Marriage and Divorce

What is government's role in marriage?  Recent court rulings have raised the question.

Issues of fair and equal treatment under the law brought the same-sex marriage question to the forefront.  'Under the law' is particularly narrow, but it spilled out into questions of definition and discrimination.

Marriage didn't arise from our law; its history precedes existing governments.  It has been understood among peoples around the world in a variety of ways. Governments have enacted laws after the fact to handle issues of property rights, inheritance, and taxation. Too, it's been necessary to deal with polygamy, to protect children from forced or coerced marriage, to recognize interracial marriage, and to defend married women from abuse.  Marriages have been performed by both civil and religious authorities, as well as by tribal and community groups. In earlier years, marriage was a private matter without official ceremony.  The church has made laws and rules also.

From our recent history, the occasion of marriage has been recognized by the individuals and their community in a particular fashion and often tied to deep personal conviction.  In our Judeo-Christian tradition, it's a covenant between husband and wife, and more.  The secular government's needed role was to recognize the change in status of the two individuals and little else.  The government's intruding with a new legal definition of marriage has perhaps been the critical difficulty for many.


Today, we're faced with a legal redefinition of what marriage is, a new meaning for a word we've commonly used all our lives.   The term 'marriage' has had a precise use in our culture, shaped by faith and conviction, but now without the consent of the church or the people, the word has been redefined.

It would perhaps be equally onerous if government were to enact law defining a 'Christian' or a 'Muslim' as a checklist of qualifying conditions.

Governments face the extraordinarily difficult task of negotiating from within cultural change.  No easy answers and not a job I envy.

One wonders if it isn't time to divorce government's role from the institution of marriage entirely.  Doing so raises a number of problems, of course, but the question is now in the public forum.

The word and its definition are not the issue, IMHO.

Marriage has become less common.  The U.S. and EU have seen a decline in marriage rate in recent generations.  Married households in the U.S. fell by a third since 1960.  Do we know why?

Reasons offered from the social and political arena include:

• Gay marriage
• Government subsidies
• Women increasing in the workforce
• The demasculation of men
• The divorce rate
• The media and their sensual focus
• The economy, particularly affluence

None provides a clear path of cause and effect.
It's an opportunity for thoughtful inquiry, perhaps.  What has changed?  Is it changing now, or is the change well behind us?


Statistics from the Pew Research Center: "About four-in-ten Americans think that marriage is on the rocks. No, not their marriage. The institution of marriage ... No matter what one thinks about the institution’s future, there’s no getting around its stark contraction during the past half century. Some 72% of all adults in the United States were married in 1960. By 2008, just 52% were ... most Americans now embrace the ideal of gender equality between spouses. ... some 62% say that marriages are better when husbands and wives both have jobs and both share responsibility for the household and kids."
Source: Pew Research Center. The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families.  Pewsocialtrends.org. 11/18/2010.

Note: such survey numbers reflect opinions expressed anonymously rather than actual behavior or conscious decision, but the results do suggest that cultural values have changed whether by thoughtful decision or unconscious acquiescence.

Survival Level

2015 Federal Poverty Guidelines – 48 Contiguous States & DC

Persons in household      2015 Federal Poverty Level

1                                                $11,770

2                                                $15,930

Daily News reporter Chelsia Rose Marcius is

doing the food stamps challenge of eating

only $29 dollars worth of food for a week.

Read 'poverty level' as 'survival level'; just the basics, just food and shelter perhaps.  Getting an education, staying healthy, eating well, having a stable home in which to do homework, those are unlikely at the survival level.  Ask any inner-city school teacher.  Add perhaps the costs of a car so you can get to work, clothes for the kids, gas and electricity so you can cook and stay warm, insurance; it adds up to more than you've got.  Survival is just that; not dying.The poverty level (survival level) marks the upper limit of that category; families and individuals within the category fall variously below that line.

From the census bureau's most recent report:

• The official poverty rate is 14.5 percent.
• There are 45.3 million people in poverty. 
• The poverty rate is 2.0 percentage points higher than 2007, the year before the most recent recession.
• The poverty rate for children is 19.9 percent. ¹

Things that help and things that make progress difficult ...

Studies measuring the differences between income before and after taxes and government transfers, have found that without social support programs, poverty would be roughly 30% to 40% higher than the official poverty line indicates.^[1][2]

A week's food, assuming they only use the money they
have for food and not shelter or clothing or medicine or ...
Living in such circumstances ensures your long term
continuation in poverty, health problems, educational
deficiency,and reduced life expectancy.

Far below the poverty line, we've had to add another category; extreme poverty.

• In the U.S., there are 1.5 million households with children living in extreme poverty (less than $2/person/day; there are more if you include the elderly and others without children.
• About 2.8 million children live in extreme poverty households.  

A recent policy brief by the National Poverty Center (NPC) reports the number of  U.S. households living on less than $2 a day per person has increased by 130% since 1996, from 636,000 to 1,460,000 such households today.

That means about 4 million people in “the richest country on earth” (according to capitalism’s apologists) are surviving on less than $60 a month each, i.e., essentially not survivable.  

So what do we need to know and what can we do, individually and collectively, that will make a difference?

Just inches away ... (NV-17)

John woke in an instant.  It had been quiet, just some outside noises muffled by the walls of his refuge.  Suddenly, an intruder grabs him by the arm and drags him violently toward the exit. The grip on his arm tightens, and the bones break under the pressure.  The shoulder separates and muscles are torn; tendons stretch to the limit and are torn from their roots. Flesh tears and separates as the arm is pulled free.  He bleeds, and in pain intense beyond description, he becomes aware of the same crushing grip, now on his leg ....  John dies, just inches away from being born.  He'd expected another few weeks before making the trip, but even this early, he might have lived.  

April was born prematurely at 25 weeks gestation.  She survived.  She a year old now.

Viability is just one measurement.

Among the issues before us these days and in the upcoming election as well, what will be the future of personhood? If a child is a person after being born, how about seconds before?  Or days?  And at what point does parental responsibility begin?

In our culture, this is not a simple yes or no.  Unintended pregnancy is the first and perhaps most important decision point, and many are not equipped with information or answers. For a preventative solution, we're perhaps encumbered by widespread abandonment of our earlier moral principles, by a sexualized advertising industry, and by an objectivization of women and girls. Feminists have attacked the problem, Christians have spawned a homeschool and family counterculture, thoughtful subculture segments have pulled back from the mainstream. Generally, they agree.  They hope to protect their children from the shallow, irresponsible behavior so commonly associated with sexual freedom in our world today.  Why did that behavior arise, and how might it be appropriately reigned in?

Beyond that, there's the extraordinary burden of choice a pregnant mother faces.  How might she face a complicated pregnancy or congenital defects and the longer term implications?  While we might have personal convictions about the right answer, culture and science provide a gray area where it's left to individual choice.  It's often framed in 'likelihood of survival' and 'likelihood of physical or mental difficulties'.

It's all both thoughtful and defensible. Every purposefully pregnant mother is pro-life in some measure, but can circumstances intrude and make a different choice acceptable?  For many, yes. Many.

Such difficult questions are the basis of defensible choice and of leaving the choice to the mother.

Is life sacred?  Of course.  Choices should reflect that fact.  With liberty comes responsibility.  Great responsibility

Deal with it and move on

Community folks pray over a new well in Burkina Faso

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.  Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Eph 4:31-32

So, what if we actually did that?  If we followed the counsel we're given, would it change things?

• A Peace Corps friend told me of his early years in Burkina Faso and in Somalia. 
• In Somalia, they were one tribe and culture, closely related, and they hated each other, my friend remembers.  When meetings were held to deal with local issues, there was always finger pointing and name calling among clan members, like, "I'm not dealing with you, your grandfather stole my uncle's cow!" 
• In Burkina Faso, the Burkinabé (local folks) just dealt with problems. "You did wrong, you pay him a goat," the elder would say, and to the other, "You were wronged, he's going to pay you a goat. That settles it, so make peace and let's move on."
• One culture carries a grudge for decades, another makes things right.  Imagine the difference in daily life and in the lessons the children learn.

Interesting observations, nothing more.  In the decades following these observations, Somalia collapsed and has not recovered.  Burkina Faso has fared only slightly better, since countries are more complex by far than villages.  Marxist influences and power players have made things more difficult.  Folks are making progress now with help from the French.  

You can't help but wonder, though.  What if we followed the good counsel we're given, what kind of towns and churches would we have?

Republicans and Democrats Agree!

In a fascinating study, 5,522 folks were asked what an ideal distribution of wealth might look like, one which they deemed to be fair and just.  They were also asked to estimate today's distribution of wealth in the U.S., i.e., how much does each 20% have.

Their results are given (right) along with the actual distribution.

It's called the GAP between the rich and all the rest; economic inequality. The participants knew about the spread but not the extent.  Did you?  That the bottom 40% of Americans possess about 0.3% of the country's wealth?

The participants were asked to choose where they'd prefer to live if given the choice between these two hypothetical societies, A and B.

Of the study participants, 92% chose society B.  Interestingly, it matches their suggested ideal distribution rather nicely.  It's a common desire among all the participants and perhaps the rest of us as well.

Society A represents the U.S. as it was in 2012.  Society B is fictional but approximates Sweden's distribution of wealth.

Surprisingly, 93.5% of Democrats and 90.2% of Republicans prefer and approve of the more equal distribution.

Finally, they agree on something of substance.  Now all they need is to admit it and figure out how to make it happen.  When President Obama raised the issue in 2013, both parties in Congress shut him down.  Understandable, perhaps; they and their friends are all top 2 percent wealthy and maybe haven't really seen the rest of the country.  Trump's plan will expand the GAP even more.  Of course.

You can see the source published article here for all the scholarly details.
Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA; and Dan Ariely, Department of Psychology, Duke University, Durham, NC

Wait, wait; 93% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans would rather live in Sweden?  Okay, that's bizarre.

When does economic inequality become a problem?

An economic difference between households is perhaps normal and a necessary element of capitalism.  Everyone hopes to improve, and perhaps the difference in wealth we see helps us define our goal.  The motivating question we face, however, is not 'do I have enough' but 'can I get more'. That's the cultural context we live with in the western world.

The result of such thinking is broadly visible both in market and government policies, regulations, and favoritism.  The rich get richer without any particular impediment, and certainly not because they work harder.  Is that a problem?

The dilemma with such a self focus is that it is quite content to advance at the expense of others. All others.  It protests against the less fortunate, its victims, blaming them for not having stepped up.

What might be the motivation for having a hundred or thousand times more than you or your family could ever need?