Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Earlier this year I posted on the problem of divorce and the lack of marital commitment from the perspective of relationship and how what all of this means for children and society. While there are plenty of problems assaulting marriage and family life today, the destruction of the meaning of marriage and commitment through our no-fault divorce statutes has to be recognized.

Divorce laws began to be changed in the early 1970s in the US in a way that did away with the need to find fault in order to terminate a marriage. The rationale was manifold, but in general, it was intended to prevent the wide spread abuses that had come about in order to get around fault laws, including the generally prevalent perjury. What has happened is that we now have a system which some argue results in an unconstitutional deprivation of due process because they put the one who initiates the proceedings at a considerable advantage and denies the other party any meaningful recourse to the commitment made by the other spouse. Instead of being a defender of the bond, the state has become an enabler of socially destructive behavior.

In an article about no-fault divorce law about 10 years ago in First Things, Maggie Gallagher identifies copious problems associated with them, including the affect of divorce on children. In effect, she says, the no fault divorce laws effectively deliver divorce on demand. The state no longer seems to have a sense that it is in society’s interest to enforce the commitment couples make and in keeping marriages together. The presupposition now seems to be that the individual has a “right” not to be married any longer and this right trumps the rights of children, the rights of the spouse that does not want the divorce and would seek redress from the state in order to compel their spouse to live up to his original commitment, and the rights of society to expect people to honor their commitments and to raise healthy, emotionally mature children (which requires healthy marriages).

In the same article, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead argues against changing no fault laws, which I find, by the way, uncompelling, but she is right that this alone will not solve all of the problems we have with marriage and family. In fact, some of the more fundamental problems such as the widespread use of artificial contraception, will be very difficult nuts to crack. Nevertheless, there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking before we can embark upon repairing the damage we have done to society with this tyranny of individualism that now threatens its very stability.

• First, we need to recover the meaning of the human person and marriage, and the central place of importance that marriage and family take in securing the health of society.

• Second, we have to recognize the authentic meaning of love and abandon the romanticist notion that love comes and goes without someone’s consent; i.e. there is the possibility of healing most marriages because love comes through personal consent.

• Third, we need to recognize that the rights and interests of society and children must be given compelling consideration in deciding not only whether a marriage out to be dissolved, but I would argue, that this same interest would demand a rigorous and mandatory preparation regimen before allowing couples to enter into marriage.

• Fourth, because the state has an interest in the success of marriage, there should be mandatory, longterm reconciliation programs required of those who would petition to have their marriages dissolved.

• Finally, we will have to get over the fiction that we do not legislate morality. Right and wrong underlies everything that we now legislate. Thus, we have to recognize what we used to recognize as crimes because of their deleterious effects on society are, in fact, crimes. Those anti-social acts that I would argue ought to once again be socially stigmatized and come with legal penalties include adultery, fornication, sodomy, sado-masochism and other sexual deviances, and family abandonment.

Our marriage and divorce laws now support the defective individualist thinking the permeates our culture. They subsidize the romanticist view that “love dies” without any personal culpability and they annihilate any meaningful sense of commitment to one’s oaths. In the process children, families, and society suffers for it.

As we continue to accede to seemingly restraint free demands for our personal (often fabricated) rights without any attendant societal responsibilities our prospects for social health decline in corresponding fashion. While programs of education and legislative initiatives to support marriage and family are important, ultimately it will take the success of the new evangelization among Catholics and a corresponding evangelization of the culture before we can expect to see much acceptance of the above proposals or the societal healing that will come from them.