Tag Archives: Topic: Divorce

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.”

Andrew Cohen writing at Politics Daily: “Unfolding Thursday in Concord, N.H., was yet another chapter in the sad story of a family involved in a high-conflict divorce. It is the frustrating example of two parents fighting one another for control of their child’s education. And it is a compelling lesson about home schooling and public education, religion and the role of the courts, in determining a child’s course of learning . . . The judge had applied the wrong legal standard, the ADF attorneys argued, and the guardian was biased against Brenda and Amanda because of their deeply held religious beliefs.”

“An appellate court ruled today that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott may not intervene in a Travis County same-sex divorce case, a finding that lets stand for now the divorce of two women who were married out of state but does not affect Texas’ ban on gay marriage.”

David and Amber Lapp writing at First Things: “A renewed society-wide resolve to strengthen marriage is not a matter of patricians ‘imposing’ their love of marriage on others who are resistant to marriage—it’s about helping those Americans who arguably value family the most realize their dreams of raising a flourishing, intact family. As Wilcox reports, 1993 data shows little variation by class in Americans agreeing that marriage is ‘very important’ or ‘one of the most important things to them’: 76 percent of Middle Americans agree, and 79 percent of upscale Americans agree.”

Kevin Staley-Joyce writing at First Things: “The inevitability of marriage’s decline . . . is as culturally invidious as it is philosophically fallacious. But hope and moral courage toward marriage are not the sort of virtues the culture encourages when its public discussion of marriage is colored by this politically expedient despair, and the blind and self-serving belief that being happy is the only thing that matters.”

New York Times: “Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video . . . [over] Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get . . . Although the majority of men in Jewish divorces grant their wives a get with little fuss, the husbands who refuse — it is estimated there are several hundred agunot in the United States today — can provoke a clash between religious folkways and secular divorce law.”

Religion Clause discusses the underlying tensions behind the New Year’s Eve bombing of the Coptic Church of the Saints in Alexandria, Egypt.

Danna Harman writing in The Huffington Post: “In Malta, divorce is illegal . . . For the vast majority of those separating Maltese couples, for whom neither an annulment or a foreign divorce is an option, the solution is to avoid the extra headache, heartache and expense and simply separate unofficially. Meaning, people move on with their lives: Leaving the family home, co-habitating with new partners, having new families, and yet all the while still married to their original partner.”

Emily V. Gordon writing at The Huffington Post: “When I started talking to friends about leaving my marriage, they would ask about how entangled our lives were, and I realized that they weren’t entangled… at all. Instead of feeling proud, I was horrified. It dawned on me that I might have been doing this wrong. As my (still-married) parents said to me at some point during my sad, bloodless divorce process, what’s the point of marriage if you’re not rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty?”

Elizabeth Marquardt writing at The Huffington Post: “Young people from divorced families felt just as spiritual as those from intact families, but their spiritual journeys were more often characterized by loss and suffering. For children, there is a kind of elemental wholeness in being with both of your parents, an experience that evokes the place where God is present. That experience becomes foreign for children of divorce.”

Jerusalem Post: “Discrepancies between colloquial and literary Arabic may have far-reaching legal ramifications in Egypt. Egypt may have the highest divorce rate in the Arab world, but that might be moot if a new ruling by the country’s senior jurists goes into effect. Sheikh ‘Ali Goma’a, Grand Mufti of Egypt, found in a recent study that the Egyptian mispronunciation of the Arabic word for ‘divorced’ may nullify the action, meaning the couple was still legally married.”

Wall Street Journal Law Blog: “On Wednesday, a state lawyer argued before an appeals court on Wednesday that a District Judge Scott Jenkins violated state law when he granted a divorce earlier this year to a same-sex couple. Click here for the story, from the Austin American-Statesman. James Blacklock, a lawyer in the attorney general’s appellate division, said that Texas law forbids any action that recognizes or validates a same-sex marriage granted in another state, even if the point of the action is to dissolve such a marriage.”

Theodore Dalrymple writing in The Salisbury Review: “There are few human types less attractive, surely, than failed materialists, which is what the British, or at least so many of them, now are. They consume without discrimination what they have not earned . . . Benedict’s ‘crime,’ apart from being German, goes much further than his failure (or worse his refusal) to screen out the unpleasant consequences of consumerist materialism from his vision . . . In other words, Benedict XVI presents not a challenge to this or that piece of social policy, but to a whole Weltanschauung. And hell hath no fury like a questionable Weltanschauung questioned.”

Dr. Jeff Mirus writing at CatholicCulture.org: “We must always remember that there is a great difference between a person afflicted with same-sex attraction who is sincerely seeking the best way to deal with it, and a movement which insists that same-sex attraction be recognized as good, and the resulting life-style wholeheartedly endorsed. Within such a movement, credibility depends first and foremost on agreement.”

Zenit: “A report just published found that the middle class is experiencing increased levels of divorce and unmarried mothers, and that marriage problems are not limited to people with lower levels of education and income. The 2010 edition of The State of Our Unions, ‘When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,’ was released on Monday. It is a joint effort by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.”

When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America

W. Bradford Wilcox writing at Conservative Home: “[I]n high-rent urban neighborhoods and the prosperous suburbs of the nation’s major cities, divorce is down, marital satisfaction remains high, and nonmarital childbearing is still an exotic activity. It is not upscale America but Middle America that is experiencing marital troubles. From small towns in the heartland to working class suburbs outside of the nation’s major cities, divorce, marital dissatisfaction, and nonmarital childbearing are on the rise. In a word, marriage is in much better shape among Whole Foods regulars than it is among Walmart shoppers.”

At the Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen objects [to a Ross Douthat NYT column that makes an argument similar to Wilcox's]: “[W]e should be suspicious particularly of the gap between how the highly educated are living . . . First, I think there is good reason to think that the ‘highly educated’ have come to support marriage because of growing evidence that marriage is a net benefit for one’s economic bottom line . . . What might be a growing commitment to marriage among a segment of the college-educated class is generally not accompanied by a commitment to the idea of sexual self-control and the felt-need for a broader culture that would support such a commitment; rather, it could be argued that marriage is the conclusion of a long period of serial partnerships and sexual experimentation that colors more broadly the view of the highly-educated. If marriage is good for one’s bottom line, better to put it off until one has tasted the hedonistic pleasures of Babylon before settling down in Greenwich. Yet, both decisions are born of a hedonistic calculus – first the benefits of guilt-free sexual experimentation, and then the pleasures of guilt-free Wall Street bonus checks.”

New York Times: “[A] lawyer referred her to Balance Point Divorce Funding, a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up — paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle — in exchange for a share of the winnings . . . So far, the number of companies investing in divorce is small — Balance Point is one of the few that do it exclusively. But other businesses are gearing up.”

Ken McIntyre writing at The Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “In a pleasant surprise, a startling new report on the ‘disappearance of marriage’ is getting serious attention from liberal media outlets. It’s a good day for the American family when NPR, CNN and The New York Times all take note of a study warning that divorce, childbearing outside marriage and single parenthood have become the norm—imperiling not only the wellbeing of children but the American Dream itself.”

DW-World.de: “EU justice ministers have paved the way for European divorce regulations aimed at simplifying the legal process of divorce for binational couples. If adopted, the new rules would take effect in 2012.”

News.com.au: “THE global financial crisis cost people their homes, livelihoods, savings and even their marriages with tough times blamed for a sharp increase in divorces.”

Elizabeth Marquardt writing at The Huffington Post: “Those who are sanguine about widespread divorce like to say that divorce is just a temporary crisis, that family members bounce back after a couple of years ready to start a fresh journey. But governments around the world, lonely aging persons, and grown children of divorce struggling with whether to care for and how to grieve their divorced parents are telling us that the results of family breakdown are far more dramatic and lasting.”

Wintery Knight: “This is timely, at a time where I am considering whether I would do more good supporting Christian/conservative groups on campus as an assistant professor or as a free speech lawyer defending campus groups from student governments. No one is better at these kinds of issues than the ADF. Here’s the article.”

Via The Volokh Conspiracy: “The case is Charara v. Yatim (Mass. Ct. App., decided today) [opinion can be accessed at this link]: ‘Following a trial, a judge of the Probate and Family Court concluded that no deference was due the custody order issued by a Jaafarite religious tribunal (Jaafarite Court) in Lebanon. The probate judge based his decision on evidence, including the testimony of experts, that the Jaafarite Court’s custody order was not made in “substantial conformity” with Massachusetts law regarding the best interests of the children . . . ”

ADF Attorney David French writing at Speak Up Movement / University: Last week’s post on the Crushing Burden of Divorce generated more than a little push-back, both in the comments section of the post itself (which was cross-posted on our companion church site) and on Facebook . . . How, you ask, can parents be so much happier when their children are so much worse off? Wouldn’t the emotional and sexual collapse of their own children cripple the parents’ emotional well being? Not if they long ago shifted their life priorities — away from the Biblical model of self-denial and to the world’s model of personal fulfillment.”

“Sociologists tend to believe the answers lie outside marriage. Coontz thinks that if we changed our assumptions about alternative family arrangements and our respect for them, people would be more responsible about them. ‘We haven’t raised our expectations of how unmarried parents will react to each other. We haven’t raised our expectations of divorce or singlehood,’ she says. ‘It should not be that within marriage you owe everything and without marriage you don’t owe anything. When we expect responsible behavior outside as well as inside marriage, we actually reduce the temptation to evade or escape marriage.’”

NPR: “One in every five Chinese marriages now ends in divorce, double the rate a decade ago . . . This trend is sparking concern. Experts fear that the divorce rate will continue to soar, particularly among the younger generation of Chinese born under the country’s one-child policy and during China’s explosive economic growth.”

ADF Attorney David French writing at Speak Up Movement / University: “The longer I live, and the more time I spend in the Christian conservative movement, the more keenly I’m aware of the extent to which divorce is devastating the Body of Christ. It’s destroying children’s lives, destroying their parents, and destroying our cultural witness . . . How can we tell any population of Americans — whether inclined to homosexual behavior or even polygamy — that marriage is the earthly model of Christ’s relationship to his church if we treat it as an instrument of our own happiness?”

Jane Smiley writing at The Huffington Post: “When I asked my older daughter what she thought of my divorce from her father (she is 32), she said, ‘Do you really think I wish we had remained in that suffocating little four-person family?’ . . . It was divorce that gave her the tribe of peers that she wanted, and she has never seen a downside . . .”

Robert Hughes writing at The Huffington Post: “They found that those with any religious affiliation, especially those who identify themselves as conservative Protestants were more likely to think that divorce laws needed to be stricter.”

Elizabeth Marquardt writing at the Huffington Post: “[S]ocial science research shows that about two-thirds of marriages that end in divorce are low conflict. These marriages may feel troubled to the one or both of the spouses, but they are not struggling with the kinds of serious or frequent conflict many imagine when they picture a marriage on the rocks. It is these marriages — what some call ‘good enough’ marriages — that matter so much. To any still-married parent who is considering divorce who may be reading this, I want to affirm that your ‘good enough’ marriage is doing a world of good for your kids.”

Beverly Willett writing at The Huffington Post: “Two months ago, outgoing New York Governor Paterson . . . signed legislation making New York the 50th and final state to sign on to no-fault divorce . . . I was heartsick and wrote about my own divorce experience for The Daily Beast . . . Hate mail had already begun rolling in to the website . . . What was controversial about a woman who loved her husband and children more than anything and wanted to save her family from the heartaches of divorce? Was she really an ‘idiot,’ a ‘psycho’ bent on ‘revenge,’ out to hog-tie the man who freely said “I do” into “forced slavery” because of her hard-headed sense of right and wrong?”

Leonard Link: “Justice Kevin G. Young of New York Supreme Court, Onondaga County (Syracuse), issued a decision on October 21 dissolving a civil union that had been contracted in Vermont in 2004 by Heidi Marie Parker and Mindy Tamara Waronker. Parker v. Waronker, No. 2010-M-0517.”

Toronto Star: “Quebec’s top court has overturned a lower-court decision that denied an unmarried woman the right to alimony from her wealthy ex.”

Telegraph: “The ruling, made in an online fatwa by the Darul Uloom Deobandi seminary in northern India, regarded as one of Islam’s leading authorities on religious law said that the woman would have to first marry another man before she could remarry her first husband.”

Indian Express: “In the year since the Delhi High Court passed a landmark judgment overturning a 150-year-old law and legalising consensual homosexual relationships between adults, more and more women stuck in unhappy marriages have filed for divorce on the grounds that their husbands are ‘homosexual’.”

The Straits Times: “Ms Wang belongs to the ‘post-1980s generation’, single children who are the product of China’s 1979 family planning policy and the people who are fueling the country’s rising divorce rate, experts say. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 1.71 million couples filed for divorce last year, up 10.3 per cent over 2008.”

The Christian Institute: “Judges yesterday ruled in favour of giving more weight to pre-nuptial agreements, but the decision does not mean ‘pre-nups’ are legally binding in England and Wales. A pre-nup is a contract made between a couple before marriage which says who will get what if they split up. Currently pre-nups are not part of English family law and making them so could encourage divorce, critics say.” Radmacher v. Granatino Judgment; Press Summary

ABC: “Not only did researchers find that couples with sons are more likely to stick together, unmarried pregnant couples were more likely to have shotgun weddings if the baby was going to be a boy and divorced mothers of boys are more likely to remarry and stay remarried.”

Times of Malta: “All those who ‘cooperate’ in the introduction of divorce, including judges who apply the law, would be ‘committing a grave sin’, according to the head of the Church tribunals.” | Via Religion Clause.

Newsweek: “As cohabiting has come more common across the country . . . the once strong link between ‘living in sin’ and divorce has weakened over time. While some religious groups, such as socially conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, still frown upon living together before marriage, two thirds of marriages in the U.S. now start as cohabitations. ‘Something that used to be stigmatized is now becoming the common experience,’ Smock says . . . Many of the cohabitations that started for economic reasons during the Great Recession are ‘fragile’ and probably won’t result in marriage, says Wendy Manning, associate director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University.”

LifeSiteNews: “The Vanier Institute of the Family has released ‘Families Count: Profiling Canada’s Families IV,’ the fourth in a series of publications since 1994 that draw on the most recent data to provide a new picture of Canadian families and the challenges they face. For pro-family advocates, the report paints a worrying picture of increased cohabitation and divorce, later marriages, and fewer children.”

Religion Clause: “In Greene v. Greene, (GA Ct. App., Oct. 1, 2010), a Georgia appellate court upheld a trial court’s finding that a divorced husband was in contempt for violating a Settlement Agreement that gave his former wife final decision-making authority over matters related to their daughter’s religious upbringing. The wife was Jewish and the husband was Christian.”

David Gibson writing at Politics Daily: “[T]he reality of divorce within conservative Christian communities is the elephant in the room that can no longer be ignored . . . Indeed, the problem of Christian divorce is growing larger as the evangelical profile against gay marriage gets higher . . . [T]he new focus on getting Christians to practice what they preach marks an important shift in the culture war front, and, if successful, could prove to be the most potent cultural argument evangelicals have ever deployed.”

“The real scandal is the fact that evangelical Protestants divorce at rates at least as high as the rest of the public . . . this creates a significant credibility crisis when evangelicals then rise to speak in defense of marriage.”

LifeSiteNews: “The Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court has issued a decision requiring Orthodox Coptic Pope Shenouda III to pay damages of approximately 19,500 Egyptian pounds to church member Magdi William who sued the Coptic Church over its refusal to issue a certificate to re-marry after he divorced his wife.”

For background information, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/country-egypt+global-marriage-and-family/

Metro.co.uk: “The woman, known as JM, was awarded £2,550 in damages and £15,275 in costs after the European Court of Human Rights ruled there was no justification for the discrimination . . . Her child maintenance payments to her ex-husband were assessed in 2001 – but she was told a reduction if the absent parent had entered into a new relationship, whether married or not, did not apply to same-sex couples . . . ‘her maintenance obligation towards her children had been assessed differently on account of the nature of her new relationship.’”

Case of J.M. v. The United Kingdom (Application no. 37060/06)

Syed Tazkir Inam, Role of Supreme Court in Protection of Muslim Divorced Women (February 24, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1681527

“With the passage of time, mankind has clamoured for special privilege and treatment, and societies across the world have looked towards the courts for benevolent interventions. For this purpose sociological jurisprudence has come a long way from being a theoretical stream towards being consulted for mass reforms by the courts. The Supreme Court of India has played a major role, as the final arbiter of the Constitution. In its performance of this role the Supreme court of India has bring about equality and social change, building way for an advanced and modern outlook. The perspective has been entirely societal oriented and therefore ‘social change,’ has been made the focal point. The approach is to analyze the decisions of the Court, as the reflection of its opinion and contribution towards the attainment of this egalitarian objective. Supreme Court has even played a major role in the upliftment of the conditions of women in India through its landmark judgements.”

Washington Post: “The study, published in the spring edition of the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, was co-written by Michael Aamodt, a professor emeritus at Radford University who now works as a consultant with the Washington-based DCI Consulting Group . . . Dancers and choreographers registered the highest divorce rates (43.1 percent), followed by bartenders (38.4 percent) and massage therapists (38.2 percent) . . . ”

Law.com: “Prenuptial agreements are on the rise, according to a poll by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Of the divorce lawyers polled, 73% reported an increased number of prenuptial agreements during the past five years. Significantly, 52% reported an increase in the number of women initiating such agreements.”

“The risk of divorce is 50 percent higher when one spouse comes from a divorced home, and 200 percent higher risk when both of them do . . . ”

“By attacking the family, government is creating the very problems it claims to be solving.”

Dallas Voice: “Attorneys for a gay Dallas man who’s seeking a divorce from his husband filed a motion this week requesting a re-hearing of the case by the full 5th District Court of Appeals.” PDF of the motion is here.

“But this is what conservatism is, in the end: The belief that there’s more to a flourishing society than just the claims of autonomous individuals, the conviction that existing prohibitions and taboos may have a purpose that escapes the liberal mind, the sense that cultural ideals can be as important to human affairs as constitutional rights.”

Joanna L. Grossman writing at FindLaw: “This column will discuss a recent appellate court decision from Texas, In the Matter of the Marriage of J.B. and H.B., which illustrates the problem and its harsh consequences for many affected couples . . . The appellate court held that the statutory law did not give Texas courts the jurisdiction to give effect to same-sex marriages from other states, even if the recognition was fleeting—in that the recognition of the marriage was only extended by the court on the way to the court’s granting a divorce and thus dissolving the marriage. The Texas appellate court ruled, moreover, that the laws precluding such an exercise of jurisdiction were constitutionally valid — contrary to the trial court’s view.”

Associated Press: “As Egypt’s Muslim majority has grown more religiously conservative over the past three decades, so has its Christian minority, many of whom see the Church as a refuge. As a result, the authority of Coptic leader Pope Shenouda III now goes almost unquestioned. The Church’s grip on Christians’ personal lives will likely only increase with a bill before Egypt’s parliament that would bar civil judges from making rulings that contradict church law in personal status cases involving Christians.”

Patriarch Antonius Naguib, the head of the Coptic Catholic Church, interviewed at Aid to the Church in Need: “The easiest way to get out of a marriage, for a Christian whether its the man or the woman, is to become Muslim – for them it is easy to divorce and have the benefit of full rights against the other partner or spouse and full custody of the children.”

Texas Lawyer (Law.com): “James ‘Jody’ Scheske, a partner in the Austin office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who represents J.B., says he is disappointed with the decision and his client will likely appeal.”

At the Ruth Institute Blog, Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., provides an excerpt from her contribution to a new book called “Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching“: “Marriage is a universal human institution, defined—until recently—as the preferred context for both sexual activity and child-rearing. Until the last forty years, every society understood that some contexts for sex and childbearing were preferable to others . . . Over the past forty years, many women have become convinced that marriage is not in their best interest. Some women believe marriage is unnecessary. Others think that it is or has been harmful to them. The views of women like these, orchestrated, I will argue, by socialist and other secular feminists, have been instrumental to weakening the institution of marriage.”

“The 5th Texas Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a Dallas judge didn’t have jurisdiction to grant a divorce to two Dallas men who wed in Massachusetts. The court also says Texas’ same-sex marriage ban is constitutional.”

Beverly Willett writing at The Daily Beast: “No-fault assumes that removing choice from the equation will lead to less acrimony, but that’s too simplistic. It assumes the only reason parties would ever hold up a divorce is to angle for money. It tosses aside the notion that one might want to stay married because of one’s pledge, or for the sake of the children . . . Governor Paterson commended New York’s legislature for ‘fix[ing] a broken process.’ But no-fault isn’t the answer. It won’t cure our national preoccupation with searching for happiness in greener pastures–the root cause of rampant divorce–any more than a fault-based system of divorce can. We’ve created a happiness culture without understanding what that means or how to achieve it. Ditch your spouse and eat, pray, love your way to the next one.”

New York Times / Economix: “There were 13.5 births per 1,000 people last year, compared to a rate of 13.9 births per 1,000 people in 2008. In 2007, the rate was 14.3 births . . . The marriage and divorce rates also fell in 2009. The center estimates that there were 6.8 marriages per 1,000 people in 2009, after a rate of 7.1 and 7.3 marriages per 1,000 people in 2008 and 2007, respectively.”

Citizen Link: This headline is hard to miss. “Why is the Government Trying to Force Me to Divorce My Wife?” But even more noticeable is the $80-100,000 dollars Scott Sumner and his wife will miss over their lifetime simply because they’re married.

The Oklahoma Daily: “However, it is rather telling that it is easier to get out of marriage, once viewed as the foundation of society, than a business contract. Not only is this a formula for increased dissatisfaction even among those in the 60 percent of marriages that have not ended in divorce, it constitutes a fundamental shift in the definition of marriage, one that did not require any assistance from a San Francisco judge to implement.”

LifeSiteNews: “Archbishop Antonio J. Ledesma of Cagyan de Oro City has strongly criticized a proposed bill that would legalize divorce in the Philippines and said that the move would destroy the moral fiber of Philippine society.”

“[Walker's] decision is by no means neutral between competing moral viewpoints. It effectively writes a rejection of natural law theory into the constitution.”

Alicia Cohn writing at her-meneutics (“The Christianity Today blog for women”): “No-fault divorce is now legal in every state, making filing for divorce in America — whether both parties agree or not — simply a matter of getting the proper paperwork. New York just became the last state to adopt the legislation, passing a bill in early July that was signed into law this week by Governor David Paterson . . . Opposition to the legislation has created unlikely allies out of the Roman Catholic Church, the New York chapter of the feminist group National Organization for Women (NOW), and the nonprofit Marriage Savers, founded by evangelical Mike McManus.”

Robert W. Wood writing at Forbes: “[T]he biggest tax issues often come up on the unraveling of a marriage. Whether a couple is heterosexual or gay, the tax aspects of unraveling a relationship are very different inside and outside marriage. You might be shocked how these tax rules work.”

Jennifer Saranow Schultz writing at The New York Times / Bucks: “Here’s a new option for those worried they’ll end up on the wrong side of the statistics that show so many marriages ending over time: divorce insurance. SafeGuard Guaranty Corp., an insurance start-up based in North Carolina, recently released what it’s billing as the first world’s first divorce insurance product.” | Via Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Bloomberg: “New York just made breaking up easier to do, passing a no-fault divorce law that stands to reduce long, cutthroat court battles over who’s to blame when marriages fail. The new law permits couples to split without assigning blame for the marriage’s collapse.”

John W. Whitehead writing at The Huffington Post: “There can be no easy fix for these problems. Certainly, there are no legislative or governmental solutions, and fighting gay marriage isn’t going to do it. Morality and the decline of the family have become convenient platforms for those on both sides of the political aisle. Having reduced the very real problems plaguing America’s families to soundbites bandied about in the quest for political dominance, today’s politicians, gay rights activists and traditional marriage activists are not providing a lasting solution to the marriage meltdown. The solution, if there is one, is to be found where the problems start: with each man, woman and child taking responsibility for keeping their family together. So let’s forget about politics. Forget about the debates over who gets to marry whom. Instead, let’s look around at what’s left of our neighborhoods, our communities and our families, and put our children first.”

Ross Douthat writing at his New York Times blog: “[F]or what it’s worth, here’s what I would ask of America’s highly-educated mass upper class (more than top third of America than the ‘upper half,’ I think): A kind of noblesse oblige on some issues related to sex, at least; on others, a moral reckoning with the cost of the new equilibrium they’ve achieved; and on still others, a willingness to translate some of the more conservative habits they’ve embraced (or partially embraced) in their personal lives into law and public policy . . . What all of these proposals [regarding pornography, abortion, and divorce] have in common is an attempt to wrestle with the cultural costs of separating sex, marriage and procreation. The drive for same-sex marriage, on the other hand, involves an attempt to push that separation to its logical conclusion.”

The Week collects responses to Ross Douthat’s NYT column, “The Marriage Ideal.”

OneNewsNow: “The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to decide a child custody battle that has an unusual twist. Alliance Defense Fund (ADF)-allied attorney David Dye tells OneNewsNow the fight over the child developed after ‘a mom and a dad had a baby [and] subsequently divorced. Both parties got remarried, and then unfortunately mom died. But even more unfortunately, mom’s new husband was given custody of their child.’”

‘Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous’ . . . . Rebarbarization is just around the corner. Courtship, anyone?”

Joanna L. Grossman writing at FindLaw: “Contracts between husband and wife have always had a tenuous position in American law. Once forbidden, postnuptial agreements now seem to have crept into the realm of enforceable contracts in most states, though they may not always be enforced on the same terms as other types of contracts are. In a recent case, Ansin v. Craven-Ansin, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) of Massachusetts ruled that an agreement that a husband and wife made after they married, seeking to predetermine the financial consequences of any future divorce, was not against public policy and satisfied the necessary criteria for enforcement.”