“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” – Matt. 5:11-12
The covenant marriage “stander” community has its leaders who organize weekly conference calls where testimonies and other encouragements are offered to those who are believing God to pull their prodigal spouse out of an adulterous state-sanctioned (perhaps, even church-“sanctified”) but God-forbidden“remarriage”, thereby restoring justified, regenerated souls to the kingdom of God once the sin is confessed as sin, and renounced by the penitent prodigal spouse. This, of course, is the only“biblical grounds for (man’s) divorce” that has ever existed, from the beginning. In all such cases, the biblical ground is based on the fact that God has never created a one-flesh (Greek: sarx mia) entity due to the undissolved prior covenant and unlawful nature of the union. This is why Jesus consistently and repeatedly calls such legalized unions where there is a living, estranged true spouse adultery — not so much for moral reasons, but actually for metaphysical reasons, and because a holy God cannot and will not ever covenant with sin. The word of God is crystal clear that only physical death, not man’s paper, dissolves original God-joined holy matrimony unions between a widowed or never-married man and a widowed or never-married woman.
These online groups are so vital to this marriage permanence community because standers, and those who do exit their papered-over adulterous “marriages” in Spirit-led repentance, can often find themselves subject to intense persecution, some of the most vicious of which is at the hands of other so-called “Christians”, and inexcusably, sometimes by churches that have some scurrilous reason to aid and abet an adulterous legalized union. Such was the riveting testimony of Tracy Jordan in a recent conference call – link to the May, 2019 audio replay is here. Listening to the audio is strongly encouraged for readers who have the time, as there are details and drama of the story not highlighted in this post.
Tracy relates on the call that she was five years into her first covenant marriage when her husband began a pattern of infidelity, and that there had been a generational legacy of divorce in her birth family. She married her husband in 2000 after several years of cohabiting, and was happy that he would be the sole-provider and she a homemaker after the biblical model. She was concerned about the curse of the family legacy of fragmentation, and hoped that this marriage would be until death. When her husband asked her for a divorce after a few years of standing for her adultery-embattled marriage, she refused to sign the papers, and started going to church on her own. She then found out that her husband had applied to become a deacon in a Miami megachurch at the same time he was in the process of unilaterally divorcing her, under Florida’s family-hostile “no-fault” law, in order to continue and cover up his ongoing adultery with a member of that church.
Tracy made an appointment with the leadership of the church who had made her estranged husband a deacon, Tracy following the biblical model for addressing sin in the body of Christ, and Paul’s guidelines concerning the qualifications for church leadership. She was not allowed to see the head pastor, but was granted an appointment with an assistant pastor. When she arrived at the church for the appointment, she found her husband and his adulteress in the assistant pastor’s office, and as she was soon about to violently find out, they had, perhaps without the head pastor’s knowledge, pre-arranged for a police squad car to pull up out front of the church. Also in the office were two church security goons, at the ready. Tracy pleaded scripture to the assembled group, warning of the sin of this church in facilitating the planned adulterous nuptials between this pair, quoting Mark 10:11-12 and Romans 7:2-3. She says she was then seized by church security and bodily thrown to the ground outside. The waiting police then arrested her, charging her with “simple battery” because she had tried to push the church security guards away, telling them, “don’t touch me!” Not only was the assistant pastor guilty of collusion with the adulterous pair and the police, but the police were guilty of collusion in being eyewitnesses to the unprovoked assault by the security guards, in basically “reversing the charges”.
“I commend you once again sister Henry.. (addressing an author and leader in the marriage permanence community who left an adulterous remarriage of 17 years, Sharon L. Fitzhenry)… for your stand and dedication on this critical issue of marriage, divorce and remarriage. I was arrested a couple of years ago in church here in Miami, because my husband divorced me and married another woman in the church.
“I confronted the Leadership with Matthew 19:9, during a bible study lesson and there was a uproar in the congregation with me being arressted. I would have done the same thing over again, because it wasn’t like I was John the Baptist, going to be beheaded! I was with my husband for 19 years before he divorced me. I tried to fight for my husband’s soul, because I didn’t commit adultery, and I knew what state that would put him in. A lost state! he had no biblical right to divorce me. The church, cosigned, condoned and contributed to adultery. After the drama was over, I moved forward with my children, unfortunately two years later, my husband developed lung cancer and died. He died in his sins!
“God took one Rib! not spare Ribs! No man should divorce his wife, because she gained two pounds or burned the chicken last night! My husband was a deacon of the church! I warn those that teach this damnable Doctrine, because many souls will be lost because of it. Marriage is a Covenant, not a Contract! It’s until her last breath or yours!
“I didn’t make the rules, I just follow them. A pastor told me that there was no such thing as an adulterous marriage. Once you remarry, the second time, God honors that marriage. That’s not what the Bible teaches! As far as divorce and reconciliation to your first marriage partner, we find in Jeremiah 3:8, that God divorced faithless Israel and gave her a certificate of divorce and sent her away, because of her adulteries, but God reconciled himself back to Israel, once she repented! The story of Hosea and Gomer, depicts God’s undying love for Israel. Hosea was God! God was married to Israel! As husband’s and wives, we need to love like that. We need to forgive like that. We need to drag the hurts we have been harboring against each other in our hearts to the cross of Christ- it’s where we lay our burdens of guilt and shame. Only in him will we find true forgiveness. When we fully forgive each other , our minds will be released from the bondage of resentment that has been building a wall between us, and we shall be free to grow in our relationship with each other as husband and wife in holy matrimony!”
Covenant marriage standers bear many sorrows, but the loss of their one-flesh’s eternal soul to death before repentance (with the full complicity of a harlot church) has to be the very worst of these. Every stander living under the crushing burden of an unreconciled marriage and family dreads this occurrence beyond anything else. Many have this burden lifted by the return of their prodigal home to the Lord and to the home in this life, sometimes after decades of running away from Him. A tragic few do not. Tracy’s husband died in his adulterous remarriage only a few years after entering it.
Tracy relates on the conference call that she was eventually exonerated and acquitted of the criminal complaint after a trial that went on for eight months, and which depleted her financial resources. This is the all-too-common lot for an innocent spouse who dares to seek any kind of justice for what modern “family laws” routinely inflict on them by giving preference to the offending spouse, and subjugating the fundamental rights of the non-offending spouse.
In too many such cases, the innocent spouse is punished by both civil and criminal laws, though they’ve done nothing morally wrong. Tracy relates that she was ultimately unsuccessful in recovering civil damages for the false arrest because one of the officers subsequently went to prison for an unrelated matter. She eventually received an apology from the head pastor of this church that conspired to have her arrested.
Tracy is now married to a biblically-eligible man, but at an unthinkable, staggering eternal loss, following the untimely, unrepentant death of her first husband. Today Tracy is a grandmother, and she works as a volunteer in a shelter for abused women in Florida.
And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. – 2 Timothy 3:12
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | “Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise),SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, and that you may live long on the earth. – Ephesians 6:2-3
Mother’s Day 2018 has come and gone, and it’s now Mother’s Day 2019. In sharp contrast with Mother’s Day 1968, here are a few miserable facts:
Over 40% of children are born into fatherless homes outside of civil wedlock, and in some races this is as high as 70%
Over two-thirds of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by WOMEN, yet most of these same women never recover financially and may easily retire impoverished
Some 80% of those filed petitions are non-mutual – that is, opposed by an innocent spouse who has not objectively done anything to harm the filing spouse or the marriage
Taxpayers, including divorcees, foot a bill for well over $100 billion per year in state and Federal costs arising from the social expense of state-accelerated family breakdown
What would beneficial reform look like? From a constitutional standpoint, allowing for the restoration of our right of religious conscience and free religious exercise under the 1st Amendment, and allowing for 14th Amendment equal protection with regard to parental and property rights, our suggested reforms are:
(1) All petitions that are notmutual filings would require evidence-based proof of serious, objective harm to the marriage or to the offended spouse. For example, “emotional abuse” would be professionally defined in the statutes in terms of specific behaviors, with professionally documented admissible evidence legally defined
(2) All divisions of property and child custody / welfare arrangements that are not agreed as part of a mutual petition would be determined based on objective evidence of marital fault being the key consideration, with a view to leaving the non-offending party and the children as whole as possible in comparison with pre-divorce conditions
(Yes, we readily concede that this would be creating substantial economic disincentives to dissolution of the marriage, and we make no apologies. The present system actively rewards the one seeking the divorce and actively punishes the innocent spouse who dares resist in any way.)
So what are the specific benefits to families and society (hence, to mothers) from these reforms?
Benefit #10 – They’d be more prone to have marriage as a realistic and durable option in their life. We hear this from the cohabiting young adults all the time, including households with kids but unmarried parents: “what’s the point of getting married?” Despite the social do-gooders who cheerlead with shallow slogans like “put a ring on it”, the kids sense the government power-grab that unilateral “no-fault” divorce imposes on their lives and pocketbooks, and many of them have been saying “no thanks” for several years now. Even if they’re not old enough to remember a time when the marriage contract was binding (absent some provable serious fault), they know the current civil contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, especially when they see 50 and 60-year olds who have been successfully married for decades suddenly unable to stay out of the jaws of the “family court” machinery.
Benefit #9 – Their kids and life companions would be less likely to commit suicide. This is not to say that in the halcyon days when the marriage contract was reasonably binding, there weren’t murders and suicides of wives. All one has to do is watch the old “Twilight Zone”, “Perry Mason” and “Alfred Hitchcock” episodes from the early-1960’s to know that this was an issue which probably justified some measured reform of divorce laws to allow for mutual consent “no-fault” grounds — and arms-length property and child settlements. But, certainly not the travesty we wound up with: unilaterally-asserted “irreconcilable differences” grounds, where the innocent was assumed guilty by the courts upon the allegation of one spouse, and no evidence to the contrary would be tolerated or heard or appealed, and where the guilty party was rewarded while the innocent party was smeared and robbed by the court (and sometimes even jailed).
The apologists for this robbery of fundamental rights from the entire classof innocent spouses claim it’s “justified” because the suicide rate in wives reportedly dropped by 20% following unilateral divorce enactment. But who’s to say that this improvement would not have comparably happened as a result of mutual-consent “no-fault”?
In the meantime, spousal murders have not abated, while estranged husband and young adult child suicides, and accidental deaths due to drug addictions, have skyrocketed. Mother’s Day is not such a happy day for some mothers for this horrible reason, even though they extracted their personal sexual and financial autonomy under the civil law. For other mothers, it’s not such a happy day because their husband decided to trade them in, and as a consequence they find themselves alienated from their children (perhaps even losing one to suicide or worse), even though they were the responsible parent who did nothing wrong. Benefit #8 –Their kids would be less likely to become gender-confused and gender-dysphoric. Speaking of high suicide and addiction rates, and looking back 50 years, we had this amazing phenomenon of rapidly increasing numbers of LGBTQ(xyz)-ers suddenly being “born this way” — when markedly fewer of them were “born this way” back in the days when it just so happened the civil marriage contract was legally enforceable. Ditto concerning the amazing inverse correlation between the demand for “marriage” among homosexuals and the legal enforceability of the marriage contract (while we’re at it).
Benefit #7 – Their kids would be less likely to be killed at school or (even worse) become the shooter. Sadly, we’ve come to have so many school shooting incidents in the past 20 years that they no longer shock us the way they used to. In 2013, CNN compiled a fairly exhaustive list of all such reported incidents, and has kept it updated since.Only three such incidents occurred between 1927 and 1970, according to the list, and only one of those involved a minor as the perpetrator. However, from 1974 to present, CNN reports such incidents, most of them involving minors, and since the late 1980’s it’s consistently been 2 or 3 per year, most of them carried out by a “son of divorce”. In his 2013 article, “Sons of Divorce School Shooters”, W. Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia writes,
“From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.”
This makes for dozens of mothers, on both sides of the gun, for whom each Mother’s Day is unimaginably painful.
Benefit #6 – Reproductive abuses, from profiteering abortionists to abominable surrogacy, would stop victimizing so many of them. “standerinfamilycourt” was shocked and outraged to see the U.S. listed in an article, Surrogacy by Country, by the organization, Families Through Surrogacy, where this practice is legal (but expensive). What most countries have in common where both surrogacy and abortion are legal (the latter often government-funded) is that they also have unilateral divorce-on-demand, and by extension, removal of fathers’ rights and responsibilities because he’s often been forcibly severed from his marriage and family. Where there are strong natural fathers favored by society and the legal structure, there is less room and demand for commercialized reproductive abuses that exploit and traumatize women — and commoditize children.
Hungary, in particular (not on the above surrogacy list), has recently decided to bank on this relationship between easy divorce and negative population implications, implementing conservative national family policies to avoid having to resort to open borders to resolve its demographic issues (to the angst of its feminists). If conservative family policies work there, they’ll probably work in other western countries and the U.S. Hungary only has “no-fault” divorce available by mutual consent, according to websites by Hungarian family law attorneys. Abortion is legal in Hungary, but it’s broadly reported as being very difficult to access, and its constitution states that “life begins at conception”. Look for God’s blessings to be on Hungary as a nation.
Benefit #5 – The national debt would begin to decline, improving the national security of mothers and their children. The national debt clock shows that the U.S. is over $22 trillion dollars in debt as of this writing. In a study released in 2008 by the Institute for American Values (which was 7 years pre-Obergefell and badly need to be updated), the combined state and Federal annualtaxpayer cost of family fragmentation due to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws was $122 billion per year. Compounded by the Treasury’s borrowing cost over those years since enactment, unilateral “no-fault” divorce could easily account for at least one-third of the total.
Benefit #4 – In-home child abuse would decline at the hands of the mothers’ boyfriends so their children could grow up safely again. Forcibly removing the rights and authority of natural fathers (in some cases, mothers) from the lives of their children has come at a very high moral and safety cost to those children. W. Bradford Wilcox (cited above) writes in a 2011 article for Public Discourse,
“This latest study confirms what a mounting body of social science has been telling us for some time now. The science tells us that children are not only more likely to thrive but are also more likely to simply survive when they are raised in an intact home headed by their married parents, rather than in a home headed by a cohabiting couple. For instance, a 2005 study of fatal child abuse in Missouri found that children living with their mother’s boyfriends were more than 45 times more likely to be killed than were children living with their married mother and father.
“Cohabitation is also associated with other non-fatal pathologies among children. A 2002 study from the Urban Institute found that 15.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems (e.g., depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.), compared to just 3.5 percent of children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents. A 2008 study of more than 12,000 adolescents from across the United States found that teenagers living in a cohabiting household were 116 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, compared to teens living in an intact, married family. And so it goes.”
Benefit #3 – Family and national wealth would markedly improve, leaving fewer of them poor in old age Wedlock (emphasis on the “lock”) creates wealth and staves off poverty, many studies have shown. Yet, close to 70% of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by women, who don’t realize until too late, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
If, on the other hand, they had to prove fault, and if they bore the cost of their own fault, they wouldn’t so readily fall prey to the deception of feminist ideologies. All too often they find themselves in unanticipated poverty after buying into the empty feminist promises and discarding their spouse, after which, they come to think the only way out is to throw another woman into poverty by seducing her husband onto the legalized-adultery-merry-go-round.
In terms of national wealth, this is a hand-of-God matter. Deuteronomy 28 tells us (vicariously, since this was spoken to His most-favored nation):
“Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the Lord your God:
“Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.
“Blessed shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground and the offspring of your beasts, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.
“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.
“The Lord shall cause your enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you; they will come out against you one way and will flee before you seven ways.The Lord will command the blessing upon you in your barns and in all that you put your hand to, and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.The Lord will establish you as a holy people to Himself, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways.So all the peoples of the earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will be afraid of you.The Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give you.The Lord will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.The Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you only will be above, and you will not be underneath, if you listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I charge you today, to observe them carefully,and do not turn aside from any of the words which I command you today, to the right or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.”
The Apostle John channels the words of Jesus in Revelation 2 to confirm this Deuteronomy 28 warning as still being true in the last days among the Gentile church:
But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality.Behold, I will throw her on a bed of sickness, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds.And I will kill her children with pestilence, and all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your deeds.
Sexual autonomy is a contemporary “other god” that is served by immoral family laws. Notice that both blessings and curses passively overtake a nation according to the national choices made by clergy and government. Reading on in Deuteronomy 28, the opposite curse to each blessing is recited by Moses, except the curses far outnumber the blessings, showing that His protective hand over a nation holds back far more curses, which flood us when He removes it after many prophetic warnings go unheeded. Most of us would agree that God has allowed most of these poverty-from-disobedience consequences to fall on the U.S. and other western countries in increasing intensity as the Sexual Revolution has become increasingly entrenched in our culture, unopposed by the church.
Jesus was very clear about God’s commandment, which if we truly obeyed as a nation, there would be no humanist legal provision for divorce:
“…What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate…Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.”
Benefit #2 – Their pastors would quit lying to mothers (and fathers) about biblical instruction concerning remarriage It is a documented fact that commercially-published bible text has been “evolving” since at least the late 1800’s, that seminary faculties have been increasingly overrun with sexual liberals since the post-World War II period, and that academic freedoms have been increasingly on the wane in the last 10 years with regard to conservative biblical scholars. We now have free online bible study tools that enable just about anybody to conclusively demonstrate the liberal violations of Revelation 22:19. Back in the 1970’s, pastors in several denominations went on record as demanding that the church stop teaching that remarriage is adultery in every case where an estranged spouse is still living (even though that’s quite accurately what both Jesus and Paul taught), demanding the removal of denominational rules that would disfellowship them for performing weddings Jesus would call continuously adulterous. There were also demands for pastors in such an adulterous “marriage” themselves to no longer be denied ordination credentials, even though that’s the standard that the Apostle Paul himself implemented in the churches he established.
It’s also a well-documented fact (per the minutes of denominational conferences) that the chief cause for this was primarily economic – i.e., the fear of loss of church membership as legalized adultery supplanted holy matrimony going forward. But it was also emotional and reputational now, as falsified bibles (and pastors themselves commonly living in ongoing legalized sexual sin) emboldened a lot of church women to bully their own pastors if they didn’t take a liberal stance and shrug off God’s word to the contrary. If it’s true that the cause of doctrinal unfaithfulness was the pursuit of unrighteous mammon, the effect will eventually reverse to the extent the civil laws comport again with biblical morality concerning marriage. (Luke 16, from beginning to end, needs to be read as an integrated unit, rather than a random cluster of miscellaneous sayings of Jesus.)
Circa 100 A.D., the Bishop of Antioch said this in his Epistle to the Ephesians,
“Do not err, my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. And if those that corrupt mere human families are condemned to death, how much more shall those suffer everlasting punishment who endeavor to corrupt the Church of Christ, for which the Lord Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, endured the cross, and submitted to death! Whosoever, ‘being waxen fat,’ and ‘become gross,’ sets at nought His doctrine, shall go into Hell. In like manner, every one that has received from God the power of distinguishing, and yet follows an unskillful shepherd, and receives a false opinion for the truth, shall be punished.” –St. Ignatius
No, this wicked idea that “remarriage” while an original spouse was still alive could ever be accepted by God as holy matrimony was an unfortunate time-bomb, a product of 16th century Reformation humanism (as was “replacement theology”, against which the Apostle Paul also warned). Eventually, this heresy removed inhibitions against enacting immoral family and reproductive laws in western nations, and deceived the lawmakers who today uphold these laws into having the audacity to call themselves “Christians”. This was also the reason why some conservative denominations made the eternally fatal choice in the 1970’s to revise their once-biblical doctrine to accommodate the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, instead of standing strong against themanywhere close to the way they stood against gay “marriage”.
Jesus preached a 3-part definition of adultery, and part 3 actually precludes any notion of “biblical exceptions” we hear so much about:
(1) to lust in one’s heart after someone other than our living spouse (Matt. 5:27-28)
(2) to divorce a spouse in order to remarry (Mark 10:11-12)
(3) to marry any divorced person (and by corollary, to marry someone after being involuntarily divorced – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18b)
In Matthew 5:27-32 Jesus tell us that adultery doesn’t just occur extramaritally, but it occurs just as much inside of the “remarriages” of seemingly respectable church-going people, and by His reference to cutting off of our hands and gouging out our eyes rather than taking the first step toward this abomination, He alludes to this conduct leading to hell as the (unrepentant) destination. Later on, He directly and graphically says so in Luke 16:18-31.
Picture credit: Sharon Henry
While it’s not strictly necessary for pastors and lawmakers to visualize their sheep (and constituents) in the hell-flames to get the former onboard with moral divorce reforms in civil law, it sure doesn’t hurt. Pastors who do see this connection usually don’t perform the kinds of weddings that directly drive the demand for “no-fault” divorces. If lawmakers could see their adulterously remarried constituents in the resulting hell-flames as a repeal bill is before them, and if they knew that what the martyred Ignatius had to say was a certainty concerning the corrupters of families, it wouldn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, they would vote for the repeal of marriage “dissolution” laws altogether. Getting the state “out of the marriage business” would include getting the state out of the divorce business to the same extent!
Nine of these benefits to mothers (and future mothers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word. The #1 benefit to mothers, however, is eternal.
Happy Mother’s Day to those who can celebrate today. Joyous Mothers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord.
Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.– Hebrews 13:4
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment, so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation withoutreference tosin, to those who eagerly await Him. – Hebrews 9:27-28
On Wednesday, May 1, 2019, divorce law reformers were again in front of the Texas House of Representatives, testifying in an effort to get the repeal of unilateral (non-consensual) “no-fault” grounds to advance from that committee, a bill identical to the one that had been voted out of the same committee two years before, whereupon that bill died a mysterious death before it could be brought to the floor of the full house for a vote, and before the legislature adjourned for two years. This time, related bills under discussion, HB922 and HB926 occupied about an hour of the late evening 3-hour session for testimony, while one bill seeking to protect wedding officiants from (homosexualist) liability by allowing them to recuse themselves, where conscience before God would be violated, (HB2109) preceded this debate and took more than 90 minutes of that time. During the discussion of the supposedly “homophobic” recusal bill, one recently-elected millennial lawmaker from a district north of Austin responded to the testimony of Cecilia Wood, a family law attorney of 32 years, there to testify in support of HB922 eliminating non-consensual “no-fault” grounds for divorce, but also a supporter of the right to recuse from officiating weddings based on religious conscience, as follows (@ 8:30):
Rep. Talarico: “Two comments and a question: of course, allusion to the civil war (sic) important, but there was also a right side to that war and a wrong side to that war. Second, you mentioned Christians staying home. There are many Christians on this dias, including me who don’t hold discriminatory beliefs….”
“Woke” social justice writers like Ms. Held are largely responsible for the extrabiblical notions of young Mr. Talarico and too many of his generation:
(1) Belief that one can be a follower of Christ without embracing and obeying His teachings on morality and sexual ethics, as plainly described in the bible – both on a homosexual and heterosexual basis.
(2) The belief that biblically-immoral sexual behavior choices can constitute an “immutable” identity which can then be parlayed into valid comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1860’s and 1960’s that were based on race, biological sex and religion, i.e. “a right side to that war and a wrong side to that war…” to pass prudent moral selectivity off as “discrimination”. (It should be noted, however, that homosexualism is quickly becoming a sect of the larger secular humanist de facto state-religion of the United States ruling political class.)
(3) The asserted moral superiority of “social justice” Christianity over a holiness-based discipleship that better comports with the full teachings of Christ, the apostles and the early church fathers, especially in the area of sexual ethics. The fact remains that this humanist pseudo-religion is the very antithesis of actual Christian discipleship in every respect.
(4) That false analogies (in general) are excusable for the greater “good”.
To this last point, a woman’s purported “right” to disobey Christ (such as by divorcing her husband in a pagan civil court) is obscenely compared with Martha’s sister, Mary choosing to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn from Him, in the RHE illustration we’ve opened this post with.
While this testimony was occurring in Austin, TX, another kind of eternal tragedy was occurring in Tennessee in the Evans household, a covenant holy matrimony union of 16 years, with two children.
Dan and Rachel Evans wedding, 2003
The news site, AL.com wrote on April 19: “During treatment for an infection, Rachel began exhibiting unexpected symptoms. Doctors found that her brain was experiencing constant seizures. She is currently in the ICU. She is in a medically induced coma while the doctors work to determine the cause and solution…” By May 1, her condition was deteriorating due to brain-swelling after she failed to come out of the coma. As reported by CNN: “…Over the next 10 days and transfers between three facilities, Evans was comatose. Doctors began weaning Evans off coma medication Tuesday, but she did not return to an alert state during this process…Thursday [the coincidental date of the committee vote in Texas], Evans had ‘sudden and extreme’ changes in her vitals. A medical team found “extensive swelling of her brain” and took emergency action”.
That emergency action was unavailing, and she died on Saturday, May 4. Out of respect for the Evans family and their grieving process, we will be publishing this blog a day or two after her funeral.
This is the sort of dias-sitting “Christians” that Rep. Talarico was referring to in his hearing remarks were, no doubt, influenced in great measure by the evangelical darling of CNN, the Huffington Post, and a host of other liberal publications, secular and evangelical. SIFC has a grown, married daughter four years older than Mrs. Evans, who also started adopting RHE’s views around the time her writings gained prominence on CNN, and quoting similar homosexuality-sympathizing “Christian” writers such as Jen Hatmaker. This tragedy hits very close to home for that reason. It’s normal for young adults who have been raised in Christian homes to go through a season of questioning, but in these evil last days, it can be eternally fatal to purchase a home there (and turn it into a real estate office, as RHE did, with the backing of crooked investors). Hopefully, SIFC’s daughter is “just renting”, and moves to a home with a Rock foundation in time.
Mrs. Evans joined Soros-funded Baptist feminists (Karen Swallow-Prior, Beth Moore and an acclaimed homosexual journalist) in the leftist smearing of Rev. Paige Patterson, resulting in his removal from his leadership posts in the Southern Baptist Convention last year because of his fullybiblical anti-divorce views which rejected the morally rabid “abuse” doctrines of this evangelical feminist cult. She was quoted by Baptist News Globalat the time: “Patterson’s comments need a swift and thorough rebuke from the SBC and all Christians of good faith.” At least indirectly, Mrs. Evans was the epitome of the “rent-an-evangelical” cadre that Soros operatives openly bragged about recruiting.
The following was typical of her views on man’s divorce, finding purported legal “dissolution” a necessary “right choice” to prevent the exploitation of women, and imagining the true protection of women under the biblical leadership of her husband “legalistic”….rather than the metaphysical impossibility Jesus taught that divorce of an original holy matrimony union actually is. In effect, RHE was a popular writer because she excused hardness of heart, telling her fans what they wanted to hear – at a time when nearly 70% of unilateral “no-fault” divorce petitions are filed by women, and almost nobody takes provable abuse through the criminal justice system, as the bible would instead direct.
Jesus’ words about divorce were intended to protect women who were being exploited by the system. That they have been turned into legalistic laws that often harm women is a tragedy. A marriage is not more sacred than the people in it. Sometimes divorce is the right choice.
— Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) (@rachelheldevans) April 29, 2018
“…but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
“Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!” – Jesus, Matt. 18:7-8
Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. – Romans 1:32
“standerinfamilycourt” would vigorously challenge the late Mrs. Evans’ assertion about the “purpose of Jesus’ words on marriage”. Rather than protecting women from “exploitation by the system”, those words were to protect society as a whole from self-absorbed individualism, and keep fathers firmly in authority over the generations of their families, per God’s design.
Challenging the authority of scripture on such a matter, and then (apparently) dying unrepentant is very eternally costly, at least according to one early church bishop who was martyred early in the 2nd century….
Meeting this fate while still very young illustrates the extreme danger of achieving broad influence and acclaim which is built on a foundation of sand. It’s a mercy that God sometimes removes high-impact siren voices from our midst. When He must do so while they are so young, it’s a strong sign of how many they were leading astray, and of His foreknowledge of whether they would ever repent. Apparently, Mrs. Evans knew John Stonestreet of the Colson Center (Breakpoint.org) very well because they were from the same town in Tennessee, and (while he can’t quite bring himself to vocalize it), he is wondering if she ever repented before she passed into eternity last week. We can only hope so.
We are bracing for the howl we’re going to get from the antinomians out there, as we did when remarriage adulteress Joey Feek passed away young and unrepentant in her “marriage” to another woman’s legally-estranged husband. That blog post elicited comments from hundreds of people for days. We didn’t write that piece to be “mean” to the divorced-and-remarried, nor will we apologize for reminding people that all of the apostles warned repeatedly about the possibility of wandering away from the faith, as directly evidenced by the levels of repentance, and spirit of obedience to Christ’s commandments, in the life under discussion. If those who would take offense insist on doing so based on extrabiblical denominational dogma, their souls are in their own hands. If the past is any indication, some will read this and insist that SIFC has “judged” and personally consigned these erring souls to hell, as if feeling deputized by God to do so. This is irrational (to be as kind as possible in expressing it). What SIFC has done is tell the audience what God’s word and early church fathers clearly said about similar situations.
“standerinfamilycourt”, as Mrs. Evans did, feels called to the role of a teacher of God’s word on the family, approaching it with a holy fear of God, and ever-mindful of the stern warning from Christ’s brother, James, about the eternal impact on the audience….
“Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment. “
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
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.
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!
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!
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 thosemarriages. 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.
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 consecutivepolygamy 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 www.standerinfamilycourt.com 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames. – Sir Thomas More
Given his 1535 martyrdom for refusing to recognize Henry VIII’s divorce and adulterous remarriage to Ann Boleyn, does it seem at least a little reasonable to believe that Sir Thomas More might have been deeply troubled about the Marxist social engineering a successor Lord Chancellor named Gauke is currently cramming down the throats of over 80% of the UK citizens, a sample of whom resoundingly told Parliamentrecently they don’t want 6-month forced family-shredding (no-defense divorce) to become the immoral law in their country?
When Ireland was about legalize abortion a couple of years ago, every one of these groups, whose logos appear above, tracked and wrote about it on an almost weekly basis. When gay marriage was in the process of being legalized in numerous countries abroad (not the least of which was the UK), it was the top daily headline for every one of them. The push to radically expand unilateral “no-fault” divorce has been all over the UK papers for more than a year now, ever since a British high court did the right thing by the nation’s families last year in denying a 67-year old woman who had no legitimate grounds to seek a divorce against her 80-year old husband of 40 years. It wasn’t that this woman would never be divorced from her God-joined one-flesh mate under the UK civil law, however (unless the Lord brought her to repentance). It was only that it had been just 4 years since she moved out of their main house, and this decision made her await the final year under existing law to fully go her own selfish way with a chunk of the sizable marital estate.
You guys decided to sit this one out for some reason. One can only imagine if instead of an elderly heterosexual couple, this had been Elton John and his lovely “husband” David Furness being denied a quickie divorce under existing law. Would any of you have been able to resist sparring back at the outraged tabloids? Yet, in over a year’s time, not one of you has even shown awareness that traditional marriage in the UK literally is on its last lonely stand.
Believers who care about this issue were scratching our heads, but still willing to forgive and support you when two U.S. states in the last four years took the tremendously courageous step of very seriously attempting the repeal of forced family-shredding-on-demand by requiring that “no-fault” grounds only be allowed upon a joint petition or other form of documented mutual consent, but for public purposes, you chose to sit that one out as well.
“standerinfamilycourt” means no disrespect, but 90% of the infringement of religious liberty in the name of the Sexual Revolution can be traced directly back to that grossly irresponsible bill Gov. Ronald Reagan signed on September 5, 1969. In fact, innocent “Respondents” on the receiving end of a unilateral “no-fault” petition, having been charged with the made-up crime of “irreconcilable differences”, have suffered the earliest, worst and most numerous of religious freedom violations, including loss of God-assigned parental rights to influence and discipline, loss of ability to choose and direct their childrens’ parochial education, severe financial reprisals in court for not acquiescing to the petition, restraining orders where there was no lawful cause, jail time, loss of licenses, and on and on. And don’t forget, scripture tells us that if a Christian (or anyone else, for that matter) is “divorced” by their spouse, it is immoral to “remarry” for as long as that spouse remains alive, an act which Christ repeatedly called ongoing adultery. That item alone makes unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws the most severe of all religious freedom violations, other than religious acts deemed to be capital violations.
If your mission statements are sincere, how can you possibly be silently sitting these events out? How can you be so embarrassed to be seen with your brothers and sisters in Christ who care as much about this issue as all of the Apostles and early church fathers did?
At least Mr. Reagan eventually admitted that his signature on the death warrant for the institution of binding holy matrimony was his worst act in all of his years of public service.
The people of the UK have a tiny window of time before this destructive law is imposed upon them against their majority will. We’re going to be nice in this post and not say anything about how inexcusably the industry special interest group that is backing this is violating the Article 73 separation-of-powers provisions in the British constitution, but we would like to introduce you to your embattled counterparts in the UK who actively fight for the sanctity of heterosexual marriage in its own right. “Standerinfamilycourt” is pleading with you to come to their aid in any way you possibly can while this time window remains briefly open due to Brexit preoccupation (the hand of the Lord, perhaps?) And we all know you can give these family warriors at least the moral support they need right now!
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mr. Thomas Pascoe and Mr. Colin Hart, of the Coalition for Marriage (C4M). Please consider giving these gentlemen a hand in not allowing the liberal press and ruling elites to control the debate with the sort of narrative that the past 50 years’ track record in this country has overwhelmingly disproven.
Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. – Hebrews 13:4
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
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 traditionelevated 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 theharvest 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 forcefamily 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!
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 2012New 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-powersbut 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”.
“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!
by Standerinfamilycourt
