From Godspy via Being! or Nothingness is an interval with Bai MacFarlane on the subject of no-fault divorce. No-fault divorce was probably the most damaging idea to be foisted upon the family in the 20th century. It was presented as a minor change in the law that would in no way damage marriage or lead to more divorce. Does this argument sound familiar? Maggie Gallagher correctly says that the "more accurate term would be unilateral divorce on demand. It is also no surprise that no-fault divorce started in the sixties in California. Then California Governor Edmund Brown established a commission to make “a concentrated assault on the high incidence of divorce in our society and its often tragic consequences.” and as a result ended in the passing of no-fault divorce laws and divorce rates going through the roof. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It must be quite comfortable to drive on the road to Hell since it has been repaved so many times.
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My mother found out that she was being divorced by receiving the papers from her husband’s lawyer in the mail. She thought she was waiting for him, the chief engineer on an arctic coast guard vessel, to finish the end-of-summer refit of the ship and come down to BC. Instead of the happy autumn vacation to South America they had talked about, he went on with his mid-life crisis, married someone else and she had a breakdown that she never recovered from. A couple of years later he had come back to his senses and was ready to finish the refit and come down for good, having corrected his previous insanity. Three days later we had the local fleet captain arrive at our place and tell my mother he had died the evening before. My mother climbed into herself and never came out. So yeah, legalised unilateral divorce on demand is a good name, but I would call it unilateral, state-sponsored soul-murder just to be accurate.
I am currently suffering through a unilateral divorce. I’m ‘playing along,’ ’cause it’s the only way I can have more say than the judge in what’s best for my children (who live with ME! and go to Mass with ME!) If there were no such thing as ‘no fault divorce,’ she would have no grounds; she has given me all the grounds necessary for divorce, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of using them (yet, anyway.)
Please pray for my children; my greatest fear is that the damage from this will go with them into adulthood, and leave them with a disordered view of reality, like their mother has. (Yes, she was a child of divorce; and yes, I thought I knew what she meant when she said she didn’t want to end up like her parents.)
I’m not sure a case can’t be made that being a child of divorce could be a canonical impediment to marriage. I have been reading Conrad Baars book ‘Healing the Unaffirmed” and he says that the disorder he has identified, Deprivation Neurosis, has been accepted by the Church as a condition that cuts at the psychological underpinnings of a person in the area where it is most needed to make a marriage commitment. If it is serious enough. I can see it. It is one of the reasons I decided that I have no vocation to marriage; it might sound like self-pity on the face of it, but there is something realistic about knowing that certain emotional deficiencies make it impossible to lawfully enter into a sacrament that requires more than just the will. Wills fail if they are all you are going on. So I suspect that one of the invisible results of the divorce revolution is to make it impossible for huge swathes of the next generation to validly contract a marriage.
Oh, my poor friends. If there is a thing I hate like poison it’s divorce. I do pray for you and for your children. Don’t lose heart about them, M. I have known children of divorce to make successful marriages; the thing that distinguishes them is that they thoroughly understood the cruel violence that had been done to them in the breakup of their homes and families, and weren’t misled by halfwitted happytalk about Mom and Dad Being Free. Stay on your knees – it’s the only way.
Bai is running an email group over at yahoogroups called defending marriage. It is an attempt to take action unilateral divorce.
I’m a child of divorce, several generations now. I have managed to have a good marriage with its rocky times. It is possible with the grace of God and the help of a good spouse to heal, or at least to scar over, some of the damage that is done. Don’t give up.
Are there any stats available on how the marriages of children from divorced families fare? From personal experience, among friends, it has been horrifying for me to watch the marriages of two different couples, all devout, committed, practicing (Catholics in one case, Protestant the other) just implode. In both the wife was from a divorced home. I have to suspect that a child not having the life-experience of seeing and feeling what a happy, successful marriage is like, up-close and personal, really weakens his or her chance of a good marriage later in life…
Come come, Elinor. I don’t expect goopy female handwringing from you. You’re made of sterner stuff than this.
Judith Wallerstein’s work, which has followed the children of divorced couples from California for thirty-five years (all the families involved broke up in 1970, I believe), may have some information. My input is that seeing your parents happy may have less to do with it than seeing them endure. My parents were very unhappy, but they never divorced, although my mother moved out of the house after we were all on our own. What I would tell people who want to be divorced is that being happy is not the whole question, nor anything like it. You don’t promise to be happy when you married, you promise to be together, and in the absence of danger or great cruelty (which would not, however, effect the canonical status of the marriage), there ought to be no divorce.
“Female handwringing”? I don’t get it.
I don’t have time to look it up now, but I knew even back before I married that children of divorce were statistically more likely to become divorced themselves. It was this concern that I had voiced to my (then) fiance, that led her to assure me that she didn’t want to end up like her parents.
One of the biggest issues I grapple with now is this: Do I pursue an anullment & then (if granted) find an emotionally healthy woman with whom I can model a healthy, loving marriage for the children (and of course for our own benefit, too;) or will that teach them that divorce can have a happy ending?
What I meant Elinor, was that the reason I so rarely talk about these things is to avoid the inevitable lugubrious and sticky expressions of sympathy they engender. Let’s keep our upper lips firm shall we? It is facts and reasonable conclusions drawn from them that is needed, not sentimentality.
The question is whether there is any reason to believe that your marriage wasn’t valid. If it wasn’t valid – and it ought in justice to be held to a more rigorous standard than the whimsical sophistries of an American diocesan tribunal, according to which practically all marriages are invalid – it should if possible be made valid, or else dissolved. If it was valid, and most marriages are, I can’t think that the children of the marriage would be benefitted by either parent’s gaming the system to obtain a decree of nullity. Given the appalling fact that ninety percent of all annulments granted by U.S. tribunals, when appealed to Rome, are overturned, the prudent thing might be to assume that the marriage was valid and that the tribunal’s decision would not be in the slightest degree reliable.
I’m very sorry you’re offended by a merely human acknowledgement of desperate misfortune, but I can’t allow an embargo to be put on my words. When you’re a bit older you’ll understand that there’s an awful lot of sorrow in the world, and the only things that can be done about it are sympathy and prayer. Henley’s “Invictus” is worse than prideful, it’s inhumane and unChristian.
I’ll take the prayer, but I like my treacle on toast.
Is 39 old enough to allow my opinions some credence?
I don’t admit that there was any treacle in the case. If the words “my poor friend” are intolerable to your nerves, you might be happier in never mentioning the matter at all. Otherwise it would be more just to preface it with the announcement, “And don’t say one word to indicate that you grasp the misery of this very miserable story, or I’ll deck you.” To slash at me for a restrained acknowledgement of a great injustice is unreasonable, to say the least.
I don’t know much about the big picture of annulmnets (aside from hearing that they’re too easy to get here; ) but I do believe I have good reason to think that my marriage wasn’t valid. And as long as she won’t even consider making it a higher priority than her other relationship (which I think has already ended, curiously enough; ) how could my marriage be made valid?
I already know that my parish priest (who is on the liberal side) is all ready to help me begin the anullment. On many levels, I am too; but 1. I am not entirely convinced that it is God’s will (as if I’ll ever be certain…; ) and 2. I see no point in going through the process of having the marriage ruled invalid unless I believe that I am called to remarry. I am currently more comfortable with #2 than #1; my main concern about #2 remains whether that will be best for the children.
Sorry, too young to k now any better I suppose.
The way it was explained to me, a marriage which was invalid at the time it took place can become valid if the impediment is removed while the couple are still, er, living together as husband and wife. I only know about this in the case of one particular impediment, that in which there were no existing marriages, but one or both spouses was in a state of mortal sin at the time of the marriage. If the erring spouse makes a good confession and is absolved, the marriage – which is formed by the couple and not by the presiding priest – is re-established and valid. There are also cases in which the couple has to live celibate, generally under the same roof, until the impediment is cleared up. I know a couple who lived that way for two years until it was clearly determined that his first marriage had been invalid because the woman had never intended to have children.
Somebody I was talking to about this once offered to lend me, for information, a book called Annulment: Do You Have A Case? I declined with thanks – if my poor Cacciaguida saw that on my nightstand I would have no use for an annulment, since he’d have a fit and die.
Can someone provide me the e-mail address for the host of this blog. “Curt Jester” I’d like to keep you advised of the developments in our canon and civil case.
Thanks
Bai Macfarlane
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