Tuesday’s edition of the Newark (OH) Advocate contains a guest column from State Senator Jay Hottinger touting an Ohio bill to establish an “option of covenant marriage. This is a voluntary designation that commits the couple to going through counseling and longer waiting periods before a divorce is granted.”
I’m in agreement with the Senator that the high divorce rate (55% of marriages in 2003) is quite the concern, but I’m not sure his solution will actually fix the problem. If there is all-stick-and-no-carrot to this moniker, that it mandates cooling-off periods and counseling, why would anyone voluntarily sign up?
If there is a “covenant” marriage, doesn’t that imply that non-volunteers are not “covenantal”? What does this “covenant” mean, anyway? Does it mean that a marriage has been blessed by God? If so, why should it be more difficult for religious people to get a divorce than for atheists?
No-fault divorce, within a covenant or not, makes a mockery of one of our most basic systems of societal order. Today people can get married and divorced faster (and this is from a kids’ magazine?) than you can say J-Lo and Chris Judd, or Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander. When marriage becomes nothing more than rearranging assets or legalized shacking-up, the participants disregard natural order themselves, and we suffer from the actions of their undersupervised children. The parents are role models (sorry Charles Barkley); they just choose to be good ones or bad ones.
If we want to make divorce harder, make it harder for everyone, not just for those who used clergy instead of a Justice of the Peace. An elimination of no-fault divorce is superior to the creation of two types of marriage.
Similar Posts:
