Tag Archives: Topic: Divorce

The Spiritual Herald: New York’s approval of same-sex marriage is just the first round in what will be a lengthy and fractious heavyweight legal battle that will wind up in the laps of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court next year. ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero, who is gay himself, spelled out a robust list of lawsuits the organization has filed in states across the nation.

In a snapshot summary of her memoir released on Tuesday, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas gives a firsthand account of what remains of children and parents after the devastation of divorce. Thomas presents a vivid portrait of the children of divorce in her neighborhood who, with her, wandered as “sad-eyed, bruised nomads.”

LifeSiteNews.com: he New York Times launched what one prominent Catholic professor has called a “peculiar” attack on natural family planning (NFP) last week by sharing the tale of a young Evangelical couple that had championed the practice and then recanted, only to get divorced three years later.

WSJ: A new study exposes a significant disadvantage for children of divorce: Kids whose birth parents divorce get less financial help with college costs, even if their parents remarry, the study finds . . . led by Ruth N. Lopez Turley, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University . . . published recently in the Journal of Family Issues.

Telegraph: Lesbian couples are twice as likely as gay men to separate, according to new figures showing a 44% rise in the number of civil partnerships that were dissolved last year.

But Americans are a roving sort, and people who marry and move to places hostile to their union could find, in disunion, a legal limbo . . .

Tarasen, Nick, Untangling the Knot: Finding a Forum for Same-Sex Divorces in the State of Celebration (2011). University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1872963

Newser: A LGBT groups says the divorce involves a female couple who married on April 20. The 46-year-old and 25-year-old are splitting due to an alleged infidelity

The Washington Post: Women who had sex for the first time when they were teens are at higher risk for divorce, with 31 percent divorcing within five years of marriage and 47 percent within 10 years of marriage, a new study says.

This breakdown of the American family has dire implications for American society and the U.S. economy. Halting and reversing the sustained trends of nearly four decades will not happen by accident. The federal, state, and local governments need to eliminate marriage penalties created by the tax code and welfare programs and instead use existing resources to better encourage and support family life.

A man who had his sperm frozen in case he became infertile was astonished to learn that his ex-wife had tricked an IVF clinic into twice making her pregnant. He then had to pay £100,000 towards the upbringing of the son and daughter he had known nothing about.

Daily Mail: But as soon as the divorce process started, the children suffered a range of problems that persisted, a report in the American Sociological Review [June 11] said . . . ‘Children of divorce experience setbacks in maths test scores and show problems with interpersonal skills and internalising behaviour,’ lead researcher Hyun Sik Kim, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Charisma: The Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute’s study shows how intact married-couple families outperform remarried families, divorced families, single-parent families and cohabiting families in the economic areas of: employment status and income; net worth; poverty and welfare receipt; child economic well-being . . . Click here for the full report.

CNA: Citizens of the island of Malta have voted to legalize divorce, making a choice that the country’s Catholic bishops have warned will lead to family breakdown and a loss of religious identity.

David Lapp at FamilyScholars.org: James says while they never really articulated their fear that marriage would ruin their good relationship, he thinks they did have it in the back of their heads. “In the back of our heads”–it’s a telling phrase.

LifeSiteNews.com: “The people of Malta have a choice to make Saturday that will affect the entire country forever,” says Human Life International Interim President Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carambula. “If Malta votes to legalize divorce, it will be a vote to divorce …

One News Now: The Texas Supreme Court is being asked to intervene in two homosexual “divorce” cases. According to Liberty Institute attorney Jeff Mateer . . .

Historically, American voters have been blunt in evaluating the wisdom of social change. When a bad idea, which was originally considered to be good, slips through and into law, the American people haven’t been shy about fighting for its repeal and holding corresponding leaders to account. With the benefit of the new media and widespread access to endless streams of data, voters are now able to even more quickly discern fact from fiction and evidence from mere promise.

Religion Clause Blog: Next Saturday, Malta — which is 95% Catholic– is holding a referendum on whether divorce should be legalized in the country. The London Telegraph reports that Malta is the only member of the European Union that does not permit divorce and only one of two nations in the world.

“. . . several legislators who want voters to ban gay marriage have had unsuccessful marriages. According to a name, date of birth, and city search in publicly available Minnesota court records” . . . . Homosexual organizations and media outlets have jumped on the bandwagon to target these legislators . . .

Daily Mail: A senior family judge yesterday called on David Cameron to prepare sweeping reforms of marriage and divorce law. Sir Paul Coleridge, who sits as Mr Justice Coleridge in the family division of the High Court, said that family laws are decades out of date because of ‘the inactivity of lazy politicians’ . . . Sir Paul, who presided over the divorce settlement of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, said that any review should consider giving more legal force to marriage . . .

Kelly Shackelford, president/CEO of Liberty Institute. “The debate over same-sex marriage and divorce should play out in our democratic institutions and should not be short-circuited by activist judges.”

The Telegraph: Outdated family laws have fuelled an “alarming” rise in marital breakdown, causing “profound” damage to millions of children, a High Court judge has warned.

AP on Findlaw: It was a storybook marriage in 1986 on a spring weekend on Cape Cod that united a princess of an American political dynasty, Maria Shriver, and the gap-toothed muscle-clad movie star famous enough to be known by one name, Arnold.

Deseret News: Utah taxpayers spend about $276 million on the effects of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth. But while there are effective tools to strengthen marriage and families, those who statistically need help most are the least likely to seek it out, experts say . . . The cost of divorce and out-of-wedlock births to taxpayers nationally exceeds $112 billion a year . . .

Russell Flannery at Forbes: The number of couples that formally notified the government of the end of their marriage increased by 17% in the first three months of 2011 from a year earlier to 465,000, according to a report in today’s Beijing Times, a Chinese-language daily.

Glenn T. Stanton at Baptist Press: Well, here’s one: New data emerging consistently for decades show that premarital sexual activity seems to be associated with a significant elevated risk of divorce. This is not a small consideration for teens and young adults. Let’s look at the handful of leading population-based studies exploring this question and what they find . . .

Christopher Wolfe at Public Discourse: People generally take it for granted that marriage will be “available,” but despite the powerful forces inclining people to marry, the availability of marriage as an institution they can choose to enter cannot be taken for granted.

Aaron Goldstein at American Spectator: “With all due respect to Wilcox he paints an incomplete picture. While it is true that the report concluded children were more suspectible to abuse in a household headed by a single parent with a cohabiting partner than with married biological parents it is far from the only factor contributing to child abuse. Indeed the HHS report also states . . . ”

Joseph Lawler at the American Spectator: University of Virginia social scientist W. Bradford Wilcox takes a look at new federal data on child abuse, and comes up with some alarming findings about child abuse in households in which the caretakers aren’t a married couple . . .

W. Bradford Wilcox at Public Discourse: Cohabitation does not serve the “best interest” of children, regardless of what the courts say . . . This new federal study indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents.

Russell Nieli at Public Discourse: While often hostile to the Calvinist Christianity in which he was reared, David Hume’s essay “Of Polygamy and Divorces” offers a vigorous and well-argued defense of marriage arrangements as they existed in England and many other parts of Europe from the early Middle Ages through most of the 18th century. His arguments have great relevance for us today as we struggle to cope with unprecedented rates of divorce and unprecedented ease of both entering into and exiting marriages and other intimate procreative relationships. His arguments against polygamy are also important as that practice seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence in parts of the southwest, with renewed interest in the popular culture.

David Lapp at FamilyScholars.org: “I just received in the mail today a copy of Oklahoma’s 2001 baseline statewide survey on marriage and divorce. As many of you know, Oklahoma launched in 1999 the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. One of the first things it did was to adminster this survey of Oklahoman’s marriage attitudes and behaviors. It has some interesting data. Here is some of the stuff that jumped out at me . . . | Hat tip: IMAPP

Texas Pastor’s Council: “A broad consensus of studies finds that divorce has serious negative lifelong psychological consequences for children, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. A significant number of these divorces are avoidable. The goal of this Act is to reduce divorces where minor children are involved.”

Daily Mail: Shocking figures reveal that births outside marriage are at their highest level in two centuries and nearly half of children can expect their parents to separate by the time they turn 16. Nine out of ten couples now live together before – or instead of – tying the knot.

Daily Mail: Baby boomers have become a generation of loners, with millions living without partners or children.The numbers of those in their late 40s to early 60s who live by themselves has risen by almost a third in a decade, official figures showed yesterday.

Huffington Post: Although the military divorce rate has begun to level off, according Pentagon statistics, 7.9 percent of women in the armed forces got a divorce last year — versus 3 percent of their male counterparts. Those numbers are part of an ongoing trend, according to Dr. Benjamin Karney, a psychology professor at UCLA and head researcher of a 2007 RAND study that looked at marriage and divorce rates in the military over 10 years between 1996 and 2005data.

AP: In a crowded courtroom on the city’s outskirts, the once unthinkable is reality: dozens of couples – rich and poor, educated and barely literate – seek divorce for reasons as varied as domestic violence to a simple inability to live together.

Carl Bialok at WSJ (3/11):  My print column this week examines a widely reported claim that one in five divorces is linked to Facebook . . .  Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which first released the stat, acknowledged in an interview that this may not be representative of all divorces . . . For one thing, the site’s users tend to be young, owing to its online presence and that it is likely to appeal to people seeking relatively simple divorces, without thorny issues such as child custody. | Hat tip: IMAPP

Adelle M. Banks at USA Today (3/14) Wilcox’s analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation. | Hat tip: IMAPP

Janice Shaw Crouse writes at Townhall: “The federal government deems it too expensive to track marriage and divorce data; instead, turns its attention to tracking data about sexual activity, behavior, attraction, and identity of teens and adults.”

TIME: Worrying is good for your health. Optimism is overrated. Women thrive post-divorce (men don’t). These are just a few of the unexpected findings that psychologist Howard Friedman explores in The Longevity Project, a new book based on a groundbreaking eight-decade study on the secrets to long life.

The Canadian Press on Google: The commission’s proposal does not seek to make divorce and property laws the same in all European Union countries, but only to create rules to determine which country has jurisdiction over the division of property. The aim is to prevent one half of the couple, often the wealthier member, from rushing to court in the country he or she thinks would be most advantageous.

MSNBC: I had never been a guy to turn to religion but then as my marriage was coming to an end, I needed help to explain it to my children and make sense of it all…Because once you are a divorced guy, being a father is a whole different thing.”

L. Lynn Hogue, The Constitutional Obligation to Adjudicate Petitions for Same-Sex Divorce and the Dissolution of Civil Unions and Analogous Same-Sex Reliationships: Prolegomenon to a Brief, 41 Cal. W. Int’l L.J. 229 (2010)

At the Wall Street Journal, Laura Landro has this report: How to Keep Going and Going. It begins: What can 1,500 Americans born a century ago, most of them long dead, tell us about the secret to a long life? Plenty, according to Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, two psychologists who, in “The Longevity Project,” mine an eight-decade research effort for answers to the kinds of questions that sent Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth.

WXYZ.com: “Facebook seems to be the number one offender with one in five divorced couples claiming the popular site led to the end of their marriage.”

TriValleyCentral.com (AP): The court on Wednesday denied a request from 13 lawmakers, including House Speaker Ed Buchanan, R-Torrington, to file a “friend of the court” brief. The lawmakers were represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based Christian civil rights group that has litigated against same-sex marriage in California.

KSWT.com (AP): “The lawmakers were represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based Christian civil rights group that has litigated against same-sex marriage in California.”

AdelaideNow.com.au: “OLDER couples with much to lose are increasingly turning to prenups to protect themselves, experts say.”

John Allen Jr. writes at the Wall Street Journal: “Fewer Americans get annulments. Is it because fewer are getting married in the church at all?”

AP: “The Alliance Defense Fund represents the lawmakers, including House Speaker Ed Buchanan. The fund is an Arizona-based Christian civil rights group that has fought same-sex marriage in California.”

San Francisco Chronicle: The 13 lawmakers want permission to file a “friend of the court” brief with the Wyoming Supreme Court. They’re represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based Christian civil rights group that has litigated against same-sex marriage in California.

Billings Gazette: The local attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, Douglas Mason of Pinedale, said Monday that there is nothing to prevent the Lusk couple from returning to Canada to get a divorce or to get one from some other jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage. “As far as Wyoming is concerned, they’re not married anyway, so they don’t need a divorce,” Mason said. (more information about ADF and ADF involvement in the report)

Heritage Foundation: “What may not be so well known is the fact that the ripple effects of family dissolution go beyond the impact on the immediate children of broken marriages. Current trends toward dissolving (or never forming) marriages have consequences for a third (and even fourth) generation, given that children’s life course of relationships tend to track that of their parents.”

TheBostonChannel.com (includes video): “If you live in the state of Massachusetts, there’s one thing that never ends: alimony. It’s a life-long financial obligation that can turn lives and finances upside down. Now a new legislative proposal could radically change that mandate.”

Paula Szuchman writes at the Wall Street Journal: “. . . from Ohio State University. The research, published in the January issue of Developmental Psychology, found that couples where the father participates equally in traditional caregiving tasks, like  preparing meals or giving baths (!!), tend to clash more than couples where the mother does a bigger share. Specifically, couples that strive for more equal co-parenting end up displaying “less supportive and more undermining co-parenting behavior toward each other,” the researchers found. But when the father spent more time playing with the kid, while the mom did more of the nuts-and-bolts caregiving, the couples had a “stronger, more supportive co-parenting relationship.”

Reuters on Yahoo: “Half of men would forgive their female partner’s infidelity, as long as it was with another woman, according to a new study on cheating.”

WDAY.com: “It’s a bill starting to get a lot of attention in the North Dakota legislature: The debate over divorce. A group of North Dakota Republicans wants to require couples wanting to get a divorce wait one year and go through mandatory marriage counseling.”

Andrea Mrozek And Peter Jon Mitchell writing in the National Post: “In recent decades, Canadian public policy has made it more difficult for parents to be responsible for their families. It begins with the micro-management of the legal status of our households . . . No-fault divorce [resulted in] a fivefold spike in the divorce rate . . . Today’s smaller families mean we seldom learn from parents or grandparents who successfully raised large broods, so it’s easy to assume the experts have a better handle on our kids.”

Times of India: “Australian couples seeking divorce are now increasingly doing it through the Internet, with more than 250 people using an online service in almost 18 months.”

WLS Chicago: “A woman who is now married to a Hasidic Jew accuses her ex-husband of not following their custody agreement to support her religion.” | For background on this case, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/state-illinois+topic-child-custody/

Fox News / Live Shots: “Like many parents who home-school, Voydatch believes in the importance of teaching the basics of reading and writing. But she also believes in the importance of a religious education . . . ‘The judge,’ explained Simmons, ‘said that Amanda reflected her mother’s rigidity in matters of Faith, and that because of that rigidity she needed to be ordered into government run schools.’”

Nebraska City News-Press: “District Judge Randall Rehmeier Tuesday denied a divorce to a same-sex Nebraska City couple that was married in 2003 in Vermont. The judge said the Nebraska Constitution provides that ‘only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in Nebraska.’”

New York Times: “A new study reports that men whose parents divorced before they were 18 are two to three times as likely to seriously consider taking their own lives than men whose parents were not divorced by that age. Women whose parents divorced by age 18 were not affected as significantly. They, too, thought about suicide more often than other women, but the thoughts were explained by other traumatic experiences they’d had, like childhood abuse.”

Dallas Voice (“the premier media source for LGBT Texas”): “Attorney James ‘Jody’ Scheske confirmed Wednesday that his client, J.B., plans to appeal the August decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that gay couples can’t divorce in Texas because the state doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.”

Canadian Press: “For more than a year, a Palestinian couple belonging to an Islamic sect rejected by many mainstream Muslims endured insults from some of their neighbours and even death threats while struggling to maintain a quiet existence in this West Bank town. As word spread about them, things got worse. A local Islamic court branded them apostates and dissolved their marriage. The couple, Mohammed and Samah Alawneh, now live in legal limbo.”

ChristianNewsWire: “California Healthy Marriages Coalition (CHMC) has released an unprecedented in-depth study, The State of California’s Unions — In the Pews and the Public Square. This is the first-ever report that looks at Californians’ views on marriage and divorce matters and compares them based on their self-described levels of religious activity . . . 32% of ‘Regular’ church-goers agree that ‘marriage is too risky’ due to the high chances of divorce.”

BBC: “A bill has been put forward in the Philippine Congress aimed at making it easier for poor people to get their marriages annulled.”

Reuters: “The Harris Interactive online poll of 2,019 adults released on Thursday showed 31 percent of American couples who have combined finances were not truthful about issues such as hiding cash or a bank account or about debt or earnings.”

MSNBC: “Major demographic changes, including a rise in divorce and more babies born to single moms, have contributed to the rise of the stepfamily over the past decades, the survey found. Overall, 42 percent of American adults have a step relative. Thirty percent of Americans have a step or half-sibling, 18 percent have a living stepparent, and 13 percent have a stepchild.”

Iona Institute: “Divorced people had the highest rate of hospitalisation in psychiatric units last year, according to new figures from the Health Research Board (HRB). The figures show that the rate of hospitalisation for divorced people was 115.9 per 100,000, nearly twice the national average of 66.3 per 100,000.”

Joyce Wadler writes at the NY Times: “Conventions change. A woman no longer earns a scarlet letter for having a child out of wedlock; divorce is not synonymous with scandal; and it is no surprise to find, when a marriage comes apart, that a third person was involved. But even in a sexually liberal culture, the home is still usually off-limits, as if protected by an invisible force field. And the marriage bed — a phrase that in itself seems quaintly out of date — remains a sacred object.”

OneNewsNow: “Voydatch’s attorney, John Anthony Simmons, an allied attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, says the court modified the child’s school placement at the request of the father. ‘And the rationale that it used was that the child [and the mother] had religious beliefs . . . that were abhorrent to the father and that essentially were too narrow,’ says Simmons, ‘and that those opinions needed to be corrected . . .’”

Religion Clause: “The New Hampshire Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments (video of full arguments) in a divorce case that has gained national attention through the publicity given to it by groups that see it as an important religious freedom test.”