Found this on EW's blog, and I think it demonstrates the rampant dishonesty and problems surrounding marriage in and out of the church
We in the Anglican Church and throughout the Western world are not facing the marriage crisis. The destruction of marriage has gone far beyond cultural decline. It is today’s most urgent and far reaching crisis of church-state relations and the greatest test facing the church. Under "no-fault" divorce laws, the vows we take to one another before God and our congregations are worthless: The state can simply dissolve them. The state can tear up the contract and the covenant (and marriage is both, the one unable to survive without the other) at the mere request of one spouse without giving any reason and without any "fault" by the other spouse. Once they dissolve the marriage, state officials then seize control of the private lives-children, home, savings, wages, movements-of all family members, however innocent of any legal wrongdoing. In fact, the state typically rewards the guilty spouse and punishes the innocent one, who may be removed from the home, separated from the children, expropriated of all goods, and jailed without trial.
When the state then steps in and abolishes that marriage, without any objection or resistance from their church or fellow Christians, is it any wonder they see no purpose to the church or doubt the sincerity of our faith when it is put to the test? We rightly challenge government officials who permit the killing of the unborn or the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions. But we do not challenge the state when it abolishes marriages altogether-marriages we have witnessed and pledged to support. As long as we tolerate this, our strictures on marriage and our preaching (in the negative sense of "nagging") about its sanctity will earn us nothing but contempt.
Christians can act to change this. Recognizing that the state has effectively abolished marriage, perhaps it is time to acknowledge that fact ourselves and in the process to demonstrate the value we place on marriage in a way that would cost us something. As a thought exercise, imagine what it would say to the world if the churches refused to consecrate marriages until the state stops tearing them up.
Marriage is the only contract which society and the government do not respect, but do so with impunity. There is no longer any meaningful penalty for breach of contract (adultery, abandonment, abuse etc.), but there is no penalty for those who conspire to help a party to the contract violate the terms of the contract. On countless petty contracts, the government frequently punishes breach of contract and conspiracy to breach contract as a serious offense which is actionable for the aggrieved/wronged party to the contract, but marriage is a contract which the government refuses to punish any wrongdoing. There is a simple, straight-forward reason why so many people are squeamish about the idea that adultery should be a civilly actionable offense, and that's that it would put a dampener on the hookup culture if aggrieved spouses could not only sue their cheating spouses, but also their hookup in cases where they had reason to believe the person was married. Also, with adultery rates as high as they are these, days, penalizing adultery would too close to home for many people.
The state of marriage law is, from a libertarian/minarchist perspective, obscene. Libertarians would be apopletic if any other contract were treated with the sort of pointed derision that the marriage contract receives before the law, and marriage is one of the most common and important contracts in existence, as the marriage contract governs the rights of two adults, their children and their combined property. Children may be forced to live with a parent that they would rather not live with in the event of a divorce, property can be forcefully extracted from a party that has honored their end of the contract, and in many cases, a completely innocent party may have a large chunk of their income forcefully expropriated by the state to a party that has breached the terms of the contract. It is, in a very real sense, everything that we minarchists believe contract law should be, but completely turned on its head.
Tied into marriage law are all sorts of violations of civil rights ranging from executive branch "courts" that don't have to abide by full due process rights in many states, to custody laws which make it nearly impossible for a man whose wife cheats on him and gets pregnant to be free from financial obligation to his wife's illegitimate love-child. The incessant focus of many libertarians and minarchists on gay marriage as the serious civil rights issue with marriage is, quite simply, insane in light of all of the deprivations of liberty that frequently occur under marriage and family law.
The Church has not come to grips with its own complicity in the sham, and not just in the ways than Baskerville brings up. It focuses incessantly on male leadership rather than equally on female submission which is a very serious problem in light of women ending seventy percent of the marriages in America, usually on no-fault grounds. It won't even contemplate supporting the abolition of legal marriage and converting over the related issues such as child custody to normal contract laws which are governed by real courts and legal regulations.
On the issue of marriage, the Church is zealous to keep homosexuals from getting married, but is pathetically timid at guarding its sacraments when its own members defile them. In many cases, it is even an active agent in this, as witnessed by the willingness of many pastors to sanctify the remarriage of individuals who ended their previous marriages on terms that are in no way biblically defensible such as "irreconcilable differences" or adultery. Where it should be threatening excommunication, it accepts or shrugs off responsibility at the very least. It does this because it would be too painful to openly confront a significant portion of its members, and risk many of them leaving in disgust at the notion that Church is actually serious about its teachings on marriage. It isn't for everyone, and the Church should stop pretending that it is for a good reason:
8Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."
10The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry."
11Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage[c]because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."
The Church needs to turn its focus inward, especially now, because it is slowly rotting from the inside out on this issue.
Thanks for the link, Mike.
Perhaps if folks enforced this oral contract the same as they do other contracts, things would be different. Even though I shudder at the can of worms that would be opened at the prospect of turning marriage into a straight up legal contract. I don't relish the idea of husbands suing wives for non-performance or breach of contract, and vice versa.
Regarding reasons for divorce, I seem to recall that adultery and abandonment were pretty much the only reasons why divorce was permitted under the Law.
Given the bastardization that has happened to the institution of marriage, I'm rather surprised that homogamous couples even want it.
They want to be able to get married as a matter of social legitimacy. Being able to marry would put their lifestyle on the same level as heterosexuals. Marriage, adoption rights and open military service are the last three major areas where they have not achieved full social parity with heterosexuals.
I hear what you are saying, but I still don't get it.
Perhaps it is because I see beyond the greater social legitimacy that you refer to, and see the bad stuff that comes about, not from getting married, but in getting divorced. Granted, not all these homogamous couples will have kids, but the ones that do, it will be a grand mess. Alimony, child support, child visitation rights, all that stuff I've seen recently between divorcing lesbians and to say it' s a train wreck is being generous. And as much as straight men have been hammered by the courts, lesbians and homo men get it much worse because they are only a social parent and the law is dodgy at best when it comes to social parents and visitation rights
The problem with your perspective is that you don't see how much they crave the semblance of legitimacy that this will bring them. They are so caught up in a pathological need to get society's acceptance of their lifestyle that they literally are willing to suffer those deprivations of liberty in order to legitimate their lifestyle.
Hmm. I see. You make a good point. Perhaps gov't sanction of homogamy will be a good thing, as their 5% of the population, which divorces/separates in astronomical rates, will add to the 25% of men who will be divorced in their lifetimes. A good chunk of these homogamous couples will have children.
That add'l 5%, plus the power and prestige that comes with a protected class, may help drive reform in family law where straight men have gotten no traction whatsoever.
Homogamy is coming. Thank feminists for that one. May as well work it to our advantage.
I'll believe that when I see it.
Mike, I absolutely agree on the "social parity" aspect of marriage for the non-heterosexual groups: it's a social-acceptance/legitimacy concern.
EW, I don't like where this is headed (which is to say, legal-contract status), but this is merely a result of an earlier manifestation of Social Gospeling. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to extricate marriage from State-control without totally dismantling the State, which would not only be a Herculean task, but extraordinarily messy.
Spot on! Libertine libertarians, just as much as liberals, see fornication as an entitlement, and so will go to any length to preserve it, thus making an unprincipled exception to their usual propensity to view contracts as sacred and inviolable, in the case of the most important contract of all, marriage. In which instance, they're, in fact, completely happy with the State interfering in a most egregious manner, in a partnership contract freely agreed to by two consenting adults.
Meanwhile, the Church refuses to politicize this or demand better behaviour from its members, because to do so would mean taking on all the divorcees and adulterers in its midst, and actually separating the chaff from the wheat, thus foregoing their financial contributions (needed to pay for big new buildings, large salaries for their pastors, etc.)
"...when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" - Luke 18:8