, Trump’s  move of  the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple)  ….seem to point to the Lord returning and rapturing away His church long before such a strategy might ever come to fruition, after which, the bible tell us the influence of the Holy Spirit will be removed from society remaining on earth, and the Antichrist will have a brief reign that will make all of this moral concern seem wildly irrelevant anyway.    Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the U.S. has already been “given over”, as described in Romans 1 because heterosexual moral reform has been rejected, especially in the church, long before the Windsor / Perry / Obergefell decisions of 2013-2015.    Those of us who are impatient about the timeline of family law reform are impatient mostly because the souls of loved ones remain in serious jeopardy in the meantime.    Some of us want the drag queen fired as “teacher” yesterday, and a morally worthy role model hired in “her” place  for the sake of our kids and grandkids.  No society in all of recorded history has survived more than 3 or 4 generations in the utterly bankrupt moral climate we have now, almost all of it driven by nefarious family laws and institutional acquiescence to them.

What’s largely forgotten in that 2013 strategic thought process at TRI is the need to change not one, but two grossly sinful cultures that sprang from the Sexual Revolution, the sodomy-as-“marriage” culture, and the sequential-polygamy-as-“marriage” culture (still seen by most in Christendom as what TRI refers to above as “natural marriage”).   As our friend, Pastor Jack Shannon pointed out in his 2017 book, Contra Mundum Swagger, those heavily invested in the second culture (relying on either RCC “annulment” or evangelical hypergrace) tend to see the first culture as befalling them from out of nowhere, and by no fault (pun not intended) of their own, seeing it fatalistically as a “test” or “cross to bear” rather than as an immediate call to individual and collective repentance.     It was not lawful for Herod to have Herodias, his (living) BROTHER’S wife, and a man of God gave up his own saved life to warn their souls.  It is no more lawful today for a few of these repeal movement leaders to have their current mates, while SIFC has not shrunk back from warning them in various ways (and is probably not on the short list of suitable conference speakers for that reason alone).

The Lord may not continue to forbear for two or three more decades for culture to change, under a strategy of incremental influence, in order “ease into” legal reforms.   It might be different if we were not citizens of a constitutional republic that His extreme favor gave us in the first place, and which we are now basically squandering  when we fear reprisal, or fear suffering persecution and loss of comforts – steep costs that the early church joyfully bore in order to introduce the world to true Christian morality, though they had little or no formal voice to the Graeco-Roman government systems at all.
For anyone, with both a representative vote and a state of living estranged from their true, God-joined spouse, to compare a reticent approach toward contemporary government engagement with the example set by the early church is just not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Wrote Anglican church historian Kenneth E. Kirk in the 1940’s:

“What is more astounding than the mere fact that the early Church taught and practiced the complete indissolubility of marriage for so long, is the fact that the Church chose to take its stand against the strong contemporary lax social and legal attitudes toward divorce which prevailed so universally all about them. The Church, today, feels that it is on the horns of a dilemma, because so many divorcees are coming to her for help and encouragement. Shall she accommodate the Scriptures to the apparent need of the unfortunate divorcees, or shall she uphold the Biblical standard of the indissolubility of marriage for any cause while faithfully discharging her duty to such distressed individuals?  Every church of today which considers the lowering of its divorce standards should remember that the early Church stood true to the Biblical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in a world that was pagan and strongly opposed to the moral and marriage standards of the New Testament. Not only did the Church maintain her stand on the indissolubility in the early centuries, she changed the attitude and standards of the whole world toward it. Even today the whole Church of Christ and the entire western world is still reaping the rich benefits of that heritage.   Shall the Christian Church of today be less courageous and faithful than the Church of the early centuries of the Christian era? Does she not under God have the same spiritual resources?

“There were other grievous social evils in the early Christian centuries. Slavery enveloped the Roman Empire of that age, yet the Christians did not set themselves to change the thinking of the masses against it, but they did set themselves to change the thinking of the masses toward marriage and divorce. Why did they not attack slavery with the same vehemence? The reason was that the Apostles had not received a “thus saith the Lord” from Christ respecting it. They had, however, received such in the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. No sect or school of philosophy is known to have influenced the early Church in this teaching. From whence, then, did she get the teaching? Certainly she received it from the teaching of the Gospels and from the teaching of the Apostles, who had earlier conveyed the same orally (as well as in writing) to the leaders of the early Church who succeeded them.”

(Marriage and Divorce. 2nd ed. London, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,1948)

For the action-oriented participants (who would like to stay God’s hand in the timing of His finalized judgment), important collaboration items had to be relegated to the conference breaks, such as asking Fr. / Dr. Sullins how one might get important outdated research refreshed, or undertake a child-outcome study for a sociological group that has never been addressed before (children of biblical standers being segregated out from those of generic and incomparable “single parents” because the former are likely skewing that measure by their growing numbers and superior child outcomes from walking out biblical principles in the home).

Perhaps there’s no avoiding the fact that panelists addressing the hydra-headed issue of what’s being done to reform unilateral no-fault divorce laws (and resulting injustices) would have a more difficult time being brief enough to allow feedback and interaction afterwards in a uniform allotted time slot, which was 30 minutes total.    This seemed to be less of a problem with the personal testimony panels where there was ample time for some follow-up, in most cases.    As it turned out, there was no time for such in the “activist” panel led by Matthew Johnston, Jeff Morgan and Christopher Brennan  (~47 minutes into this link).  The personal testimonies, while significant and powerful, mostly represent the symptoms of the disease, while the “activist panel” (in effect) represents a proposal for the surgical approach to excising the disease that is causing the cascade of symptoms.     Yes, this does involve a process for influencing policy and legislation to some extent, but the IRS has given 501(c)3’s a little bit of leeway for potential indirect involvement in this:

501(c)(3) organizations ARE allowed to take part in small amounts of political lobbying. There are two ways to determine how much nonprofits can legally lobby: 1) Insubstantial Part Test and, 2) Expenditure Test. In the first option, an organization’s lobbying activities cannot constitute a substantial part of the organization’s total activities and expenditures in any tax year. This option is somewhat vague, as it does not define “lobbying activities,” “substantial amount,” or how that amount will be calculated. The second option is somewhat clearer. The Expenditure Test defines permissible lobbying activities and measures an 501(c)(3)’s lobbying activities only by the amount of money spent on lobbying activities.

Surely, providing an annual venue for meaningful strategy development, and possible nonprofit mentoring (or incubation) for an allied-but-separate non-profit that could take a more activist role which complements TRI’s core strategic mission would not get TRI into any difficulty with the IRS, nor divert significant resources from “Ruth’s” preferred core activities.   The fact that TRI awarded an “Activist” recognition this year is a good demonstration of that point.   Quite often, when a problem seems complex and intractable, effective solutions are “both / and” rather than “either / or”,  meaning that involved organizations can certainly specialize where they feel their strengths are, while maintaining supportive ties with other organizations whose strengths may be complementary but not duplicative.

Perhaps some time allowance is necessary for “ice-breaking” when diverse allied interests and players (who started out not knowing each other very well) begin coming together for the first time, but the road home from this conference felt as though an untamed “adhocracy” will continue to be aimed in 2019-20 at the political realm, rather than a purposeful coordination of collaborating efforts based on experiences shared, and consensus-finding.   This seemed like a sad waste of the rare and valuable face-to-face time we were afforded in Lake Charles.   Hopefully, some of this occurred at the smaller dinners that were organized for the invited speakers outside the formal agenda.    From SIFC’s seat, it appeared that some panelists were not in consensus with each other about specifics of the way forward.    When the other side plays dirty (as we know they do), one option indeed is to wait until conditions are more favorable before ever engaging, another is to peck away randomly which isn’t likely to be very successful, and the third way is to go after them with a solid, coordinated and well-vetted battle plan that takes into account a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) that is updated at least annually.    One possible solution for the next conference might be some breakout time by interest area.

We all tend to come to these events with a few individualized sub-agendas, in addition to the main agenda items.    SIFC is the first to admit that what will be gleaned from this year’s Summit participation and deemed most valuable is steps to meaningful reform that will come sooner rather than later, and divert that many more precious souls from hell (at least, on account of dying while in a sinful subsequent union).   Another sub-agenda, for somebody else, might be gleaning whatever will most quickly lessen parental alienation or reduce onerous child support payments.   Some standers in the room might prefer for divorce to remain cheap, easy and certain so that their prodigal spouse has an easier path to repentance some day.   Some individuals will be looking to make or continue a livelihood from the reform effort.   These things will, of course, cause some differences in preferred approach and timeline to reform.     Possibly, a sub-agenda for the Summit sponsors is to be inclusive of non-Catholics while not doing anything that might unnecessarily alienate the material support of RCC hierarchy for the organization’s efforts and vision.   Can a mutually-supportable action path be found through all these sub-agendas?   Possibly, but not if insufficient interactive discussion time is allotted among key stakeholders in the program agenda!    This is the first major conference in recent memory attended by SIFC  where some sort of general participant evaluation feedback was not requested.

It did not take long for word to get out among the covenant marriage stander community of this #RuthSummit, and of the livestream video resources that Family Research Council staffers so generously provided.  “Standerinfamilycourt” awoke to an email from a male leader in the movement Tuesday morning, sharing that another abandoned, standing husband had emailed most of the faithful pastors in the movement, and several other standers.   This young husband who originated the email chain had been texting me on Friday, eager to get to the livestreaming links before the opening dinner got underway.    All of this is truly a blessing to that large community, who has (admittedly) mixed views on the actual repeal of unilateral, no-fault divorce laws and the biblically-appropriate level government engagement by Christ-followers.

“Standerinfamilycourt” would like to wrap up this post by giving a hearty “thumbs-up” to a few points in the long list of positives from #RuthSummit 2019 over this past weekend:

1.) Auspicious, God-orchestrated timing:  As we sat at dinner Friday night, while Texas activist Jeff Morgan was receiving TRI’s award as “Activist of the Year”,  SIFC received a text on the cell phone:    Both HB922 and HB926 had been scheduled for their committee hearings on only 2 business days’ notice.    SIFC is “sure” there was no mal-intent with this timing, which is “done all the time”, we hear.    Little did House committee chairman Harold Dutton know that his maneuver increased the joy of the evening, as the veritable who’s who of activists in were in the same room to receive the news while gathered over dinner.   This would include Dr. Morse, Leila Miller, Matthew Johnston, Chris Brennan, blogger Kristi Davis, Dr. Stephen Baskerville, and new repeal enthusiast Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon.     Just picture the phones ringing off the hook in Austin all day today and tomorrow, and the prayers going up for some of these folks who will be there in Austin testifying tomorrow at 10:30 local time.
The timing actually helped increase the chances that if both bills fail against the very long odds of getting to the House floor for a timely vote, there will at least be solid backing for simultaneously introducing them in both chambers (with needed improvements) in 2021, next legislative session.   The Lord works in mysterious ways. – praise Him!

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.
– Gen. 50:20

Dear Readers, here is the list of committee members and their contact information.

ACTION REQUEST: Would you consider being a part of history-making and giving each of these committee members a timely call, asking them to support both bills? You do not necessarily have to be from Texas to weigh in, but if you are from Texas, and either you or somebody you know from Texas has a restored marriage after a Texas “no-fault” divorce, this will be very important information to leave with the staffer when you call, in order to deliver a strong message that “insupportability” is nothing more than a subjective legal fiction on which no law depriving citizens of their parental or property rights should be based in a constitutional republic.

A key tidbit about Mr. Dutton, the committee chairman:  he went through a messy divorce in the 1990’s.   Among other traumas from his own divorce, he experienced the horror of having his wife’s live-in boyfriend physically abuse his sons without being able to do anything about it, like many other young men who are subjected to forced divorce. If the situation is that he did not actually initiate his divorce (almost a 70% chance), this could provide something to widen his perspective a bit.

The current legislative session in Texas adjourns for two years at the end of May.    If you are interested in watching tomorrow’s proceedings live tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, try this link (no promises they will actually have it on camera, but there’s a chance).   Alternatively, it’s likely Jeff Morgan will be videoing capturing the testimony for upload to you his youtube channel as he did two years ago.

UPDATE:  Testimony on the bill to repeal one spouse’s subjective and unsubstantiated declaration of  “insupportability” as a ground for divorce in Texas was heard on May 2, 2019.   On May 3, the bill failed to achieve the necessary votes in the Democrat-dominated Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee to move on to the Calendar Committee, despite having done so two years earlier, and despite dozens of covenant marriage standers calling these committee members’ offices in support of HB 922.   It will now have to be introduced again into the 87th legislative session in 2021.

2.) Wonderful connections with another strong group of Catholic standers was forged:  We already have solid connections with Catholic standers through Bai MacFarlane’s wonderful ministry, Mary’s Advocates.    SIFC learned at the Summit that Covenant Keepers has been working closely with a well-established group of Louisiana standers who have formed a weekly group locally called “Hosea’s Hope” (no apparent online presence).    These standers shared another tidbit of good news:  it appears that Covenant Keepers has worked recently to cleanse its local group leadership of adulterously remarried leaders, which would be an update on our earlier reporting, if confirmed.

3. )  The value that covenant marriage standers bring to the effort to save biblical marriage was publicly recognized at the Summit.   Dr. Morse asked all the standers in the room to “stand” right after the panel on marital abandonment spoke.   We were able then to identify each other, perhaps half a dozen people.    Hard copies of this recent blog post , “7 Important Contributions Covenant Standers Are Making Toward the Repeal of Forced Divorce” were brought to the conference for handouts, and Dr. Morse very graciously gave us impromptu table space in the venue.   She told the invited stander speakers, “when the history is written that this ship got turned around, y’all are going to be mentioned…”     This was said in front of some of the most important Christian scholars we have today by one of the most important Christian scholars we have today, and it went out over the Family Research Council media machine.    It was a mighty proud moment for standers everywhere.    Dr. Baskerville gets a lot of feedback from the (justifiably) angry MGTOW crowd (“men going their own way”).    It must have been refreshing to hear for once about grace-filled men and women going GOD’s way under the same profoundly unjust circumstances.

4.) Dr. Baskerville hit yet another one “out of the ballpark” (opening wide the eyes of some very influential people).    These were the exact words of a stunned Dr.  Gagnon on his Facebook wall after hearing Stephen Baskerville’s riveting 40-minute address:

“Dr. Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College, hitting his critique of “No Fault Divorce” out of the ballpark. It is one of the most anti-constitutional measures imaginable, incentivizing family break ups, rejecting basic standards of justice, and giving the state unlimited tyranny…”

Most serious standers who follow our pages were not surprised by this at all, since it is quite customary for the blunt Dr. B to hit things out of the ballpark every time the mic is on.   That said, there is a famous moment in the movie, “Amazing Grace” where MP William Wilberforce has conspired with the head of the Tories to take one well-heeled set on a party-barge tour of the harbor, complete with powdered wigs, wine, hors-d’oeuvres, and a string quartet.   SIFC could go on to describe the proceedings, but it would be more fun to just let the readers watch it instead, while emphasizing that in no way are any Summit leaders or participants being compared with the insensitive lot in the movie, but the “turning point” feel of that moment is still quite similar indeed.   Picture Dr. Baskerville on the bridge of the sailing vessel that carried the slaves – not hard, is it?

5.) The language of the thought leaders in the room appeared to be slowly changing for the better (and root causation finally being acknowledged out loud).     Dr. Gagnon also gave an excellent address Saturday afternoon.   Although it was (by title) about homosexualist twisting of the scripture, he had a lot to say about holy matrimony.  Across several of the speakers, we started hearing a bit less about the looser “standard” of “permanence”, and considerably more about the far more demanding state of indissolubility that Christ laid out.   Desirably, we also started to hear a lot about the one-flesh state, notably at ~ 11:55 in Dr. Gagnon’s address, when he says this about the one-flesh state (echoing Paul in Ephesians 5):  “…so whatever you do to your spouse, if it’s a negative thing, it’s a self-inflicted wound.”   And again, at ~ 21:30, and at ~40:00 where Dr. G comes oh-so-close to appropriately recognizing the instantaneous, supernatural, metaphysical nature of the God-joining that is the very Creational basis for indissolubility, and for “remarriage” while an original spouse still lives, constituting papered-over adultery 100% of the time.    It’s not the repeated physical uniting that creates the one-flesh state, according to Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 and Paul in Ephesians 5:31, it’s God’s actual hand in the wedding itself that permanently does so.   If this were properly acknowledged, the witness against homosexual “marriage” (and practice) would become so much more powerful than any attempts to “rank” soul-corroding sexual sin.

At ~ 18:00: “When Jesus talked about marriage in Matthew 19 as being indissoluble, permanent, lifelong…a vision largely lost by the church, which is the beginning of our problems.   We would never be at this place on the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism if we hadn’t already lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage…if we had not caved on those issues, we would not have come to this extreme point, and we are at an extreme point now.”  
(SIFC must still respectfully disagree with any attempt articulated between 22:00 and 40:00  to claim that one sexual sin is “worse” than another, when Paul said this in 1 Cor. 6:18-20,  about heterosexual defilement of the temple of the Holy Spirit, and warned at least twice, “do not be deceived” :  both receive the same eternal outcome if unrepented, we’ve lived to see that both equally undermine the biblical family, hence entire societies, sending the unrepentant to hell in both cases.  SIFC believes such a philosophy is a large part of the reason we “lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage”, as Dr. Gagnon had earlier put it.)

We believe it’s the patient, continued voice of the scholar-standers who are respectfully challenging the comfortable presumptions of the more conventional and acclaimed scholars and bringing about this necessary evolution in the latter.

6.)  There also seemed to be a “lessons-learned” readiness to jettison the unhelpful idea of 5 years ago, that the sexuality debates can leave God out and prevail.   The best indication of this maturation, of course, is the theme for the Summit: “Why the Church’s Teaching Was Right All Along” (that is, “right all along” if you ignore the 12th century fabrication of “annulment” doctrine under Pope Innocent III, and you also ignore Luther’s humanistic 16th century innovations.)   The absurdity of this notion should have been obvious on its face in 2013:   “we battle not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities and dark forces in the heavenly realm.”

7.) Satan so feared the impact of the #RuthSummit livestreaming result that he felt compelled to harass the Family Research Council technicians on both days.    Thankfully, the Holy Spirit was invited in both days in prayers to open and close the sessions.  Organizing this kind of an event around a controversial topic that brings together people of different faiths, but the same biblical truth, is never as easy as it looks.   This one came off very well, and was an endless encouragement to thousands of covenant marriage standers around the world who were not able to attend, but wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

We are looking forward to next year already!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

 

citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Myth-Busting: Will Restoring Fundamental Rights to Respondents “Trap” People in Unwanted Marriages?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him.   – Proverbs 18:17

As sure as death and taxes, any time a “family law” reform bill is before a state legislature which seeks to curb unconstitutional, non-consensual “no-fault” grounds being allowed to shred a family at the selfish whims of one of the spouses, there are two media responses:

(1) loud howling about people “trapped” in “bad marriages” (the Left), and

(2) deafening silence (the hypocritical Right).

“standerinfamilycourt” humbly submits (and will demonstrate) that these objections are overblown and way out of proportion in the “fairness” picture.

The model reformed “no-fault”  statute will do a few essential things (all are a necessary minimum):

(1) limit the use of subjective grounds like “insupportability”, “irreconcilable differences” and “irretrievable breakdown” to a mutual, joint petition, where all the terms and conditions are agreed by the parties at arms-length (rather than by strong-arm).    The mutual petition part is important here.    No-fault dissolutions should never be obtainable by default judgment, or where the effects of divorce are not mutually agreed.   All default judgments should be fault-based, without exception.

(2) restore the availability of fault-based grounds in the alternative, which is important because many state legislatures have eliminated and disallowed these.

(3) ensure that desertion or “living apart” grounds are only available to the non-offending party.

(4) ensure that marital misconduct is a material consideration in child custody and property division judgments if the parties cannot agree these things mutually and state them on a joint petition.

Yes, this kind of reform will (at least temporarily) leave some parties legally married against their wishes.    However, there are several reasons why both the time frame of delay in legally “dissolving” the marriage, and the number of such cases has been greatly exaggerated.     This is especially true in contrast with the millions involuntarily divorced today against their consciences and against the best interest of the children and grandchildren of the marriage.

Here’s why:

=>  although this 1980’s statistic needs to be refreshed by a study, 20% of dissolution requests are mutually agreed between the spouses.   It is quite possible that the legalization of homosexual “marriages” has increased this figure a bit.

=> of the remaining 75-80%, perhaps half (under current law ) do involve fault grounds, but the Petitioner is choosing “no-fault” grounds for cost and privacy reasons.    Cost should not be as big a deal as it’s made out here, since the statutorily at-fault party can ultimately be made responsible for the costs if the non-offending party has no resources for filing and legal costs.

=>  in the case of endangerment, there will be restored fault-based grounds and fault-based remedies available immediately., as covered above.

Of the remaining 40% of potentially negatively-impacted parties being compelled to remain legally married longer than they’d prefer,  the following mitigations still remain:

=> nothing in this reform prevents an unhappy spouse from separating and living apart — an act that is biblically forbidden in an original marriage unless there is danger to family members (covered above), and living as immorally as they wish with whomever they wish.    They will simply no longer be rewarded by the powers-that-be for doing so.

=> in the case of abandonment, the story is the same, with perhaps a delay of a year or two.   This is not really an unreasonable delay for the sake of restoring the ongoing integrity of our Constitution and our society.

One canard that keeps surfacing is very true, but very selectively applied by the shameless propagandists who skillfully trade in emotional manipulation:   “you can’t force people to stay married”.
Indeed!  We’ve shown here that over a year or two time frame, anyone who wants to legally “dissolve” their marriage, or cause it to be “dissolved”, has a clear path to doing so under virtually all circumstances in a meaningful “family law” reform scenario.    The more accurate saying is “you can’t force someone to live with a person they don’t wish to”,  but their legal marital state is irrelevant in any case.   What is relevant is WHO PAYS under the law.

The emotionally manipulative howling in the press is really about the economics and incentives changing from those that reward the offending spouse and divorce industry, to those that protect the spouse who is committed to family integrity and the true best interests of the children and grandchildren.

Non-consensual “no-fault” divorce laws strip non-offending spouses of their free speech, free religious exercise and conscience rights, along with other fundamental Bill of Rights protections including the right to raise their children according to their convictions, the right to free association with family members on both sides of the family, their property rights, 4th amendment rights against warrantless search of their finances without being accused of a crime, their right to live under an enforceable marriage contract, their right to a jury trial when confiscation of those things is sought by the state.    The best and only way to distract from all of these harsh truths is to howl loudly about very shallow considerations.    In interests horribly adverse to the nation as a whole, they strip us of the separation-of-powers guaranteed by Article 3, allowing the legislatures of these states to override constitutional separation-of-powers protections by legislating away true judicial discretion, true cause of action, and true due process.

Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.
– Proverbs 14:34 (Douay-Rheims Version)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

Can The Sexual Revolution Be Defeated With Only Secular Arguments? (Why I Respectfully Dissent)

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.   Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.   But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.  So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.

Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess  him before My Father who is in heaven.  But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.
–  Matthew 10:28-33

Since the rise to power of homofascism started to rivet the faith community’s attention to the excesses of the Sexual Revolution in earnest about ten years ago, it quickly became an article of faith that some other way had to be found to articulate existential truth to the larger society and policymakers than the out-of-fashion Bible.   Statisticians pointed to the year-over-year increases in the measured ranks of the “nones” (people surveyed to have no religious preference or affiliation) and hastily concluded that they were rejecting the Spirit-breathed content of scripture rather than the easily-observed rampant sexual hypocrisy in the mega-church down the street.    We were cautioned that if we threw our pearls before swine (i.e. the LGBTQxyz political machine), they would be merely trampled under foot and would turn on us.    Turn indeed they did!   Here is an example of the swift rebuke that ensued from the “swine”….

The very influential national Catholic voices among us (for which we remain so grateful to God)  touted “natural law” as the way to crack this nut without offending non-religious and cross-religious sensibilities.    However, to some of us, “natural law”,  as it tends to be applied, sounds like a much watered-down version of God’s law–designed to protectively fence off from moral reform (repentance) the heterosexual root of our “homosexual” sin problem.    One uniformly overlooked element of “natural law” so-applied seems to be chronic, however:  the inconvenient fact that no disease of the body has ever been healed by treating only the symptoms. 

– Why is this secularized “natural law” ideal so tempting to Christian and Jewish social conservatives?

After 50 years of the unchallenged reign of unilateral (so-called “no-fault”) divorce laws throughout the land, some 60% of adults are now living day-to-day in “marriages” that Jesus habitually called adulterous because a legally-estranged spouse is still living.    As displayed above, even malicious, casual bible “scholars” know this.  Don’t bother to bore them with our evangelical “biblical exceptions”, which they see right through!   Since picking up our cross and following Christ tends to be economically costly as well as morally costly,  the adulterously-wed among us tend to also be the very deepest pockets in the land.    How can we afford to do battle against such urgent, existential threats to society as transgenderism, unsafe public restrooms, wedding industry artists bankrupted and hauled off to jail, pornographic indoctrination classes in our schools, on and on, without lots of financial and political support gathered as rapidly as we can humanly gather them?   And how can we gather sufficient funds or political support if we dare call adulterers adulterers?

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.  We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, 6 and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.   – 2 Corinthians 10:3-6

  • Concern for children in “blended” families
    Many promoters of the fenced-off  “natural law” approach to legal and church reforms have legitimate concerns for children born into remarriages following a civil-only divorce, even if they agree, in principle at least, that these are the children of adultery according to what Jesus taught.  “All children have an innate right to be raised by both their natural parents in an intact home”, they assert, and policies that thwart this amount to child abuse in their estimation.     This makes it somehow “acceptable” for the wholeness of grandparent marriages to be subordinated in reaching for only limited legal reforms, even while our society is predominated by fragmented family units, and Bill-of-Rights protections designed as a human rights measure for all original marriages which have been trampled in “family” court for five decades will continue to be trampled.   The Catholic voices for “natural law” are frequently joined by the Calvinistic evangelical voices (Billy Graham, John Piper and others) whose oft-cited banality is “you can’t unscramble the eggs”.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Never mind their utter lack of concern, at the time the legal machinery was installed to civilly “unscramble” the COVENANT eggs of the original marriages that God’s hand joined, and never mind any concern for the legitimate children of those marriages.     Never mind that these same church voices remain shamefully silent today while courageous  Christian lawmakers in two states are presently travailing to uninstall that legal machinery.   Never mind that Jesus pointedly said that it is the original eggs which cannot be unscrambled – as all of the Pandora’s Box of ever more-horrifying societal symptoms empties itself in Divine demonstration and testimony of.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ( SIFC is very grateful for the recent breakthrough article by Catholic author Leila Miller – a very good read that begins to acknowledge what the Lord wants us to see about this.)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Further details on why SIFC believes Calvinists are so prone to joining Catholics in this flawed view will be addressed below.   For now, let’s touch on two more overlooked and overplayed facets of the misplaced concern for the “Ishmael babies”, valuable human beings and Image-bearers created by the moral carnage and dislocations of the Sexual Revolution, which hinder us in fully obeying God in this matter.

(1) there have been studies of the ill effects of remarriage after divorce on children of divorce, but there have not yet been any studies on the effect of reconciling original holy matrimony unions on the children born in the interim into legalized adultery, in eventually failed “remarriages” that followed man’s divorce, but preceded the covenant reconciliation.    There is, however, lots of anecdotal evidence of excellent outcomes on these particular children.    This segment specifically needs to be studied in order for these less specific overall studies to be complete and valid enough to support durable public policy.  This will never happen so long as legal remarriages are deemed morally equivalent (or staying in them morally superior) to holy matrimony the way Christ defined it in Matthew 19:4-6.
Many studies have shown that each subsequent “remarriage” is statistically much more likely to also end in divorce than the previous one, covenant reconciliations being the stable exception, due to the lifelong inseverability of the sarx mia (one-flesh) state created by God’s hand.   This too, is an indispensable element of “natural law”, according to Jesus and according to whole-bible witness entailed in all of the pagan and mixed-marriage couples whose unions God defended as indissoluble, but is completely lost if the biblical argument is discarded.
                    
(2) the Bible tells us in very clear terms that the sin of remarriage adultery is intergenerational.    Hence, living on in an adulterous remarriage does even worse generational  and emulation harm to the children of that “marriage” than does physically separating and legally severing it.     While there is limited hope from some studies that a few in the next generation are learning from the “sins of the fathers”, we are quite literally jeopardizing the future marriages of all children when we allow this malignancy to be cemented as a societal norm.    (There is no “natural law” or secularized way to share this kind of a vital truth.)

 

  • One societal objection seems a lot easier to overcome than two Unfortunately, even among the faithful there are vastly different sexual ethics, most of which also deviate from the teachings of Christ while claiming to be following Him.    As a result, instead of merely needing to build a bridge to the “nones” and atheists in order to do effective battle with the homosexualists, we need to hold together a shaky coalition that includes Jews, Muslims, Mormons, those who believe their church can “annul” marriage, and those who call themselves evangelicals but don’t believe that holy matrimony is indissoluble for life.    In other words, in order to reach those who say there is no God and no binding moral standard, it is necessary to keep two kinds of religious polygamists onboard: concurrent and consecutive, plus a third type that thinks ecclesiastical paper (extrabiblically) takes people out of the second category of polygamy.   No wonder the urge is so strong to leave “religion” out of it!   But leaving God (as He actually is, not as we’ve reinvented Him) out of it, leaves all supernatural power out of it.    As scripture predicts, “they hold to a form of godliness, but deny its power.”

 

  • They hope it will better unify allies in Christ who hold differing faith confessions
    This sounds similar to the previous argument, but actually delves one level deeper.   Keeping it secular seems so much easier when it comes to presenting a united front to agnostics than the hard work of sorting through issues like  sola scriptura vs “tradition”, annulment vs. universal indissolubility, hell versus purgatory, and the Calvinist doctrine of “once saved, always saved (OSAS)” versus the disciples’ doctrine of “once saved, guard your heart“.   Two things can be validly said about this issue:  (1) the 1st century church willingly suffered gross persecution rather than leave God out of it, and they brought moral reform such as the world had never before seen, and (2) the diverse elements of the marriage permanence community squabble daily among each other on these matters, yet God still holds this shaky coalition together for His greater purpose, such that we learn from each other.    We even do so online, right in front of the agnostics and seekers.     He can handle it, and because of His hand in this, so can they!                                                                                                                                                                      The famous Australian evangelist Ray Comfort speaks of leading people to Christ (getting saved) in these terms:  “people need to know what they need to ‘get saved’ from, before they will weigh and accept this as a need in their own hearts.”    He likens it to going through a commercial airline cabin handing out parachutes and urgently instructing the passengers to put them on.   If they put the parachute on in their cramped seats, it’s going to be profoundly uncomfortable.    They’re not going to do it unless they’re told the plane, with certainty, is out of fuel and is about to crash before it can land                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  .….Which brings us back around to the strange bedfellows of Catholics and Calvinists, and why those are the voices we tend to  hear most concerning “natural law” arguments against the Sexual Revolution.   Both tend to believe that hell is for is not for their faithful, regardless of life choices or how people choose to die.   Neither defines “faithful” in terms of bottom-line obedience to Christ.    The Catholics believe God has a “holding tank” for the departed to “earn” one more chance.   The Calvinists believe the worst that disobedience, and even dying while in a God-mocking lifestyle, can result in eternally is “loss of rewards” once “saved” (a single transaction)…as long as unrepentant homosexuality wasn’t practiced.    To be fair to both, neither has allowed the Sexual Revolution to officially degrade their doctrine, such as it stood in the 1970’s, while most other denominations felt license to completely revise theirs based on a vote of their pastors and leadership.   The Southern Baptists, in fact, took solid steps to shore up their family-related doctrine in 2000, even if actual practice would never quite match up.  This unchanged doctrine perhaps has motivated both groups to continue to insist on a voice in the Sexual Revolution, albeit a mostly hypocritical voice in both cases.   Discourse about breaking God’s “natural law design” goes absolutely nowhere out in the world if the best and only reason we can give for why that’s bad is the consequences on the kids.    People using sex like a drug, and people who think this life is all there is are not going to care about the kids, even if they claim a born-again experience.    They’re just not going to.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  God has to be part of the discussion so that we can tell the truth about heaven and hell, even if that offends some evangelicals.    There’s no shortage, after all, of evangelicals who have signed on to the Sexual Revolution themselves, as we all know.   God’s commandments and eternal consequences for disobeying them have to be part of the conversation so that we’re defining terms like “love”, “mercy”, “grace” and “compassion” in terms of eternity, and not just in terms of temporal comfort and feelings.     God has to be part of the conversation so that we’re not misunderstood!

 

  • Illusion that policymakers will respond more favorably to a strictly secular argument
    Only one thing to say here, now that we’re several years in:  how’s that been working out for us?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully believes what the Apostle Paul tried to warn us about in Romans 1 (which is not exclusively about homosexual practice so much as it is about idolatry, self-worship  and misuse of our bodies, in various forms)….
    For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.   Professing to be wise, they became fools,  and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 (   SIFC : Folks, the “impurity” Paul is talking about at this stage is the corruption, by whatever human mechanism, of heterosexual marriage as an institution, that is, any deviation from #1M1W4L which Christ laid out and commanded.)                                                                                                            
    For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,  and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,  being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips,  slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,  without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Respectfully, you cannot prattle on about “natural law” to people who have depraved minds, even though they know the ordinance of God.   You have to find a way by the power of the Holy Spirit to put the fear of God in them!    You have to have resolve in reminding them that God will not be mocked, never lies, and that He keeps His promises.    You also cannot pretend that “natural law” does not follow the full creation ordinance, which Jesus made clear marriage indissolubility except by physical death was just as much a part of as were the complementarian roles of male and female.   God did not take a slab of ribs out of Adam, but only one rib.   Adam’s reference to “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones” has a meaning that legal paper cannot ever change, and that’s a supernatural function of the hand of God.                                                                                                                                                                                                   That fact cannot be explained to people with any number of secular arguments, yet it is at the core of why the Sexual Revolution has caused society to degenerate.     God progressively gave them over because they refused to repent despite His ramping up the consequences.  It is foolish to expect God to lift His escalation of our chastening, especially all the manifestations of virulent homosexualism, which He allowed for a reason, without our actual repentance all the way back to the #1M1W4L standard.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  When we speak to the worldly only of “natural law”, we have to keep in mind that “natural law”,  as people generally understand it, has always included polygamy somewhere in the world.    You can’t speak out against today’s polyamory, therefore, without raising God’s full creation ordinance standard.  You can’t separate the author from the contents of His book!    Expecting to claim “natural law” in order to hold onto a system of consecutive polygamy while denouncing and abolishing the array of sodomous practices and ideology (thereby rescuing our threatened religious liberty) will never be permitted by the God of the bible, Who is sovereign over all of it.    Abolishing consecutive polygamy  requires unabashed references to God and His moral standard, as well as to the full consequences of not seeking to reinforce His standard of holiness in our law and in our societal mores.        Defeating the Sexual Revolutionaries requires His supernatural intervention because of the profound spiritual warfare involved, and we must entreat Him for that intervention as purified vessels, giving Him all the glory and honor when He accomplishes it for us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Being public about these truths costs potential book sales and probably won’t put “standerinfamilycourt” at the top of the list of speakers to invite to the next traditional family conference of any size and financial consequence.   In the big picture, that really only matters with regard to fundraising for the 501c4 being contemplated to fill the enormous gap left by the Christian legal defense ministries who won’t touch constitutional and religious freedom appeals of state unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws against the deep pockets of the state AG’s, profiteering bar associations, Lambda Defense, HRC and the ACLU, should one or more of these challenges ever succeed in the lower courts.     However,  whenever Jesus wanted to get something big done, He provided a fish or two, and on one such occasion, it was even a fish with a gold coin in its mouth.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         And He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  And they were unable to catch Him in a saying in the presence of the people; and being amazed at His answer, they became silent.
    – Luke 20:25-26
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citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

The Marriage Moral Space Between The Bible and The Constitution – Conscionable for Christ-followers?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:32-33

Video credit:  Jeff Morgan.   Matthew Johnston interviewing Dr. Stephen Baskerville, February, 2019

Our blog spends most of its time and words mapping out the moral space between scripture and unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, all the while being well aware that this is “taboo” space which is alleged to be at odds with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.   Actually, this moral space consists of three moral sub-spaces:

(1) the moral space between scripture and the allowance of fault-based divorce which does not violate the Constitution, but severely violates scripture (Matt.19:6,8 )  –  Space “A”

(2) the moral space between fault-based unilateral divorce (Romans 13:4) and mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce  – Space “B”,

and, finally

(3) the moral space between mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce and forced, unilateral “no-fault” divorce (Isaiah 5:20) –  Space “C”.


(please click to enlarge picture)

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

“standerinfamilycourt” began pondering this due to the repeated persistence, in a small strategy discussion group, of a Catholic man who refuses to budge from Space “A” on both moral and constitutional grounds.     He therefore stands opposed to the apparent consensus of the majority in that group: that our divorce law reform objective, particularly insofar as it encompasses the legislatures,  should be  Space “A” + Space “B”.     It’s not at all that this gentleman believes per the bible that death is the only thing which severs and dissolves holy matrimony.   On the contrary, as a “good Catholic”, he also believes that an “annulment” decree from the bishop does this, but in that case he would argue that some extrabiblical “defect” somehow made it “not a marriage”.

At the same time, a brilliant young legal scholar in the group also believes in reform encompassing only Space “A” – on technical constitutional grounds related to  Articles 3 and 10 of the Constitution, but for pragmatic reasons, can settle for Space “A” + Space “B”, so long as this result doesn’t get overturned in court on those same constitutional grounds.  (“Get ‘er done”!)    The difference between the two gentlemen is in their motives and reasoning in arriving at the same end point.    Our Catholic friend believes there are some instances other than physical death which lead God to assent to “dissolution” if church leadership does,  and absent leadership corruption (a huge presumption), this would normally track with fault-based jurisprudence which would be better for the children of the marriage than their parents having an option to decide together to end their marriage.  (Church tradition elevated above God’s commandment, by perceived “delegation”).  Meanwhile, our millennial believes that God has delegated so much authority to the state that the Establishment Clause must override God’s law in order to prevent a “theocracy”.    (State over God, because the alternative in a pluralistic society might be worse.)  SIFC cannot agree with either view, because of Who God says He is, and the outright blasphemy involved with corrupting in any measure one of the key symbols of His holiness and His relationship with His people.

That said, SIFC can also “live with” a pragmatic reform result of Space “A” + Space “B”….but upon deep reflection, believes that if Jesus Christ were in this discussion group,  He’d say that even Space “A” is too much “daylight” between the instructions He left us with and what we as Christian citizens will settle for in our family laws.   Space “A” actually reflects the Pharisaical school of Shammai which He rebuked in Matthew 19, while  Spaces “A” + “B” + “C” reflect the Pharisaical school of Hillel which He also rebuked in Matthew 19.

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter heaven.    Matthew 5:20

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.”     Matthew 19:8

Christ’s position would be:  only God, and not civil government has authority over holy matrimony, and nothing short of holy matrimony is actually moral:

Space “A” +  Space “B” + Space “C” – Space “A” minus  Space “B” minus Space “C” = zero human authority to create holy matrimony or grant a divorce from it.

Christ would grant civil government the authority to track marriage and death records to support the union, but would say that all divorce is man-made and of no effect in the kingdom of God, unless the “marriage” it purports to “dissolve” was invalid and kingdom-unlawful to begin with.   He would say that all authentic marriage is only God-made, and anything outside of that is adultery, which sends people to hell if they don’t repent of it, and for which He will eventually judge our unrepentant nation, especially if the shepherds of His church remain complicit.   By contrast, one recent state is attempting to keep the usurped authority for the state to continue granting unilateral “no-fault” dissolutions, but prospectively only record God-joined unions (and all manner of other man-fabricated  cohabitation arrangements) upon affidavit, and doing so in order that the state’s judges may escape perceived persecution and actual liability at the hand of the homosexualist community from conscience-based refusal to officiate sodomous weddings.

 

“Standerinfamilycourt” is sincerely wrestling with this….
So…just how acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for change in a law that is presently sending people to hell by the millions, in favor of a reformed law that maybe only sends people to hell by the thousands (on the prevention side), and increases the legal avenues for repentance which avoids hell (on the rectification side)?
How much more or less acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for a law that prohibits divorce altogether (that is, strikes the dissolution statute in its entirety — whether or not there exist what men might consider to be “fault-based grounds”), thereby sending few or no one to hell because they divorced their true spouse, but sending some to hell because they can no longer civilly-divorce a faux spouse, and which also closes off all avenues of biblical repentance  via man’s law?    After all, it can’t be emphasized often enough:   the law is a teacher, (especially with regard to the unregenerated who have no way of being counseled from within by the Holy Spirit), for better or for worse.

“standerinfamilycourt” may never have the answer to this dilemma until actually standing before the throne of God, when all of a believer’s life works will be judged to see what survives the fire:

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver,  precious stones, wood, hay, straw,  each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. 
If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.  If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.
1 Cor. 3:10-17

“standerinfamilycourt” is right to be concerned that all of the very costly and difficult activism, in terms of changing man’s divorce law, is only “wood, hay and stubble”.   But if legal reform could also change hearts, reduce the massive number of people dying in a state of adultery,  and increase the harvest of godly offspring who ultimately become citizens of heaven, that becomes a precious metal which will withstand the fire.

In Mathew 6, Jesus told us to seek His righteousness (presumably for ourselves, but perhaps also for others) while we’re first seeking the kingdom of God.    In Matthew 5:6, He declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”  Both verses clearly promise a fulfillment from Him if our heart motives are what they should be, and we’re doing our part to obey the seeking, hungering and thirsting part.

Many earnest believers will argue either (1) “No one serving as a soldier entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he might please the one having enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4), and therefore eschews all political involvement by Christians,  or (2) God’s law of marriage only applies to the redeemed.    Although the first idea has some merit, the second is completely contrary to Christ’s instructions, so  “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully rejects both notions, in times like these.

It seems, therefore, the moral focus needs to be on the net effect on souls arriving in the kingdom of God, in clean wedding garments.   That is all that will survive the fiery test of our life works.    Obviously, if the “dissolution” statutes were all repealed from the lawbooks of all 50 states and not replaced, the expected result would be a wave of both righteous and unrighteous marital abandonments, the former resulting in repentance from adultery ,  and the latter resulting in a massive, if not unprecedented, increase in adultery because of the cultural intolerance of being told by government what to do.     As predominantly immoral as our society has grown in the past five decades (encouraged by the enactment of increasingly immoral civil laws), perhaps the effects would initially “wash”,  then who knows what would follow after that?

Situational ethics and moral relativism are never healthy things, and are downright nauseating to SIFC.   This is the mistake Moses  appears to have made, in endeavoring to “manage” sin in a pretty identical situation (Deuteronomy 24:1-4)  instead of strongly rebuking it, and Christ showed that He was less than impressed with this.   After all, it was not Moses whom Christ commended as the “greatest among all men born of woman”.    It was instead His cousin, John, who sacrificed his very head to try and warn two adulterers to repent to escape hell.   The kingdom of God suffers violence, not appeasement and accommodation!  In accepting moral Space “A” or moral Space “A” + “B”  for pragmatic reasons, there is both situational ethics and moral relativism involved, because human compromise is being aimed at seeking to prevent a perceived greater evil anticipated from a stricter law, due to inherently evil human nature.

Talk like this can be very unsettling to those who have never had the constitutionally-false notion of a thick wall of separation between church and state meaningfully, intellectually challenged.   Certainly, among millennials, there is a long-fed fear (much of it, historical-revisionism-driven and propaganda-driven) causing this generation to struggle in particular with the Establishment Clause, and almost elevating it over the Free Exercise, clause out of concern, (perhaps) that Christianity will lose its moral authority and representation if Allah, Buddha, Krishna and Marx are not given equal place with the Most High God of the bible in our society.     A lot of it has to do with the time period in which boomers vs. millennials and generation X-ers lived and grew up.   And that has a lot to do with (believe it or not) the downstream effects of enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce. Those of us whose hair is now graying grew up for at least a couple of decades during a time when Christian values indeed dominated, and families under all religions actually thrived, even if they were prevented from dominating or having equal representation. That’s because we still HAD our families, directly due to Judeo-Christian domination of power structures and government.

In another February interview, Dr. Baskerville told World Magazine ,

“The churches withdrew from private life? And the state moved in. What had been the role of pastors and priests became the role of lawyers, judges, and social workers. The church has never tried to reclaim its turf, and has been a major contributor of secularization, of people feeling the church is not part of their life when it’s not enforcing the marriage contract.

“What can be done now? The church has got to step in. Much of the history of the Christian church has been brave churchmen speaking out when the state overreaches its authority. This whole area of sexual morality is, frankly, our turf and God’s turf. The state has a role but is overstepping.”

Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?  But he perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, Why tempt ye me?  Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar’s.  And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace.
–  Luke 20: 22-26

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse posted another excellent question from that interview on the Ruth Institute facebook page:  Q: Were churches sleeping when no-fault divorce emerged?

A: Some churches did raise their voices, but much of their attention was diverted at the time by Vietnam and civil rights. There was very little debate, very little discussion. No-fault divorce, the welfare state, and the cohabitation explosion were all usurpations of the church’s role by the state. Governmental power was inserted into a realm of private life that had been the realm of the churches.”

All of the above is true enough, of course, but does not represent the whole picture, at least with regard to the Protestant churches:

[standerinfamilycourt 3/6/2019 on this Ruth Institute Post ]  Martin Luther & co are partly to blame for the church apathy. Forced divorce would be a much bigger issue had he not turned over the authority to the civil state to regulate holy matrimony in order to obtain access to man-made “dissolution” certificates, then established the Reformation church on the outright heresy that original holy matrimony bonds can be severed by anything but death. The real insult to the church is that the civil state is deigning to regulate marriage at all, much less on a “no-fault” basis, but heresy reigns supreme, and revised bibles back it up. For the church to do much to oppose state regulation of marriage, much less any kind of tyrannical divorce law, they would have to acknowledge that all resulting “remarriages” are morally and spiritually invalid adultery in all cases. When they can get away, and indeed grow rich, with not doing so, that’s too big a morsel for most to bite off.

One of Martin Luther’s more outrageous quotes (actually acknowledging that only death dissolves holy matrimony, and providing a very creative solution) goes thusly…

Dr. Morse’s Roman Catholic Church has their own canon law, and has continued to claim its authority over marriage, notwithstanding the state’s competing claim to that authority.   Both claims are overstated and distorted from a kingdom of God perspective.

Perhaps it’s best to step back and look at the behavior of our nation’s founders and their choices with regard to allocating authority over marriage, between human government (Caesar) and God’s commandment that marriage was indissoluble except by physical death.    It was these men who claimed “certain inalienable rights” directly from God, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   It is interesting to note that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any of the original state constitutions eventually ratified in the thirteen colonies even attempted to allocate the authority to regulate marriage to civil government at all, even though Federalism and Article 10 left the states this space.    Based on this, SIFC believes it is fair to say that our nation’s founders started off on the conservative end of Space “A”, fairly aligned with biblical instruction, and this is one of the reasons God incubated and fostered our nation, making it extraordinary in its greatness.    In other words, there wasn’t a lot of moral space between the Bible and the Constitution until case law and legislatures put the moral separation space there later.

A Word About Our Founders, the Framers of the Constitution
Were all of our principal founders followers disciples of Jesus Christ?   No.    Many were deists and humanist subscribers to natural law, including Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen and Benjamin Franklin.     Others, like John Jay, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster were unequivocal about following Christ.    Virtually all of them knew and expressed an overt warning that the form of government they had designed and bequeathed to the future citizens of this nation would only continue to function in an environment of national biblical morality.

Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence said: “Without morals a nation cannot subsist for any length of time.”

John Adams said, “Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.”

Though widely assumed to be a deist, Benjamin Franklin said, “God governs in the affairs of man.  And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?”

(    SIFC:   That can be the rise of a nation for a kingdom purpose, or it can be  tolerated rise of a malevolent stronghold into an empire to punish an unrepentant nation that once enjoyed His extreme favor, and in yesteryear faithfully carried out that purpose, but now is leading the world into deeper debauchery and idolatry.)

Also, observed by Ben Franklin:  “Only virtuous people are capable of freedom.   As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports”, and, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the bible.”

John Adams declared, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

(Tell us 21st century citizens about that, Mr. 2nd U.S. President!)

Finally, Noah Webster said, “…the moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis for all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils that men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from the despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the bible.”

It is frequently argued today that we can’t go back to what we first had as a nation (as if the Lord God were indifferent), because our nation’s residents are no longer homogenous enough for it to work, therefore, we have no practical choice but to govern according to the prevailing cultural morality.   (Much of this, it can be quite accurately observed, is said with the motive of coddling and appeasing the homosexualists.)   “standerinfamilycourt” hereby prophesies that if we continue on as a nation with this ridiculous fallacy, the Muslim caliphate ultimately will not share that opinion with us, and will not hesitate to impose Shariah law on a morally-unruly citizenry. There is plenty of historical precedent for this in the bible and recorded world history.  God owes the United States of America nothing, but He allowed first the Assyrians and then the Persians to overtake the nation of Israel. After seven decades of subjection, He required an intense purge of unlawful “marriages” and restored societal morality before He would restore sovereignty to His favored nation whose religious leadership was complicit in the systemic evil.

The following is only a theory on SIFC’s part, but it has been well-tested by the first nearly 200 years of our nation, when Baptists, Anabaptists and Methodists (who were socially disdained back in England) got along just fine with the Anglicans and Presbyterians.    Later on, the Jews and Catholics got along just fine with the Protestant leaders and citizens under the civil marriage laws that prevailed until 1970.   God’s moral favor gave cover for civil governments to impose that morality on the Mormons and Muslims, a circumstance that today shows signs of beginning to break down.  Civil law does not need to prohibit man’s consensual divorce in order to appease God and wisely govern the people, but it must never force family dissolution and fragmentation on innocent family members while morally and financially rewarding the guilty family members.    Society begins to break down at the point when obeying God’s biblical family law (whose very core is Gen. 2:21-24 and Matthew 19:4-6,8) becomes either very difficult or impossible under the corrupted civil laws of men.

Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
– Proverbs 14:34

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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



citizenship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Decoding a High-Stakes Legislative Study: “No-Fault” Push in the UK

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by Standerinfamilycourt

The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him.   –  Proverbs 18:17

The “senior members of the Judiciary, the Family Mediation Task Force, Resolution (the national organization of family lawyers)”  have the perfectly “simple” solution to the Solomonic dilemma posed above:   make it henceforth unlawful for another to come and examine him.  
(At least, until they’re all back in court afterward, fighting over the level of support and visitation of the children, upon which the next 10 years of fees may be billed, post-decree.)

Thomas Pascoe of the Coalition for Marriage called the House of Commons legislative “impact assessment” supporting enactment of “no-fault” divorce in the UK, on the premise that it will reduce conflict, “very flawed”.    We call it, “not very original” – nor experientially true.    We couldn’t agree more with Mr. Pascoe.   In fact, after studying the study, we find his critique quite tactfully understated with regard to the entire study’s design, purpose and independence.    Based on U.S. experience, we have much to say about the validity of the very premise that conflict over the involuntary dissolution of one’s marriage, and abridgment of parental and property rights,  while innocent of any objective and provable charge, can or should be “managed” by the state as a primary goal of marriage regulation.    The U.S. experience shows the acrimony can only be postponed until after the “dissolution” is imposed, and that this particular state-of-affairs has a long track record of being extremely lucrative for the legal community, while imposing absolute totalitarianism on the citizenry as a whole, outside of the protected special class.

In Part 2 of our coverage of these developments, we do a “deep dive” into the validity of the report, gleaning what we can about sponsorship, financing for the study, design, independence and objectivity.    We do so from a U.S. experience-base of almost 50 years concerning the on-the-ground ability of the government to “manage conflict” in an adversarial divorce petition over inalienable property and parental rights, especially one where there’s no defense available to the “Respondent”, as is the appalling case in most U.S. states.   We concede that the British constitution differs in various respects with the U.S. Constitution when we use terms like “inalienable”, and we forthrightly concede that these things have eroded over time in the U.S. due primarily to judicial corruption.

Undertaking this task has actually required the reading of several ancillary reports in addition to the House of Commons recommendation (briefing) report, including the public vetting results, and a 171-page commissioned “research” paper financed by a liberal public policy foundation  (which states in a foreword that it also funded 1980’s research pushing  unilateral divorce-on-demand), and spearheaded by a family law professor.   This centerpiece research paper focuses primarily on administrative convenience for the courts, and “public perception” of the law, and not at all on evidence surrounding family integrity or outcomes (which should be paramount).

Pointedly  not considered in the design of this “study” was any highly relevant U.S. data resulting from similar policies as here proposed, or whether the unilateral divorce laws enacted in the United States and Canada are sustainable in light of their extensive, progressive  damage to the constitutional republics involved, nor even where similar policies (“postcard divorces”) had to be repealed even under communist regimes before those societies uttlerly collapsed.   Most tellingly, Professor Tinder ignored  Dr. Mark Regnerus’ landmark 2012 New Family Structures Study which was longitudinal over 15,000 subjects and a 30 year time period, and showed (among other things), that children raised in step-parent homes resulting from divorce did as almost poorly in their adult outcomes as children raised in single-parent homes – a clear rebuke on public policy which promotes non-widowed remarriage.    Indeed, the study was not concerned at all with family structure outcomes; did not ask that question, therefore did not consider any of the abundant data along those lines.  Despite engaging a statistics firm, this study did not even do a competent root cause analysis on the study questions it did ask, to validate the problem statement before defining “alternatives” and jumping to predetermined recommendations.

A properly-validated study would have examined the proposals from persistent reform efforts in other “no-fault” countries such as the United States, at least to have reasonable assurance that all viable reform models were being considered in this study.   We further note that if the problem statement and root cause analysis had been properly constructed, the rather trivial complaints which the study said “justified” reform would have been more properly attributed to the lack of availability of a joint petition based on “irretrievable breakdown”, rather than mis-attributed to fault-based grounds — as was the true case in the United States in 1969.  

It is quite implausible that Resolution would not have been aware of the steady wave “no-fault” reform bills over the last 15 years or so before legislatures in  Michigan, Iowa, Texas and Oklahoma,  where the persistent reform consensus has been around providing a combination of consent-only “no fault” grounds by mutual petition, and fault-based grounds that would apply in the event consent cannot be obtained.   The best of these reform efforts also seek to apply fault-based property and child custody standards which have the goal of reforming the perverse financial incentives involved in the family law industry’s practice of actively contributing to the promotion of family breakup, to judicial collusion and corruption, and to preemptive control of all related legislative committees.   It is also implausible that the lobbying organization “Resolution” would not be aware of the commercial advocacy of their counterparts in the various state bar associations and family law associations in the U.S.  Surely, they would be aware of the rapidly-growing Parents’ Rights movement backlash in North America that has resulted from the very policies which this “reform” campaign advocates.    Instead, this “study” takes a mere “snapshot” of existing problematic legislation which these intensifying reform efforts are aimed at, and disingenuously complains that the UK is “out of step” with what is occurring abroad.

In “standerinfamilycourt’s”  humble opinion, the only portion of these study documents that were not primarily lobbying propaganda was the very interesting public vetting results (which were basically ignored in the final recommendations), along with very valid criticisms in Section 5 of the report.

The official recommendation for the new legislation reads as follows:

“The Government proposes that there will still be only one ground for divorce: that the marriage has broken down irretrievably. However, this would be established in a new way. The Government proposes to move away completely from both the ability to allege “fault” and the ability to contest (defend) the divorce: We propose to move away from an approach that requires justification to the court of the reason for the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage to a process that requires notification to the court of irretrievable breakdown. We also propose to remove the ability of a spouse, as a general rule, to contest the divorce (this is formally called defending in the legal process…). The Government reasons that if one spouse has concluded that the marriage is over, then the legal process should respect that decision and should not place impediments in the way of a spouse who wants to bring the marriage to a legal end. Importantly, this change would also prevent the legal process from being used to exercise coercive control by one spouse over the other spouse who may be a victim of domestic abuse.

“The Government therefore proposes to repeal the requirement for petitioners to give evidence of one or more facts and to replace it with a process of giving notice of irretrievable breakdown. In this process, the person seeking the divorce (or potentially the couple jointly) would give notice to the court of the intention to divorce, stating their belief that the marriage had broken down irretrievably. Irretrievable breakdown would therefore continue to be the sole ground for divorce. In the two-stage decree process that we propose to retain, the court would not be able to grant the first and interim decree (the decree nisi) if it was not satisfied that the marriage had broken down irretrievably.”

(   SIFC :  Notice the clever pretense of a residual “judicial discretion function” in the last sentence, mimicking a pseudo separation-of-powers but no longer with any actual substance, since explicitly all that will be legally required is the Petitioner’s subjective assertion which would then bind the judges to just one possible decision, once appealed.   Under the U.S. Constitution this sort of window-dressing would be an imperative due to Articles 3 and 10.)

How did the vetting population feel about this?   And who were they?

Overwhelmingly, these UK citizens are opposed to the main legislative recommendation to remove fundamental family protections, but their voice is clearly being ignored.    This figure tracks right along with data gathered three decades ago in the U.S. that showed 80% of Respondents to a “no-fault” petition alleging “irretrievable breakdown” opposed the dissolution of the marriage based on religion and conscience, even if they could not afford to formally contest.   Clearly, these UK citizens know when their civil rights and the sovereignty of the family are at risk, and when they don’t buy into the problem definition to begin with.

Based on who the vetting population consisted of, it is clear to see who made up the 15% minority in favor of forced, non-consensual divorce.

  Independence in the research study?
SIFC found that in digging into the Nuffield study on which the legislative recommendations almost entirely rely,  the backward-engineering (n.b. desired solution defines the “problem” which scopes the “research”), and cozy relationships between the legislators, judiciary and the family law industry didn’t take long at all to detect.   Clicking over to the webpage of one of the partners in the study, statistician firm Bryson Purdon Social Research,  we find their list of current and past projects shows that they are regularly hired by legislators.   The acknowledgments page of the study gushes about the extensive contributions of the family law lobbying association in the UK called Resolution, several members of which served as advisors and “recruited interviewees”.

It would have been great to compare the list of officers and trustees of the Nuffield Foundation with those of Resolution, but unfortunately, the latter was unavailable to non-members.   We have already mentioned the study director’s extensive ties to family law.    As a touching finish, we read this dedication:  “This report is dedicated to the memory of Sir Nicholas Wall, a former President of the Family Division (of the Judiciary) and an advocate of divorce law reform.

Rationale for disregarding overwhelmingly negative public     input
On page 16 of the study, we read the following (bold emphasis added by SIFC):

“In our national opinion survey, 71% thought that fault should remain part of the law. However, the general public are unlikely to be aware that the current law does not in fact seek to make a definitive allocation of blame or of the very limited scrutiny that the court can undertake in practice.

( SIFC:  In other words, the ignorant peasantry simply “doesn’t understand” that the current statute is meant to preserve an appearance, and isn’t meant to foster the best family outcomes, renovate the system from the ground up so that the judiciary can manage its case load,  preserve fundamental rights of innocent family members or promote any meaningful changes in the existing power structures for the good of society as a whole.)

“Drawing on qualitative interviews with the parties, we drew a contrast between two different and mutually exclusive moralities in relation to divorce: a traditional one based on ideas about individual justice for the petitioner, and a responsibility morality based on the ‘good divorce’ where the focus is on harm-minimisation, especially in relation to children. The first emphasises the importance of a strict adherence to and finding of fault; the second would eliminate fault if possible.

“We also traced how adherents of both moralities experienced the divorce process. In general, the experience of both groups was largely negative, but for different reasons. For some embracing a justice morality, the pragmatic orientation of the justice system could be deeply frustrating, whilst for others the experience of fault turned out to be problematic due to the conflict and upset it generated. Those embracing a responsibility morality also found the experience difficult. Some were using fault pragmatically but found the process slow and painful; whilst some who were avoiding fault on principle found the long separation required to avoid fault very difficult in practical terms and also left them feeling they had lost control of private family decisions. A small number of interviewees a dopting the justice morality wanted the role of fault to be strengthened, but for most the removal of fault was strongly preferred. ”

(   SIFC :  The removal of fault may have been “preferred” for Resolution’s hand-picked interviewees for the study, but this was certainly not born out in Commons’ vetting effort with the general public, which showed an even stronger result at 83% than the still-overwhelming 71% found in the study.   We should also note that the last statement directly contradicts the beginning statement in this quote:  so, which is it, Resolution?)

Why is increasing the role of fault important to this “small number of interviewees”?   Dr. Stephen Baskerville, Professor of Government and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College, and author of two enormously important books,  “Taken into Custody” (2007) and “The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power” (2017) travels all over Europe explaining this very eloquently…

Dr. Baskerville (~ 2 minutes):  “Nobody’s claiming we have to force somebody to live in a house with somebody they don’t want to live with.   The question is…who bears the consequences?  It’s a legal contract, or it should be, and if one walks away from it, what are the consequences?   Who gets the house?   Who gets the children or property and so forth ? Under what circumstances does the state have the role to come in and start allocating things?   So fine, if someone wants to leave a marriage then I think we have no choice but to allow them to do that.   But that’s not what we’re talking about here in the divorce machinery is positive state action against the other spouse.   Why should that spouse who wants to leave the marriage without legal grounds…

(   SIFC :  excluding purely subjective legal grounds not based in any provable offense against the marriage or family members)

“… shouldn’t he or she leave with just the clothes on their backs, what they can get in a suitcase, and nothing else?    Do they have the right to take the children, take the house, take the property with them when they leave?    And this, of course, is where the state has to step in and say…has to allocate fault. They have to say where justice and injustice is.”

We provide this additional brief link to another key segment of the February, 2019 interview with Dr. Baskerville, for important further context.   The study respondents in favor of increasing the role of fault know that the true best moral interest of the children and the only avenue to actual, objective justice, upon which a sustainable society depends, absolutely requires the application of fault, at least with respect to the effects of the divorce.    The real barrier to this policy alternative, of course, is the hoped-for business model of the family law special interests, including the sponsors and designers of this “research study”.

Quoting the “Equality Statement” within David Gauke’s report,

“The aim of the policy is to reduce conflict between couples involved in divorce, dissolution and legal separation. The policy objectives are in line with wider strategic objectives to deliver a modern courts and justice system, including to provide a fair and effective justice system which supports better outcomes for children and families.

“The objectives are:

• To ensure that the decision to divorce or dissolve a civil partnership continues to be a considered one

• To minimise the adversarial nature of the legal process, to reduce conflict and to support better outcomes by maximising the opportunity for the parties to agree arrangements for the future

• To make the legal process fair, transparent, and easier to navigate

• To reduce the opportunities for an abuser to misuse the legal process to perpetrate further abuse”

These are purely ideological statements, with an undertone of making the law as LGBTQ-friendly as possible (code word: “Equality”).    We point out that if a justice system which supports better outcomes for children and families were really the objective, then the research study would have been designed accordingly around family structure outcomes, and Dr. Regnerus’ rigorous 2012 NFSS study would have been invaluable support in reaching that outcome.

Because the April, 2019 position paper by Lord Chancellor David Gauke brings no other independent evidence to bear other than this heavily-biased and less-than-arm’s-length “research” (extensively requoted verbatim in the final recommendations, including the incomplete set of policy alternatives)– and the public citizen input has been patently ignored and discounted,  “standerinfamilycourt” rests our case against the validity of “support” for this legislation here, rather than picking apart the legislative conclusions point-by-point (which was nevertheless tempting!)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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