Category Archives: Equal Protection

Church Discipline, citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

So What (ELSE) Has 50 Years of “No-Fault” Divorce Gotten Us?

September 3, 2019 standerinfamilycourt 13 Comments

by Standerinfamilycourt

To deliver you from the strange woman,
From the adulteress who flatters with her words;
That leaves the companion of her youth
And forgets the covenant of her God;
For her house sinks down to death
And her tracks lead to the dead;
None who go to her return again,
Nor do they reach the paths of life.
– Proverbs 2:16-19

On August 13, 2019, author and family law reform activist Beverly Willett achieved the noteworthy milestone of having an accurate, objective article about the legal and societal debacle of unilateral (so-called “No Fault”) forced divorce ,”What Has Fifty Years of No-Fault Divorce Gotten Us? “, published in a Washington D.C. secular media weekly, despite the graphic, unflattering details she offered up. Kudos deserved, kudos gratefully extended to Beverly for her hard work on this piece. The Washington Examiner’s publisher had announced in 2013 that it would seek to distribute the weekly publication to at least “45,000 government, public affairs, advocacy, academia and political professionals.” The publisher also asserted that the Examiner‘s readership is “more likely to sign a petition, contact a politician, attend a political rally, or participate in a government advocacy group than those of Roll Call, Politico, or The Hill.”
You can bet “standerinfamilycourt” applauded as Beverly did some extensive, long-overdue cultural myth-busting in that great piece.

[ SIFC Trigger warning, for anyone thinking of clicking on that August article, who already suffers MGTOW-ish sentiments and high blood pressure: there’s a gratuitous embedded song and interview by Pistol Annies (I guess to appease the feministas) that “standerinfamilycourt” found hard to suppress from auto-playing:
“a feel-good divorce song that was ‘needed’ — Ah broke his heart and Ah took his money” (isn’t that special?) This has zero relevance to Beverly’s piece other than to illustrate her points, and is best experienced with zero sound , while scrolling resolutely down.]

Among the frank and excellent points that Beverly made in the actual article:

(1) the 14th Amendment due process violations involved, including “the plaintiff’s obligation to assert grounds, the defendant’s right to be heard, including the right to cross-examine and call witnesses, and offer evidence, and the right to impartial decision-making.”

(2) Oversold reduction in animosity or acrimony, which was postponed in cases with children until after the decree, but turned out to be a predictably-hollow “merit”, since the theft of property and parental rights were still involved anytime a divorce is forced (as it is some 80% of the time), and revisits would go on and on until the kids aged out.

(3) The skyrocketing divorce rate, followed by the later avoidance of marriage by those who were stung in childhood and learned firsthand how harsh and one-sided our unconstitutional “family laws” are.

(4) Increases in poverty, suicide, depression.

(5) The national normalization of adultery.

As much as all this is for a writer to get a typical reader’s arms around, we all know that Beverly’s piece just scratches the surface, and writing about much more of it would have caused her readers’ eyes to glaze over. Unfortunately, what was expedient to leave out for the general audience who has been fed 50 years worth of myths has even further future implications for the very survival of our constitutional republic. Hence, SIFC picks up where Beverly left off, to point out what else it’s important to recognize easy, sleazy divorce has cost the nation.

So what else has 50 years of “no-fault” divorce gotten us?

* Metastasizing erosion in due process, now impacting many other segments of society than just discarded spouses

This shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve observed very frequently and very accurately that the breakdown of the family was planned and orchestrated decades before the laws could be passed that enabled the fragmentation we have today, and that the nation’s “family courts” have served as a testing ground for how much degradation in constitutional protections citizens would be willing to trade for increasing levels of sexual autonomy. The family has always been the natural buffer limiting the need and the feasibility for state control of people’s lives. This limit has always been unacceptable to some of our power holders.

We saw with the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings how little regard some of our sitting Senators have for due process staples like “innocent until proven guilty”, if due process stands in the way of ideological “sacred cows” such as abortion-on-demand (which always takes a human life without due process), or protecting women from (even self-perceived) “attacks”. Patriots were relieved when Mr. Kavanaugh was confirmed despite the orchestrated and fabricated smears, none of which were proven with any actual evidence. But the takeaway from that episode remains that plenty of elite power-holders don’t share the values of our nation’s founders, hence anyone who shrugged and rested easy just because that particular skirmish was won last year, wasn’t paying attention. And sure enough, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the ABA is lobbying to relax due process in cases where sexual assault has been alleged, by requiring that the accused prove his innocence rather than the accuser prove his guilt. After all, nobody has missed the absence of full due process in “family court”, and the ends justify the means, right? Any resulting change in the laws for prosecuting sexual assault will obviously be unconstitutional, but guess whose members are in charge of ruling on any appeals that the falsely-accused might pursue? Once again, this reflects 50 years’ experience gained from unconstitutional divorce law challenges being summarily dismissed without fear of SCOTUS intervening, at least in heterosexual cases.

* Rogue political involvement by professional associations

Licensed professional associations once had a noble tradition of ethical codes and standards of practice that were developed and enforced in the public interest. Unfortunately, feminists and other sexual activists started infiltrating those organizations in the post-war period, and started coming to power in the 1970’s, which is how an American Bar Association-sponsored “Uniform Marriage and Dissolutions Act” model legislation (UMDA) that was so contrary to the Constitution and so contrary to sound public policy gained enactment so quickly in so many states, as the ABA also saw to it that “family law” attorneys ran for election to state legislatures and got appointed to the relevant committees, despite the obvious conflict-of-interest.

At about the same time, homosexual activists were infiltrating the American Psychological Association, with the strategic goal of getting homosexuality declassified as an emotional disorder, which occurred in 1973. These events are connected by the fact that both professional groups shared a common goal of breaking down the nuclear family as a powerful institution. Both of these professional bodies have grown wealthy and powerful enough to destructively marshal the media and make bribes masked as “donations” to block the reforms that would restore our society and constitutional republic. Such reforms, of course, would topple their financial and ideological empire.

Anyone who doubts that unilateral “no-fault” divorce was but one element of a centrally-orchestrated plan for Marxist social change that already existed in 1969, or that much of it would necessarily be accomplished over a few decades, initiated by subterfuge, should do some deep reading here (see especially, pages 6-8). Just as the collective of mental health professionals knew, or should have known in the early 1970’s that there was no scientific basis for reclassifying homosexuality as naturally-occurring, so the collective of practicing attorneys knowingly advanced a grossly unconstitutional model law.

* Substitution of “family courts” for the guaranteed due process of criminal courts when domestic violence is alleged

Although many states did not enact UMDA verbatim, but instead chose to keep a mix of fault-based grounds, along with the no-fault grounds, some states did get rid of all of their fault-based grounds to leave “irreconcilable differences” (or its equivalent) as the only available grounds. False allegations in divorce cases was a complained-of issue, and the idea was to cut out the need for an evildoer to lie to the court in order retain assets and at least partial access to the children. The consequences for the innocent spouse and children were trivialized and dismissed, often heinously virtue-signaling that there was “no such thing as an innocent spouse”. During this time, many state laws criminalizing adultery were also dismantled or reduced to a slap on the wrist.

Unfortunately, the new regime encouraged even worse and more damaging forms of perjury in the form of fraudulent protection orders to gain assets and child custody. Some rogue attorneys encourage this even when there is no provable abuse, precisely because constitutional due process is uniquely circumvented in “family court” and nothing will have to be proven in exchange for the financial and parental “club” that can now be unwielded over the “Respondent”. They also know that even having a jailed actual physical abuser can make it tough for attorney fees to be either earned or paid, so they wheedle their clients to route through no-fault “family court” to keep family dirty laundry “private” for the sake of the (typically confused and bewildered) kids. Obliging the attorneys does not present a conscience issue for non-Christians or for most adherents to the Westminster Confession of Faith (which unbiblically endorses divorce and remarriage for adultery and “abandonment”), so it’s easily sold even to some people of faith. But what does the bible actually say about personally bringing one’s spouse before a pagan civil judge? What does the bible actually say dissolves a marriage, and leaves somebody free to “remarry”? Who does the bible say should “bear the sword” against actual wrongdoing?

* Strengthened hand for Marxists and others who have always objected to the Bill of Rights

Anyone with a serviceable knowledge of U.S. history knows that Marxists have always existed as a minority group in our country.
In the past they were kept on the fringe due to most Americans’ abhorrence of the havoc Marxist leaders wreaked in other countries, persecuting and impoverishing their own citizens, until most of those systems collapsed. Today’s youngest voters either were not taught that chapter of history or have no one surviving in their lives to educate them. Indeed, the violent, black-hooded thugs who call themselves “AntiFA” do so because they object to the First Amendment. Most of us know from a 1926 article in Atlantic Magazine that unilateral “no-fault” divorce enactment quickly followed the Bolsheviks into power in Russia early in the 20th century, and caused so much societal chaos that Stalin later had to scale it back a bit. In 1959, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly said in a speech:

“We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.”

Unilateral “no-fault” divorce transfers some measure of family assets to the state and a disproportionate share to the offending spouse and the attorneys. It transfers God-given authority over the upbringing of children directly over to the state. It requires a measure of totalitarianism to sustain itself, and hence it persecutes anyone who believes and who states on the witness stand that only God alone has authority to “dissolve” a marriage, and He does so exclusively by physical death. It suspends virtually every Bill of Rights protection imaginable for the “Respondent”: right to jury trial, right to seek redress of government grievances, rights against unwarranted search and seizure of financial records, rights against compelled speech (in some states), right to free religious exercise and association, just to name a few that Beverly Willett didn’t already mention. Again, some younger voting adults are shocked to hear that it wasn’t always this way with our divorce laws or that we didn’t always have the resulting societal fallout such as active shooters a couple of times a month, since it’s all they’ve ever witnessed.

* Continued, escalating erosion in parents’ rights

“Family Court” also pioneered the pushing aside of parental rights without due process nor equal protection under the law, and where typically the only “offense” committed was wanting to keep the marriage together, which then gave rise to the Father’s Rights / Parents Rights Movement, endless allegations of parental alienation countering the often-false allegations of “abuse”, and finally, MGTOW. Solomon was wise enough to know even he could not split the baby in half (though he suggested it to make a point and to ferret out the truth)….neither can an administrative function posing as a judicial function pretend to do so. Today the child becomes the tug-o-war rope in a system where his or her “best interest” boils down to judicial lip service, and where the chief aim is to shred the home at all costs as rapidly as possible, in the interest of unfettered sexual autonomy (and a years-long future fee revenue stream arising from the severance).

In due time however, such a toxic system, which more typically exposed children to the often-immoral post-divorce home of the Petitioner (since objective fault could no longer be taken into account in most states in deciding child custody and visitation), and where perjured accusations often took over via restraining orders, or created two immoral homes in “amicable” situations, the damage could not possibly stop with the legalized no-cause destruction of once-married homes. Enter children born or dragged into cohabiting homes, where the legal profession had no issues with setting up the same rules for the even-more-inevitable severance game. Enter the single household “with benefits” – and children in-tow. Enter the homosexual home and the polyamorous home. Enter a generation of young people with gender dysphoria whom government leaders now declared “were born that way”, and whose identity derangement must be humored with surgery, opposite sex bathroom privileges, and court-compelled parental sponsorship of the dysphoria, lest the child revert to the state as a ward of the foster system from which the purloined children may now be trafficked for filthy Federal lucre.

As recently as 2017, even intact married families found themselves fighting in court for custody of their own biological children if they were not willing to consent and pay for gender transition procedures, this recalcitrance being judicially deemed to be “child abuse” and a risk of suicide, while the much higher risk of suicide in post-transition individuals was ignored. As it now stands, several Leftist state legislatures have passed laws mandating that LGBT “history” and pornographic “sex education” be taught in all grades of public school, many of them also mandating no prior notice to parents and no parental right to opt their children out. In the earliest case, more than a decade ago, one kindergarten father in Massachusetts was literally jailed for asserting his parental rights over his biological son’s education. In many other situations, children are routinely confiscated and placed in the foster system on allegations of “medical neglect”. There is a bottom-line for why all of this is happening to parental rights: we eventually were no longer raising enough solid citizens over the past few decades to execute positions of responsibility with sound conscience and appropriate sense of the true and sustainable public interest.

But what happened to the landmark SCOTUS rulings that once hedged-off parental rights as fundamental rights? Part of it was arguably the changing landscape for households where children were now raised, as discussed above, making parental rights across the board far more difficult to guarantee on a practical basis. The other part of it was a fruit of unilateral “no-fault” enactment being so fiercely and corruptly protected in rogue state courts whenever constitutionally challenged, in part, due to what now follows….

It’s become impossible to move off this parental rights topic without briefly mentioning the culmination of all of this evil, the little-known State-Federal piracy partnership in “family-court”-trafficked children, which began with perverse Federal legislation in the late 1970’s. In its simplest terms, states (many of whom incur annual taxpayer-borne transferred social costs north of 10-figures resulting from their unilateral “no-fault” laws) have been offered and paid per-head Federal subsidies for every child they place in foster care, without regard to how their inventory of children for that nefarious purpose was sourced, in a program called Title IV-D of the Social Security Act. SIFC again refers readers to the detailed sources of this information, while here noting the takeaway that significant, perverse financial incentives arising after many of these landmark SCOTUS rulings which once guaranteed and reaffirmed parental rights, today actually reward individual states for usurping the fundamental parental rights of the vulnerable, and these are enabled by widespread corruption in the periodically-elected state level judiciary function.

* The birth of new “fundamental rights” that bypassed the Constitutional amendment process, to be handed down from the bench in order to neutralize and supersede original Bill of Rights protections.

Believe it or not, our founders “overlooked” providing us with a “right to privacy” in the Bill of Rights. Instead, their design called for freedom of association in the First Amendment, and protection against unwarranted, unlawful search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment. At the same time, many of the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights explicitly warned that this Judeo-Christian blueprint for a constitutional republic could only sustainably govern a “moral and religious people”. This was sufficient for a couple of centuries in protecting other founding fundamental rights such as free religious exercise, property rights, the right to life and liberty. Unfortunately, most of these interfered with the “right” to take an unborn life, or to take property in furtherance of the Sexual Revolution. There was not a fundamental right to be found that was robust enough to protect and foster unfettered sexual autonomy, and in the 1970’s most citizens would have been too classically-educated and too close to the shedding of the blood that had upheld international challenges to our founding fundamental rights, to ever consent to changing those rights at the ballot box. No, getting past this solid barrier was going to require a bit of “judicial” relaxing of separation-of-powers as had just worked so masterfully as the “legislative” relaxing of separation-of-powers which had recently ushered in “no-fault” divorce. Of course, the “right to privacy” was instrumental in declaring a fundamental right to feticide in 1973, and to sodomous relationships in 2003 (hence, also to adulterous relationships), but in another 1973 case involving a pornographic movie house, the high court said this…”Our prior decisions recognizing a right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment included only personal rights that can be deemed fundamental or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty . . . This privacy right encompasses and protects the personal intimacies of the home, the family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, and child rearing . . . cf . . . Pierce v. Society of Sisters; Meyer v. Nebraska.”

SIFC would argue that parental rights were already well-covered under the concept of ordered liberty without creating a named fundamental “right” to disordered liberty, or libertinism. It can reasonably be argued that when a deemed new “fundamental” right materially interferes with the basic fundamental rights named by our founding documents, the courts have gone too far in interpreting the 14th Amendment. In other words, when special rights or super-rights are created for a certain group of behavior choices that override the most basic fundamental rights of other people, there is by definition no longer equal protection under the law.

* Dulled will and ability to discern between symptoms and the disease actually causing them.

A very important discipline in business is root cause analysis, because managers have a vested interest in accurately stating problems, then applying disciplined techniques to systematically “peel back the onion” to arrive at the correct root cause before investing in and implementing a solution. If this is not done objectively, only the symptoms will be treated, and not only will the problem recur, but serious resources will be wasted. Sometimes in business there is non-cooperation or even active interference with this process by individuals who have a vested interest in not having the true root cause identified and effectively addressed. Stepping back, many of the societal evils we routinely have today, we rarely experienced prior to the 1970’s. Something that changed in the early ’70’s has caused most of the serious woes for our nation.

Activists in the marriage permanence community are often frustrated by endless traditional “pro-family” activist hand-wringing over symptoms in a decaying society who has kicked the nuclear family slats out from under itself, symptoms such as the rising cohabitation rate, the school and church shootings, child-trafficking, clergy sex abuse cases, the abortion rate, the opioid crisis, the push to legalize marijuana, the bathroom privacy issues, Chick-Fil-A getting kicked out of the local airport, judges being persecuted for declining to officiate gay weddings, and on and on. On the one hand, these are all emotional issues that are powerful short term fundraisers that get staffers and rent paid at the nonprofits who champion conservative cultural issues. By contrast, appealing for funds to support public activities to end peoples’ absolute “rights” to terminate their marriages at-will and legalize their planned or existing adultery is at best a longterm proposition which is going to offend some significant donors whose wealth derived to some degree from the current system. Even if research funds to gather and publish data are socially acceptable (providing that, they point only to divorce in a generic sense), any research funds that might potentially lead to correlating adulterous remarriage as a systemic root cause seems far out-of-bounds for now. The problem is that evidence is growing by the day that this hamster-wheel cannot keep turning like this forever before the nation literally comes down around our ears, with God allowing it. Civil war and foreign invasion cannot be fended off forever once our Constitution has been rendered sufficiently inoperable. From Caliphate-loyal, ethics-immune members of Congress to “sanctuary” cities and states to huge corporations officially pushing First Amendment-destroying legislation, there are bad actors working fervently toward these things with growing success every passing day.

* “Do Something, Anything” mentality.

John Stonestreet of Breakpoint.org recorded a podcast in the wake of the El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio mass shootings that is very astute. Desperate times indeed call for desperate measures, but that still does not justify unstudied knee-jerk reactions. As noted above, these cries are typically for “do something that doesn’t gore MY ox.” Ban guns, so I personally don’t have to repent from my adulterous remarriage or reconcile with, or make restitution to my rejected covenant family (which just might contain a wounded potential mass shooter). Ban guns, so the practice of commoditizing and commercializing the acquisition of other people’s children to validate an immoral household, does not have to cease.

John’s podcast points up the growing threats to two additional vital provisions for sustaining our constitutional republic, our decreasing practical ability to uphold the 2nd and 4th amendments represented by the currently-favored knee-jerk reaction to mass shootings: Red Flag laws. He points out that doing the wrong thing can make many things substantially worse, even if the intent was good–and that the result may prove intractable or irreversible. We’ve been denying, suppressing and altering truth in this way for five decades, actually, and it’s become a very bad habit for both citizens and leaders.
The very same can fairly be said of enactment of “no-fault” unilateral divorce laws that began on September 5, 1969. When will we as a nation learn our lesson?

Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed..

Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Before becoming more sensitized to the abusiveness of “family laws” for those parents still with minor children in the home, and where the petitioning spouse has a lesser income than the so-called “Respondent”, this blogger stood on the sidelines of the gun debate and didn’t have that much of an opinion when it came to banning certain weapon types, “standerinfamilycourt” confesses. Why would any non-military citizen ever need a flame-thrower or an AK-47? When SIFC was only ten years old, an opportunity arose to fire an M-16, back-to-belly with a very stout sergeant bracing the effort. The “kick” that resulted was absolutely stunning, and resulted in a lifelong conviction that a gun in the house would more likely do harm to self and loved ones than to any intruder. Prayers go up constantly for a son who trained and qualified for concealed carry, with precious little ones in the house, SIFC having personally lost more than one young companion to household gun accidents where somebody got careless in years gone by. But I digress. At that time, the entire Constitution and national border sovereignty were not literally hanging by a timely-elected POTUS (er…thread).

Thanks to “no-fault” laws and the related widespread abuses of restraining orders by the legal community, many more innocent people have been charged with either emotional or physical “domestic violence” than have ever been guilty of either. Red Flag laws will mean that these people who have already have suffered the stripping of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, their Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Amendment rights, along with their contractual rights under Article 1, Section 10– all through NO FAULT of their own–now additionally stand to lose their Second Amendment rights as an after-the-fact result, in yet another situation where nothing has to be proven, only an allegation made.

A word or two about the Fourth Amendment before moving on: all divorces, whether fault-based or “no-fault” require the exposure of private financial records, in this case without a warrant being required. How can there be any “probable cause” if the only “crime” alleged is “irreconcilable differences”? There can be no warrant without actual charges being leveled against person, as opposed to a relationship, can there? “Family Court” uses those disclosures not only to keep the Petitioner as financially whole as possible after filing for the unilateral shredding of their own family, but also for purposes of determining how much of the family assets can support legal fees both pre- and post- decree. Perhaps most egregiously, forced financial disclosure is used to help determine which spouse to grant primary custody to in a way that leaves the spouse with the most assets on the “outs” – to further enhance future legal fees. Our Constitution says this stuff is none of the court’s business unless probable cause of a crime exists.

SIFC wishes the Fourth Amendment violations associated with unilateral “no-fault” divorce stopped with forced financial disclosure. Unfortunately, the violations can extend even to deeply humiliating bodily invasion, if any sort of sexual abuse is alleged in some “family courts”, even under so-called “no-fault” grounds.
Dr. Stephen Baskerville described this in his April 29, 2019 address to the Ruth Institute’s annual Summit for Survivors of the Sexual Revolution. Activist Jeff Morgan also recently interviewed a Texas man who was subjected to the same. Delicacy and brevity would have us move on, but the curious should give these a listen, but keep in mind that “no-fault” laws enable such things to be triggered without any evidence of probable cause.

* Corrupted churches and apostate denominational doctrine.

Churches had a clear choice to make after September 5, 1969. Option 1 was to get involved and educated, much as they did with so-called gay “marriage” and abortion, and do whatever was necessary to fulfill their citizenship obligation to resist the clear constitutional incursion and frontal attack on the families in each congregation; to stand publicly against unilateral, forced divorce in the Lord’s power. Option 2 was to haul out the existing doctrine on the sanctity of marriage, do the economic math around attendance and giving, then grab a red pen and decide whether existing doctrine could withstand, without alteration, the impact on both attendance and giving that opening the divorce floodgates would soon precipitate. Unconscionably, most churches and denominations chose Option 2.

Church history tells that the very need for Option 1 had its genesis in the acts of the 16th century “Reformers” including Martin Luther and John Calvin in ignoring God’s word (Matthew 19:6,8) to hand jurisdiction over marriage to the civil state in the first place. The seeds for apostate marriage doctrine were sown both in the various writings of these reformers, and then ratified in the heretical Chapter 24 of the Westminster Confession, which denied the absolute lifelong indissolubility that Christ repeatedly taught, and fabricated in substitution a humanistic doctrine that allowed man’s divorce for adultery and liberally-defined abandonment, as well as (ironically)..apostasy. A little more than 200 years after that, the obvious disconnect between actual scripture and the WCOF, along with the growing mass-literacy rate and availability of bibles prompted the Anglican church to sponsor a phased program of subtle text revisions, verse and phrase suppressions, and word mistranslations under the guise of “modernizing” and readability. By the time the mid-20th century rolled around, a divorce attorney specialist could get by with calling himself or herself a “Christian” while passing a lie detector test and having most of the public believe him or her. Approximately 50 years after this, the online technology emerged to actually detect and document what had happened to our bibles, but this was unfortunately not soon enough to head off the official marriage-related doctrine changes that occurred in the 1970’s in many denominations, and the waves of false teaching and apostate practice the churches had adopted in the meantime.

In a way that most sophisticated marketing organizations would roundly applaud, Christian media and virtually every denomination accommodated everything it did from that point forward to the “inevitability” of unilateral, forced divorce, as state after state enacted the UMDA “model law”. Mainline churches already were willing to perform weddings over divorced people whose spouses were still living, largely due to the heresies in the WCOF, but conservative denominations voted to allow this for the first time in the 1970’s. Even most mainline denominations did not allow divorced-and-remarried clergy until the 1970’s, but they also made this horrible change contrary to the direct counsel of scripture. Both changes almost guaranteed that churches would never rise up to oppose unilateral, forced divorce laws (or even so much as describe them accurately in sermons and writings) even when the deleterious effects of their error started to emerge in the late 1990’s. “standerinfamilycourt” would like to humbly suggest that had the churches chosen Option 1, God’s hand of protection would still be on this nation, and most of those deleterious effects would never have emerged. Had the church chosen Option 1, and exercised the many resistance actions that lay within her exclusive power, “no-fault” divorce would have been sent to the dustbin of history decades ago. Instead, many churches have recently gone on to either “consecrate” or otherwise sanction sodomous unions, including one prominent denominational leader who wrote a particularly cheeky piece just four years ago insisting this would never happen.

Choosing the cowardly acquiescence of Option 2 made biblical church discipline virtually impossible to administer thereafter. As a new believer and newly-wed in the late 1970’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, SIFC vividly recalls the sensational lawsuit of a “scarlet woman” against her Collinsville, Oklahoma church for attempting to apply biblical church discipline. This woman was divorced, and it was discovered that she was shortly thereafter cohabiting with a boyfriend. The pastor went to her privately and asked her to either separate or “marry” this man. She declined, so the pastor asked her to leave the church. She again declined, so that pastor publicly put her out of the church, all according to the instructions Jesus gave in Matthew, chapter 18, and Paul reiterated in 1 Corinthians 5. The scarlet-lettered woman wound up winning a big settlement against the church for alleged public defamation, loss of reputation, pain and suffering. Pastors and denominations all over the country took note, and started looking the other way at all sexual sin that the member didn’t readily repent of in the first private confrontation. Obviously, a behind-the-pulpit papered-over adulterer lacks the moral authority to even open his mouth about most publicly-accepted heterosexual infractions in the first place, while they reproduce “sheep” (goats, really) after their own kind. SIFC knows many faithful, standing pastors whose wife was literally poached from him by another pastor, and many faithful, legally estranged pastors’ wives whose husbands have run off and “married” another woman.

Churches stopped teaching that any remarriage at all was continuously adulterous, and that this adultery, even though legalized, sent people to hell who died in that state. They started treating people as if they believed that only sodomous sexual sin, though legal, sent the unrepentant to hell. This is a very important point because to this very day, most clergy and denominational leaders have an insufficient grasp of how serious a religious freedom violation forced-divorce constitutes to an authentic Christ-follower.

* Corrupted public education systems that supplant the parents’ role.

The state of Massachusetts was an early adopter of sodomy-as-marriage several years before the Obergefell decision of 2015, and they were quick to mandate indoctrinating “education” in the public schools to reinforce its acceptance in the next generation, beginning in kindergarten. Books with this objective were written to desensitize children to homosexual practices and they soon stocked public library shelves, if not also school library shelves in many states. Back in the good old days, parents were deemed worthy of detailed advance notice when “sex ed” of any type was scheduled involving their child, and the court-protected right to opt the child out was honored. These parental rights have disintegrated in the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere since the legalization of sodomy-as-“marriage”. Parents have been jailed in the U.S., as well as in other countries, for attempting to shield their children from homosexual indoctrination. In some countries outside the U.S. private schools have been required to carry mandatory pornographic and LGBT-approved history courses, while homeschooling has been outlawed and home-schooled children removed from their Christian homes. At least two European home-schooling families sought political asylum in the U.S. who were under threat of losing their children to the state in their home countries (initially denied by the leftist Obama Administration, but one case later granted by a judge).

Some might question the merits of connecting this development to the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, as opposed to the Obergefell decision legalizing gay “marriage”. SIFC has sought to demonstrate earlier in this post that universally cancelling the enforceability of the marriage contract and the rise of the LGBT political agenda were actually co-orchestrated back in the late 1960’s by the same group of Leftist elites, who viewed durable marriages and strong families as “oppressive” and a barrier to their aspirations for power. Even gay “marriage” has been admitted by several LGBT activist leaders as never having been an end in itself, but was always aimed at rendering marriage itself an outdated historical relic. Had unilateral “no-fault” divorce not been implemented, homosexuals would have no interest whatsoever in a marriage they could not easily get out of.

Even with the central orchestration of normalized adultery via divorce and remarriage, and normalized sodomy in all of its manifestations, part of the loss of parental control over the public education system is due to another feature of legalized family fragmentation as public policy: we have gradually reached a point where society is no longer raising citizens capable of wresting back control. There would be no “Drag Queen Story Hour” at public libraries if a significant number of today’s young parents weren’t perfectly willing to directly expose their own tender children to homosexuals.

Conclusion
Patriots have been arguing for all 50 years since enactment began, that unilateral, forced-divorce laws are unconstitutional on many levels, and may well be the most unconstitutional laws ever passed. Fifty years on, it’s now becoming increasingly clear to the observant that these laws, if not repealed and reformed, are likely to bring down the entire Constitution for everyone else in the country — as planned and calculated some time before state-by-state enactment. Beverly Willett pointed out in the Washington Examiner that,
“The Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental right to divorce, but for 50 years state divorce laws have nonetheless legislated such a de facto right. “

Conversely (or perhaps perversely), Texas Family Law Association chief lobbyist Steve Bresnan argued before a House legislative committee this past spring in opposition to HB922, a bill to make “no-fault” divorce available by mutual consent only: “no state court has ever found no-fault divorce to be unconstitutional” (even though the bill’s sponsor is a practicing constitutional attorney who lined up an entire parade of constitutional attorneys to testify about the multi-level unconstitutionality of unilateral “no-fault” divorce in the prior legislative session.) They’re both right, and they’re both right for nearly the same unfortunate reason, as pertains to the state and Federal benches. Homosexuals are not about to bring a challenge to these laws, and for some odd reason, they’ve proven to be the only appellants who are consistently able to get their marital rights cases heard in either venue.

Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
– Proverbs 14:34

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Prayer, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Top 10 Ways Fathers Would Be Helped If “No-Fault” Divorce Laws Were Reformed

June 10, 2019 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt

Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, and that you may live long on the earth. – Ephesians 6:2-3

A few weeks ago, SIFC wrote about the potential impact of badly-needed divorce reform on the nation’s mothers. In many ways, that was a hard piece to write, because women consistently file over two-thirds of the unilateral “no-fault” petitions that shred their own families, year in and year out. They always have a heart-tugging excuse, usually involving some degree of what they perceive to be abuse, from which the children “must be shielded at all costs” (including the violent destruction of the family). When they take up with another man shortly thereafter (as though that behavior wasn’t even more abusive of the children), it’s only “coincidental” and “he’s who God really had for me”.

Writing that piece felt a bit like saying, “Outlawing your unilateral rebellion against God (and your husband), will benefit you by saving you from God’s wrath.” In many cases, that’s the actual truth. On the other hand, when speaking of fathers who give “family courts” permission to shred their own families, such men would be a much smaller proportion of the petitions that have historically been filed. This law has always been a militant feminist contrivance, and a vehicle for social Marxism, rather than for freedom and human thriving (which, incidentally, God specifically set men in charge of, not women).

Dr. Stephen Baskerville stated quite profoundly that the ultimate goal of the Leftist “social engineers” is to sever fathers from their families. In fact, according to Dr. Baskerville (@ 7:23-8:33), the only legitimate reason for government to presume to regulate God’s holy ordinance is to preserve its original purpose – to firmly glue fathers to their families for life.

We explained in that earlier piece what a desirable reform in the law would look like, and we repeat it here:

From a constitutional standpoint, allowing for the restoration of our right of religious conscience and free religious exercise under the 1st Amendment, and allowing for 14th Amendment due process and equal protection with regard to parental and property rights, our suggested reforms are:

(1) All petitions that are not mutual filings would require evidence-based proof of serious, objective harm to the marriage or to the offended spouse. For example, “emotional abuse” would be professionally defined in the statutes in terms of specific behaviors, with professionally documented admissible evidence legally defined

(2) All divisions of property and child custody / welfare arrangements that are not agreed as part of a mutual petition would be determined based on objective evidence of marital fault being the key consideration, with a view to leaving the non-offending party and the children as whole as possible in comparison with pre-divorce conditions.

In many ways, the benefits to fathers from these reforms, are made obvious just by looking at what “family courts” routinely do to fathers, and imagining those things being undone. Totalitarian family policies are never good for anyone, but on average, fathers as a group have been hit with the most severe overall human suffering resulting from them.

Benefit #10 – Men would no longer need for fear that marriage will wreck their life and literally criminalize what used to be universally-expected fatherly and husbandly behavior in civilized societies.
We all owe our first loyalties to the eternal kingdom of God, and not to the civil laws of men when they directly conflict with God’s law. St. Augustine expressed this in his writings, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also evoked this 5th century thought in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he wrote:

“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’

“Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law… “

State policies designed to do anything but encourage national repentance and sustainably raise future citizens...(namely, to instead try to fiscally “manage” the whirlwind consequences of legalized immorality) have degenerated to the point where lawyers deliberately whip up hostility between troubled spouses for their own future profit (which lies not in their reconciliation) , and where states act against taxpayers’ best overall interests in order to secure Federal Title IV-D funds from the men they slanderously label as “deadbeat dads” (although some women have also been finding themselves in this horrific nightmare, as well.)

Benefit #9 – Dads could serve their country overseas when duty calls, with reasonable assurance there will be a family to come back to, instead of coming back to a perjurous “protective order”.
As unbelievable (and despicable) as it sounds, “family law” attorneys have been known to attend continuing legal education (CLE) classes – such as by this Texas Assistant D.A. – to learn how to abuse the domestic violence protective order system, and to coach their clients on how to gain leverage for their divorce petition settlement (children, property, etc.) through allegations centered around actual or fabricated post-traumatic-shock syndrome (PTSD). Tragically, this is routinely used against veterans whose spouse got tired of their deployments in the service of our country and found someone else. In many states, the wronged spouse has no option to bring a counter petition where adultery (fault) is actually with the petitioning spouse, because that state’s law only provides for “no-fault” grounds, and because it (separately) bars all consideration of marital fault in either child custody or property division orders. Many states have also repealed or gutted their “alienation of affections” civil cause of action against spouse-poachers in recent years.

Benefit #8 – Dads would have more authority and influence to prevent a third party from endangering their children, and would no longer need a court’s permission to do so.
One of the most egregious human rights crimes against families (after the Title IV-D organized crime racket, of course) is banning marital fault as the key consideration in child custody decisions.
We can thank the Sexual Revolution, of course, for outlawing moral judgments on adults in the best interest of the character development of the children. We can also thank the Sexual Revolution, therefore, for the high level of emotional damage to two generations of children (and counting).

If mom unilaterally divorces dad because he doesn’t make enough money to suit her, won’t lose his beer gut, or whatever, and plans to shack up with whoever enticed her away, it should be a no-brainer that all other factors being equal, dad should get the kids, and mom should get supervised visits because of her immoral lifestyle.
That’s the way it used to work, and there was nothing wrong with it. The kids came first. Unfortunately, as it stands, dad is even not allowed to tell the court about mom’s contributing adultery in the most evil of the states. He’s barely allowed to tell the court that the new boyfriend is endangering the children, (and that’s if he’s lucky enough that mom didn’t invent some abuse charges and slap him with a restraining order so that he can’t even gain awareness of what’s going on with his kids.) No, instead of the authority GOD gave him, he has to go through CPS — who stands to make the state a little money by selling the kids off to strangers called “foster parents”, bypassing dad altogether if he doesn’t happen to have 6-figures in cash to go to court with after he brings forward an abuse or neglect complaint. When human governments come between a worthy father and his children, God will judge them severely! In fact, that’s precisely why the analogous slave trade was such an existential threat to the viability of the United States (and other involved countries) to continue as sovereign nations.

Benefit #7 – Dads would no longer be financing their estranged wife’s illicit subsequent household.
When mom gets custody of the kids in a unilateral forced divorce, dad gets to empty his wallet, regardless of his own fitness as a parent. The court applies a formula to determine how much he pays, and generally it can (and often does) go up, but if his circumstances like health or employment take a hit, there’s no guarantee in a lot of states that the amount will ever go down until the last child is 18. If he doesn’t pay up, the state often can come after any licenses (including professional licenses) that he holds, can publish his name in the paper as a “deadbeat”, and can even jail him for a period of time. If dad holds all or most of the family retirement funds, a “QDRO” (qualified domestic relations order – in a system that bars consideration of marital fault, a.k.a. – “license to steal”) is drawn up to give a good chunk of it to mom (again, without regard to consideration marital fault in a most states), and if dad was lucky enough to have vested traditional pension benefits, he ludicrously winds up paying mom by the month some day to live in her ongoing immorality. Responsible Christian husbands sorrowfully dread that this is potentially paying their wife by the month, by court order for life to die in her ongoing immoral state, and thereby have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. This is the exact opposite of the responsibility God assigned to authentic covenant husbands, and a man might prayerfully consider declining to cooperate with pension QDRO’s and enduring the humanly lawful consequences of civil disobedience, as suggested by St. Augustine and MLK, Jr.

Folks, what the state has actually done here, in banning moral judgments against the petitioner, is facilitate and incentivize spouse-poaching! (That which is financially rewarded in public policy, you tend to get a lot of, but who wants to live in that kind of a society?)

Benefit #6 – Dads who save for their children’s education, will have better assurance that this is where the funds will actually go.
For countless corrupt attorneys, obtaining the initial divorce decree tends to function as the “loss leader”, knowing that the real paycheck for them comes for the next several years following that that “dissolution” when the conflict over the children may continue until the last one reaches age 18. It is not uncommon for the non-custodial parent to complain that they’ve spent $200,000 or more just to secure the right to see their child enough to carry out their rightful parental role following a forced divorce. Where does this money come from? Typically it comes from retirement assets and college savings plans that were supposed to benefit the children. Instead, the funds must be diverted to attorney fees and court costs.

Benefit #5- Dad’s wife will no longer be incentivized by “family court”, nor rewarded for, filing a divorce petition against their innocent husbands.
Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbyist recently testified before the (liberally-skewed) Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee, that requiring mutual consent to access “no-fault” grounds, as HB 922 (2019) and HB93 (2017) would have done, deprives the petitioner of their leverage. So far so good, since one would have to be brain-dead not to realize allowing the petitioner a little less “leverage” is not quite the evil thing Mr. Bresnan painted it to be. Where he drifted off into outright falsehood is claiming that non-consensual “no fault” grounds of today’s status-quo in Texas “provides a level playing field”. We’re frankly not so sure Mr. Bresnan’s nose was finished growing, two weeks later! Yes, the leverage will shift as a result of requiring mutual consent for “no-fault” grounds. The U.S. and state constitutions demand that it shift, because what we have now is anything but a level playing field. But despite the special interest bellowing and subterfuge, it won’t shift nearly enough until “living apart” grounds that accrue in Texas three years later, to the benefit of the abandoner and forced upon the innocent spouse when the latter were neither consulted about the separation nor were they remotely supportive of it. (There was no 2017 nor 2019 bill addressing back-door “no-fault” grounds via willful abandonment.)

Benefit #4 – Dad’s covenant family will have a much better chance of surviving the apostasy of the family pastor.
Not only is contemporary “family law” a wildly lucrative business model that its beneficiaries feel must be protected at all costs, so is the operation of some local churches – sadly. Churches don’t tend to become mega-churches by being too choosy who they take money or volunteer efforts from, or how much sin they take onboard right along with the sinner(s). If that means ignoring or obfuscating God’s word concerning the no-excuses indissolubility of original holy matrimony, or concerning the ongoing adulterous nature of all remarriage while an estranged original spouse is still living, or concerning the clear biblical qualifications for pastors and deacons, so be it! (After all, we don’t want to be “Pharisees”, do we?) In fact, most seminaries today teach future pastors an apostate gospel when it comes to divorce and remarriage, and most contemporary English bible translations have been crafted to back that apostate gospel up accordingly. Indeed, Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox together created an origin point for that false gospel, which was relatively easy to do when the masses were illiterate and bibles were too expensive for most people who could read at the time. Hence, most pastors today reject what Jesus made clear in the original texts, that humans have no power from God to “dissolve” holy matrimony, and there are no “biblical exceptions” to this. Such pastors have blinded eyes when it comes to seeing how their performing an adulterous wedding over mom and her new boyfriend (likely, another living woman’s legally-estranged husband) absolutely crushes the souls of the covenant children of the real marriage(s).

Dr. Ryan Anderson, co-author of “What is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense” (2012) famously said, “the law is a teacher”. This was not exactly original, he borrowed this observation from St. Paul, but logically extended the application of that scripture from the Apostle’s original thought:

“Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.” – Galatians 3:24-25

Dr. Anderson argues that even an immoral law takes on an air of pseudo-righteousness when it has police power and court decrees behind it, because we are usually raised to respect civil authority…(indeed, some Christians go so far as to apply Romans 13 to blatantly immoral civil laws.) This legality in the eyes of men gives pastors a lot of “cover” over time to forget souls and give people what their flesh wants, especially if carnal believers are now in the majority and what they want has been temporally legal for a long time. True disciples who challenge them based on God’s word can then be pasted as “dividers of the brethren” and treated roughly. This actually happened to a 15-year old girl from Canada who visited a Missouri apostate church full of divorced and remarried folk, and spoke up while there about one such couple, according to the account of her marriage permanence pastor, Phil Schlamp (see sermon 5, @ 33.50). Something similar, but much more severe happened to a covenant wife when a megachurch in Florida colluded with her prodigal husband to stage an “incident” on their premises and had her falsely arrested for “battery” a few years ago when she simply quoted scripture in the pastor’s office challenging the church for installing this adulterous man as a deacon and agreeing to his adulterous wedding to a harlotrous woman in that church. “What about my husband’ soul?” she asked this hireling. Although Jesus would firmly disagree, he responded: “There’s no such thing as an adulterous marriage.” This prodigal husband tragically died of cancer, still in his sinful union and without Christ, a handful of years later.

The closer man’s laws can be brought to reflect God’s laws, the better it is for avoiding corruption in both families and pastors.

Benefit #3 – Dads will be far less likely suffer alienation from their children if they themselves lead a morally upright life, rather than having routine “family court” abuses remain entirely out of their control, as it is now.
Even with the most moral civil laws that can be drawn up, there’s no stopping mom from leaving if that’s what she wants to do. At best, there’s only economic deterrence from doing so, and moral protection of the children from normalized exposure to her adulterous or sodomous partner. Under current law, when mom leaves, the kids are going to be exposed to her immoral life choices regardless of who gets custody. It behooves dads to realize that heavy-handed government was never delegated any authority from God over a man’s children that would exceed his own authority over them. The best interests of the child is meaningless drivel in a pagan courtroom, with judges driven by illicit Federal subsidies to break up families, and by enforcing coercive sexual autonomy in favor of selfish people. However, if despite the profoundly immoral environment, dad lives before his children a godly example, and continues to teach them right and wrong from the bible, he is occupying the territory God assigned exclusively to him. God will “have his back” in it, and will move mountains in his behalf. Just remember, if you don’t want your son running after another woman should his future wife divorce him, don’t do so yourself.

Benefit #2 – Dads will have a restored legal basis for discharging the higher duty God has charged them with, as the spiritual head of the (biblical, covenant) wife and the covenant children (a basic Bill of Rights protection: the free exercise of religion).
There is an Old Testament story that is very sad, because it demonstrates how seriously God takes a father’s assignment from Him, and doesn’t take excuses for shirking this responsibility based on the surrounding environment. We read in 1 Samuel 2 about the priest, Eli who had two grown sons who were also priests in the temple of the Lord, but abused their priesthood by being sexually immoral and misusing the animal sacrifices brought by the people. The two sons are described as “worthless men who did not know the Lord and the custom of the priests with the people.” And why was that, if their father was a judge, and a priest of God who lived with them?
Scripture doesn’t elaborate any further, but clearly the implication is that their father had not very faithfully carried out his responsibility to train them. In fact, the implication in the next chapter is that Eli did a better job of training Samuel, who was sent to the temple as a boy to serve there. Scripture tells as that Eli sharply rebuked his sons as adults, but by then it was too late to change either their behavior or their ultimate fate in posterity. Another man of God came to Eli with God’s pronouncement of judgment on the house of Eli: “Why do you kick at My sacrifice and at My offering which I have commanded in My dwelling, and honor your sons above Me, by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of My people Israel?’ Therefore the Lord God of Israel declares, ‘I did indeed say that your house and the house of your father should walk before Me forever’; but now the Lord declares, ‘Far be it from Me—for those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me will be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days are coming when I will break your strength and the strength of your father’s house so that there will not be an old man in your house…all the increase of your house will die in the prime of life….This will be the sign to you which will come concerning your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas: on the same day both of them will die.”
The story picks again up in chapter 4 when the adult Samuel is now in charge (rather than either son), Eli is now 98 years old, and Israel is in the process of being defeated in battle by the Philistines. Both “priestly” sons died in battle after the Ark of the Covenant was misused then captured by the enemy. A man came to inform old Eli…“When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell off the seat backward beside the gate, and his neck was broken and he died, for he was old and heavy….” The Lord held Eli responsible for failing to teach his sons properly as boys, and wasn’t taking any excuses. Today, under the Messianic covenant, every household is a mini-church and every father of that home a priest. Today the cutting off of manhood is taking a very different form, but the overall effect is the same. Blessed is the man who asks the Lord to do battle for him to make a way through and around our immoral family laws, so that he can carry out this priestly and fatherly duty, despite the outward circumstances.

Benefit #1 – Dads will have a reduced risk of falling into the sin of remarriage adultery and forfeiting their own soul by dying in that immoral state.
For those who don’t follow our blog on a regular basis, we make no apologies for regularly talking about heaven and hell here. It’s truly regrettable that we have to do so, because God really gave that job to His shepherds, most of whom have not only rejected the responsibility, but also rejected an enormous body of biblical truth-telling in order to appease the Sexual Revolution and keep warm buns with full wallets in their pews. We make no apologies for not leaving God out of the “no-fault” reform debate, nor out of the more general “culture wars”. We don’t think, due to the demonic nature of this fight, that the war can possibly be won any other way. You won’t hear much about “natural law” around here. Instead, you’ll hear about God’s law!

It became culturally uncouth to speak of hell sometime back in the 1960’s, especially in churches, as if eternal moral consequences for persisting in wicked life choices were suddenly declared passe’ from On-High. The Apostles clearly did not hold this attitude, nor did most of the 1st through 4th century church fathers, even when speaking of the born-again.

Circa 100 A.D., the Bishop of Antioch said this in his Epistle to the Ephesians,

“Do not err, my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. And if those that corrupt mere human families are condemned to death, how much more shall those suffer everlasting punishment who endeavor to corrupt the Church of Christ, for which the Lord Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, endured the cross, and submitted to death! Whosoever, ‘being waxen fat,’ and ‘become gross,’ sets at nought His doctrine, shall go into Hell. In like manner, every one that has received from God the power of distinguishing, and yet follows an unskillful shepherd, and receives a false opinion for the truth, shall be punished.” –St. Ignatius

No, this wicked idea that “remarriage” while an original spouse is still alive could ever be accepted by God as holy matrimony was an unfortunate time-bomb, a product of 16th century Reformation humanism (as was “replacement theology”, against which the Apostle Paul also warned). Eventually, this heresy removed inhibitions against enacting immoral family and reproductive laws in western nations, and deceived the lawmakers who today uphold these laws into having the audacity to call themselves “Christians”. This was also the reason why some conservative denominations made the eternally fatal choice in the 1970’s to revise their once-biblical doctrine to accommodate the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, instead of standing strong against them anywhere close to the way they stood against gay “marriage”.

Jesus preached a 3-part definition of adultery, and part 3 actually precludes any notion of “biblical exceptions” we hear so much about:

(1) to lust in one’s heart after someone other than our living spouse (Matt. 5:27-28)
(2) to divorce a spouse in order to remarry (Mark 10:11-12)
(3) to marry any divorced person (and by corollary, to marry someone after being involuntarily divorced – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18b)

In Matthew 5:27-32 Jesus tell us that adultery doesn’t just occur extramaritally, but it occurs just as much inside of the “remarriages” of seemingly respectable church-going people, and by His reference to cutting off of our hands and gouging out our eyes rather than taking the first step toward this abomination, He alludes to this conduct leading to hell as the (unrepentant) destination. Later on, He directly and graphically says so in Luke 16:18-31.

While it’s not strictly necessary for pastors and lawmakers to visualize their sheep (and constituents) in the hell-flames to get the former onboard with moral divorce reforms in civil law, it sure doesn’t hurt. Pastors who do see this connection usually don’t perform the kinds of weddings that directly drive the demand for “no-fault” divorces. If lawmakers could see their adulterously remarried constituents in the resulting hell-flames as a repeal bill is before them, and if they knew that what the martyred Ignatius had to say was a certainty concerning the corrupters of families, it wouldn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, they would vote for the repeal of marriage “dissolution” laws altogether. Getting the state “out of the marriage business” would include getting the state out of the divorce business to the same extent!

Nine of these benefits to fathers (and future fathers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word. The #1 benefit to fathers of biblically-moral family laws, however, is eternal.

Happy Father’s Day to those who can celebrate today with their children. Joyous Fathers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord, and greater dependence upon Him.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.
– Proverbs 13:22

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

The “Equality Act” Is Unconstitutional For All The Same Reasons “No-Fault” Divorce Is: So Why Is Nobody SHOUTING The “U”-Word?

June 3, 2019 standerinfamilycourt 2 Comments

by Standerinfamilycourt

Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
– Matthew 5:11-12

From the start of the first century church, intense persecution has always proven to be a powerful purifier of the true church, and an accelerator of the kingdom of God. That’s the good news. The rest of this post will be about the bad news that lies ahead as a direct consequence of those who should have, failing to stand up for the religious freedom of embattled innocent spouses when their 1st and 14th Amendment protections began to be trounced 50 years ago in the “family courts” across the land.

Since all persons in the jurisdiction of the United States of America are (theoretically) entitled to the God-given inalienable rights to free religious exercise and right-of-conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to seek redress of grievances by the state, life, liberty and property, equal protection under the law, due process under the law, both procedural and substantive, there is no way of lawfully enacting a Federal statute that curtails these founding liberties but only if they interfere with the sexual autonomy of homosexuals, abortion-seekers and the like. Doing so unavoidably creates a super-class of citizens with superior rights to everyone else. Unless it’s done by the constitutional process for constitutional amendment, it is decidedly unconstitutional. It is only being attempted because our national leadership is smugly satisfied that the rule of law derived from built-in separation-of-powers has been rendered sufficiently inoperable to overturning it. Today, as a result, we have a great many enacted unconstitutional laws wreaking tyranny over the lives of the politically-disfavored, due to the decades-old disconnection of the separation-of-powers mechanism through collusion among power-holders, in favor of special interests. In fact, the enactment in the 1970’s of unilateral divorce laws was probably the most impactful of these.

Moreover, “family court” provided the perfect incubator to prove that totalitarianism could go effectively unchallenged, regardless of the human rights violations regularly honed in “family courts” across the nation. Who knew that despite even more strongly-worded protections in many state constitutions, the family law lobby and the feminist groups could cause both courts and legislatures in 49 of the 50 states to march in lockstep for five decades? This also proved without any doubt that a state or Federal Constitution could contain all sorts of vestigial protective language that the judiciary could decide ideologically (and unilaterally) whether or not it would ever be enforced, depending on the clout of the political class involved and varying with the prevailing, changeable social morality.

Up to now, this erosion in constitutional protections in the name of the Sexual Revolution primarily impacted about a million or so “Respondents” to unilateral forced divorce petitions each year in the U.S. Following enactment of the so-called “Equality Act”, all non-homosexual citizens, and especially practicing Christians, will join these divorce “Respondents” in being stripped of their fundamental rights if they in any way interfere with someone’s sexual autonomy. Back when the sexual autonomy involved was primarily (but not exclusively) heterosexual, the majority didn’t mind this, and didn’t see it as the threat to our constitutional republic that it actually represents. No Christian legal defense ministry would touch divorce challenges…by policy (and would routinely deny there was a religious free exercise threat involved in them). Neither would most other types of large ministries or state family policy councils that purportedly stood against all challenges to religious freedom and the biblical family in their mission statements. A small few FPC’s would occasionally undertake very quiet activities on this front, but not enough to be effective in the time frame before the present threat emerged, and certainly none that entailed significant resources or any publicity.

Just recently, Texas Values (an arm of the marriage-permanence-lukewarm Dobson political organization) plastered the blogosphere with “Save Chick-fil-A” (from franchise exclusion at Texas airports), but published not a word about HB922, a bill that would have repealed non-consensual “no-fault” grounds for divorce. This FPC sent a very inexperienced and poorly-prepared junior analyst solo to the May 1 committee hearing for that important bill, while the family law lobby sent its most senior person. In 2017, Texas Values’ director testified very effectively, but committed no media support that year or 2019. The semi-annual Texas legislative session has now adjourned. Chick-fil-A was saved. Texas families weren’t so fortunate this time.

Now that this is being done for the special benefit of transgender homosexuals, instead of just for the special benefit of heterosexual adulterers and abandoners, the majority of society still might not mind, so long as the only losers are Christ-followers. But there’s strong evidence that this time, the tyrannical impact is going to be much, much broader, impacting female athletes, racial minorities, women in the workplace and more. Arguably, it could lead to civil war, and probably should lead to civil war if enacted. Otherwise, the 240-year American experiment has died an ugly death by sexual appetites and the emotional disorders they spin off. It probably goes without saying that if the (In)Equality Act is enacted and signed into law, the unilateral divorce reform movement will face substantially longer odds of ever succeeding, before the nation folds into a grotesque version of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.

“…all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others…”

Other than religious freedom complaints, why aren’t others declaring the “Equality Act” unconstitutional before it passes? Enacted legislation, despite its obvious unconstitutionality, is exceptionally hard to reverse, as the unilateral, forced divorce quagmire has unquestionably demonstrated.

If U.S. citizens ever started to demonstrate that they can and do read the Constitution for themselves when bills are in progress, perhaps fewer unconstitutional laws would be cynically passed by rogue legislatures. Just maybe the oath of office mouthed by the people we’ve elected to various offices, to …“protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America (and the individual states) from all enemies domestic and foreign” might start to mean something again. Sadly, however we are becoming a society virtually illiterate in such things, and one which is increasingly willing to elect representatives to high office who are equally illiterate in them.

Judicial Watch is a very effective organization that has also been all over exposure of this malicious legislation, with attorneys who argue before the Supreme Court. “standerinfamilycourt” left this comment with regard to their May 24 post:

This proposed law is unconstitutional for all the same multiple reasons that the unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws of 49 out of the 50 states are unconstitutional, and that’s far from a coincidence! The Left has been methodically honing their skills removing the fundamental rights of parents and Christ-followers in the “family courts” of the land for 50 years, come September.

What they’ve learned over this long trial is that our own hypocrisy and fondness for sexual autonomy has shut everyone up who would otherwise defend embattled parents and innocent spouses. They’ve also learned that powerful special interest groups can make our appeals courts inaccessible to ordinary citizens who have no access to Christian legal defense ministries nor to so much as the media resources of state family policy councils for the purpose of sustaining a complaint of unconstitutionality, even if a law is blatantly so on numerous counts.

Knowing how hard it’s become to get even the most blatant unconstitutional law related to the Sexual Revolution overturned in court, can’t the constitutional attorneys in this battle (at the very least) start calling a spade a spade, and use the “U”-word instead of merely complaining about the law’s too-obvious intent? Couldn’t they encourage everyone else to? After all, every member of Congress casting a vote, as well as our POTUS have taken an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, domestic and foreign. That means that nearly 200 Congressfolk (so far) have violated their oath of office – and that ought to be a BIG DEAL to all of us! Our POTUS recently stopped short of committing to veto the “Equality” Act. In other words, Trump’s still considering whether he must keep his oath of office.

Just some thoughts,

“standerinfamilycourt”

We can count on President Trump never to sign such a bill, right? We all better hope so! “standerinfamilycourt” would like to suggest, however, that we not take such an assumption for granted. Nor should we take for granted that any reprieve afforded in 2019 by a presidential veto will necessarily be permanent, even if Trump is re-elected. Trump did take a positive step last week to curb the religious freedom fangs of homosexualism, just as the “Equality Act” was sailing through the House of Representatives on its way to the Senate. Yet, reprieve-wise, we remain an unrepentant nation under God’s advanced judgment, where church leadership has not moved an inch on reversing the desecration of His full definition of holy matrimony, and where escalating chastisement appears to still be necessary from His hand if there is to be any national repentance that will redeem our constitutional republic.

Two unrepentant years have elapsed since the election of Donald Trump, while the disappointments described above have continued in the Christian community throughout that particular reprieve.
Not one single pastor with a congregation in all of Texas was among the witnesses May 1 in Austin supporting HB922 (or its companion HB926 which would have extended the waiting period for “no-fault” divorce to six months). Yet, the next week, a Dallas pastor performed a mass wedding for cohabiting couples in his church willing to go through 90 days of premarital counseling, many of whom likely were already married in God’s eyes to someone else.

At the end of May, Trump came out with a tweet pledging to use foreign policy to pressure other countries to “decriminalize” homosexuality. Fine, if that means refraining from executing people for their same-sex attraction. But the reality is that both sodomy and adultery ought to be restored to their well-founded illegality in this country, based on the fraudulent judicial manufacture of the so-called “right to privacy” for which the Constitution has not been duly-amended by its citizens to ratify this piece of 1970’s legislation-from-the-bench. Same-sex attraction, for that matter, needs to be reclassified as an emotional disorder, reversing the heinous political action that occurred in 1973 to remove it from the diagnostic manuals of mental health professionals.

Why should we be shouting the “U-word” preemptively here, and holding our elected representatives responsible for doing so as well? Because every elected Federal official in the process has sworn an oath of office to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America.” If we defer to the ideological black-robes, as if they were the only ones qualified to detect violations of fundamental rights such as these being enshrined in the Federal statute, we lose the opportunity to hold our elected policymakers responsible for carrying out their oath of office to defend our Constitution from its domestic enemies. Enactment will prove way too late to do that! Go tell your Senator and this POTUS that you expect them to honor their sacred oath to uphold the Constitution and vote against / veto the so-called “Equality Act”!

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn. – Proverbs 29:2

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Divorce, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

The Other Side of the “No-Fault” Appeals Coin: Activist Family Court Judge in Mississippi (2017) Shot Down

May 14, 2019 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt

You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.
– Leviticus 19:15

Earlier this year, “standerinfamilycourt” shared a detailed analysis which showed that the State of Mississippi was the only state in the nation that substantially respected the 1st and14th Amendment fundamental rights of Respondents ( religious free exercise and conscience, parental and property rights, equal protection and substantive due process rights ) as well as the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of state government.

Little did we know at that time that a case had been filed in 2017 with amici by domestic violence activists asking the state Supreme Court to affirm a family court ruling that Mississippi’s mutual consent-restricted statutory “no-fault” grounds for divorce (Code Section 93-5-1) was “unconstitutional”. Though the outcome of this case (which, according to news reports, and the resulting opinion, was not a case alleging any sort of abuse). The record shows that the wife who backed out of a mutual consent petition before it was finalized was serially adulterous, including in prior marriages. This case, triggered by, Judge Jennifer Schloegel, an activist “family court” judge from Harrison County, and appealed by the innocent, rejected husband, was ultimately unsuccessful in its claim of “unconstitutionality”.

Per the Clarion (October, 2017):

“The Harrison County case does not include allegations of domestic violence, but anti-domestic violence advocates and others have said Mississippi’s antiquated divorce laws make it difficult for an abused spouse to escape a marriage and help prolong dangerous family situations.” (Translation: this is as good a vehicle as we’re going to get for our ideological straw-man, so we’d better run with it.)

Under the Mississippi court system, such appeals go directly to the state Supreme Court.

Little did we know as well, that by the time our February, 2019 piece was posted, the Mississippi state legislature was heading for adjournment in March of their annual legislative session, while the only divorce “reform” bill that had been on the agenda was defeated in committee in early February. Rather than seek repeal of the mutual consent provision of the statutory “no-fault” grounds, SB 2529 sought to add non-cohabitation grounds that even the abandoner could trigger after a period of time. This Senate defeat constitutes two pieces of good news in one development. The legislative measure would hardly have been a “reform”, and would have added a decidedly unconstitutional provision to the statute, one that had no available due process defense, beyond perhaps a token right to produce evidence that the charge of non-cohabitation was false in some regard.

Certainly, as borne out in this very case, there would be many more innocent Respondents upon whom this non-cohabitation was imposed against their will than abusive Respondents from whom a battered spouse was fleeing. It would have been a decidedly anti-family measure, and redundant of the existing provisions for a battered spouse to bring objective evidence of abuse under fault-based grounds, or pursue a criminal remedy that didn’t seek to “dissolve” the marriage. No abandoner of a marriage should ever be preemptively and automatically rewarded for the abandoning act. Fault-based abandonment remedies, where they exist, should be exclusively available to the abandoned party. We are grateful that the 2019 legislature did the right thing by the state’s families, after the high court also did.

Several studies of the causes of divorce have discredited the “abuse” and domestic violence lore, consistently showing that adultery or the desire to adulterously remarry is by far the most common driver, and placing abusive marriages far down the list. Yet the unjust expectation of the media and Leftist activists is that this one assumed cause should control family law policy as if it were dominant. Some ascribe “emotional abuse” to all the other traditional “legitimate” grounds, in order to justify this.

(Please click to enlarge)

This case also showcases the biased obnoxiousness of the liberal press around this “issue”, as media outlets from Thailand to Seattle, Detroit, Memphis (and back), including the Associated Press, all parroted verbatim the original Clarion article, which crowed its approval of the rogue, overreaching family court ruling , but went dead silent about both the Supreme Court outcome and abortive result of the ensuing legislative effort they had so confidently hyped. Why? It doesn’t exactly fit the “abuse” narrative when it turns out the truly “abused” person is actually the cuckolded Respondent, does it?

But just how obnoxious was the media over this case when it broke? Here’s a 2017 sample:

“Lawmakers are expected again to debate divorce law reform and other measures to reduce domestic violence and related issues.

“Last year after much debate, lawmakers passed a measure that allows judges to grant a divorce for “spousal domestic abuse” based on testimony of the victim spouse.

“But Mississippi and South Dakota remain the only two states without a unilateral no-fault divorce ground. An investigative report by The Clarion-Ledger last year showed how Mississippi divorce laws, little changed over 100 years, trap spouses and children in abusive situations and financial limbo. One spouse who does not want a divorce or wants it only on his or her terms can hold up finalizing one for years — in some cases a decade or more.

“State Sen. Sally Doty, R-Brookhaven, the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence and others are vowing to continue to push this year for divorce law and other reforms to combat domestic violence.”

( SIFC: Anybody care to hazard a guess who the unnamed “others” are who vowed to fight on for divorce law “reform” in this news story?)

This case would have been even more satisfying to read if it had been the case of a God-fearing husband and father forgiving his “wife” (she had been previously divorced and this was an adulterous remarriage in itself, by biblical standards). But true to the way of the culture, it was a case of retaliatory adultery also within the marriage, with no clear evidence of who started it or who retaliated. The Gertzes were in the process of finalizing a mutual petition under the existing (supposedly “unconstitutional”) law when she decided to withdraw her consent to the terms of the previously-agreed property settlement and child custody arrangements, leading both to charge each other with adultery. The media clucked about how the case had “unconscionably dragged on” as if the husband had been responsible for that.

The actual facts per the high court:

“In January of 2015, Michael informed Joesie that reconciliation was impossible and that he wanted her to sign and finalize the divorce papers. Joesie, upon the advice of her attorney, surreptitiousy told Michael that she also was ready to complete the irreconcilable differences divorce. Based on the advice of her counsel, Joesie waited until her summer [2015] visitation had begun pursuant to the [2013 property settlement agreement] until her son was physically in Mississippi before withdrawing her consent to an irreconcilable differences divorce…”

It gets crazier from there, with the account of Judge Schloegel’s arbitrary actions, with which neither the husband nor the wife agreed:

“After a temporary hearing on July 13, 2015, the chancellor granted physical custody to Joesie. The trial began in December 2015 and concluded May 2016. Six months later, in November 2016, the chancellor entered a final judgment and decreed that a divorce should be granted, but that neither party was entitled to a fault-based divorce. She found that Joesie had failed to establish adultery. She found that Michael had proved adultery because Joesie had admitted it, but that Michael had condoned Joesie’s adulterous conduct. Then the chancellor sua sponte declared the statutory scheme under Mississippi Code Section 93-5-2 (Rev. 2013) unconstitutional and granted an irreconcilable-differences divorce. Joesie was granted custody of their child…. After the chancellor’s November 15, 2016, final judgment was entered,
Michael and Joesie, along with the State of Mississippi,

( SIFC: Well, yeah, the state AG is supposed to be given advance notice – 30 days in most states – when a constitutional challenge is being brought against an enacted statute – why would a family court judge not also be held to this same standard which common citizens and their attorneys are required to observe?)

…asked the chancellor to reconsider her judgment, because no party had asked for, pleaded, argued, or offered proof on the unconstitutionality of the statute….The State appealed the chancellor’s sua sponte adjudication of Section 93-5-2 as unconstitutional. Michael also appealed, arguing that the trial court erred by (1) declaring Section 93-5-2 unconstitutional, (2) failing to award Michael a divorce on the ground of
adultery, (3) reducing Michael’s summer visitation, (4) awarding Joesie a portion of Michael’s retirement benefits, and (5) awarding custody to Joesie. We affirm the chancellor’s finding regarding custody and child support, but we reverse the remaining judgment and remand the case for proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

It would have been nice to wave this ruling under the nose of the Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbying Stephen Bresnan when he got away with making the opportunistic claim before the Texas Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee last week, that “no court in any U.S. state had ever declared [unilateral] ‘no-fault’ divorce unconstitutional” (even though most honest constitutional attorneys say that it certainly is on numerous counts – the real issue is fair access to the appeals courts and applying the correct standard of review due to political fallout for elected judges.) It would have been nice to follow up with a witness who said, “maybe not, in 2018, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that state’s mutual consent-only ‘no-fault’ grounds, which has stood since 1972, to be constitutional. They can’t both be constitutional.”

But, alas, this was only a technical ruling, and can’t really be considered a ruling on merits due to the lack of substantive arguments or evidence either way. The ruling was only that the Mississippi statute was not proven to be unconstitutional, by the trial judge or anyone else who was party to the case.

So what was the Judge Schloegel’s basis for determining on her own that mutual consent-restricted “no-fault” grounds was unconstitutional? Only her own subjective opinion, apparently:
“the chancellor sua sponte declared that “the present Mississippi statutory fault-based divorce scheme . . . unconstitutionally restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms. . . . although “the parties did not execute a formal consent for the
Court to adjudicate contested matters on this basis . . . , [t]he parties are constitutionally entitled to a divorce without the mutual consent of the other.”

Au contraire, said the Mississippi Supreme Court.

This appeal was also important due to the high court remanding the case back and requiring the trial judge to consider marital fault (attributed by the high court to the wife who failed to prove her husband committed either adultery or cruelty and inhuman treatment), also failed to prove–in light of her repeated lying and deception about her own adultery, that her husband had condoned her illicit relationship while he attempted reconciliation, and had admitted her own adultery, she was not entitled to all of the alimony the trial judge attempted to award her. The high court also determined that Judge Schloegel could not arbitrarily set aside the couple’s previous mutual custody agreement in order to reduce the husband’s time with their son for no just cause.

Perhaps it’s not so much that the mutual consent statute is actually “unconstitutional” but more accurately, the feminist judge (chancellor) had a problem ideologically with assigning legal fault to an adulteress, somebody merely exercising their sexual autonomy when she would have been perfectly free to do so with minimal legal and financial consequences in several other surrounding states. If a surrounding state legalized (or, in fact, incentivized) murder or infanticide, does it really follow that this would automatically make Mississippi’s law penalizing those acts “unconstitutional” because its law…”restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms” ? That’s not really too far-fetched a question these days, given recent successful infanticide legislation.

As for the bid by the domestic violence activists to hitch their opportunistic wagon to this case, the high court tossed their amicus brief to the side, saying: “The amicus called for affirming the chancellor, because the statute deprived domestic-abuse victims of constitutional rights. However, no domestic violence was pleaded or proved in this matter.” Given the ideological outrageousness of Schloegel’s ruling, who knows but that connections might run a bit deeper with this MCADV organization than meets the eye? SIFC struggles a bit with the feminist fantasy of a “constitutional right” not to have to prove allegations with evidence just because one is an alleged domestic violence victim, but after both the Brett Kavanaugh and Roy Moore episodes (“believe the woman”) this virulent, unconstitutional ideology had obviously taken hold in a lot of places.

Lastly, it’s not hard to see this case as the flip-side of the debate that has been going on in Texas about emulating Mississippi’s law, which appears to have operated fairly well in this particular case in levelling the playing field between an offending wife and a her offended husband. It’s refreshing to see a veteran get fair treatment for once, and for the militant feminists to lose for change.

Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God.
– Ecclesiastes 8:11-13

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Substantive Due Process

What Happened When a Covenant Marriage Stander Wrote His State Legislators About Forced Divorce

May 9, 2019 standerinfamilycourt 3 Comments

by Guest Blogger, Billy Miller of Louisiana

In 2013 I sent the following email to every Louisiana legislator, and some statewide leaders. I did not get one reply.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

While you are at work your wife could file for divorce, get a Protective Order based on her word that she is afraid of you, and you couldn’t get into your own house…not even get some clothes, shave kit, etc., and you would have to sleep somewhere else tonight.

That is divorce according to current law. Staying apart for just 6 months would guarantee her a divorce, and that is when you would start paying for something you didn’t even want…the divorce.

You wouldn’t hear any charges against you and proof of guilt, no defense because there aren’t any charges, and no way to appeal the judge saying “Divorce granted”…because there is no Case to appeal.

Now you see why I am an Advocate for Divorce Reform…fighting our ILLEGAL laws…that make you “like it or lump it” in divorce.

The lawyers in 1969 in California who came up with the current No-Fault divorce laws were told by an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court was present and told them that what they were doing was illegal, and they did it anyway.

Louisiana has had these illegal laws on the books for 40 years, destroying marriages and families…ILLEGALLY. These same laws are in effect in all 50 states.

I hope that concerns you IMMENSELY, and that you will initiate actions to put a stop to these ILLEGAL laws.

( SIFC: Billy Miller is a Baptist pastor, family patriarch, covenant marriage stander and family law reform activist who lives in Louisiana.)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Legislative Learning Curve: The Fate of Texas HB 922 To Scrap “Insupportability” Grounds

May 3, 2019 standerinfamilycourt 3 Comments

by Standerinfamilycourt

This will be a good news / bad news account of the third consecutive unsuccessful try in Texas to restore fundamental constitutional protections to “Respondents” sued by their own spouses in “family court”. Re-introduced into the 86th Legislative Session by Rep. Matt Krause, HB 922 would have limited the “no-fault” grounds for divorce to cases of mutual consent and have required cases where the spouses do not mutually agree to the divorce to submit proof of existing fault-based grounds, while HB 926 would extend the waiting period for “no-fault” divorce to 180 days. Testimony for these bills occurred at a very late evening hour on May 1, 2019 with just 2 business days’ notice of scheduling. More about that unfortunate circumstance follows below.

The latter bill extending the waiting periods made it out of committee on Thursday, May 2 and still has a remote chance of being scheduled for a floor vote in the House in time to go to the Senate before the 2-year adjournment. During the 85th legislature, this bill made it out of committee unanimously (versus 5-3 this time), but was killed by adverse lobbying of someone in the Calendars committee. HB 922 was killed by the Democrat-dominated JJFI committee, and will need to be re-introduced in the 87th session in 2021. It also passed out of this committee in the 85th session but met the same special-interest lobbying fate before it could come up for a floor vote or proceed to the Senate.

This blog post will be something of a post-mortem: what went well, and not so well, and will shine some light on some long-festering process issues in the Texas legislature that has, over time, made legislative reform of family laws a bit of an uphill battle structurally. Family structure activists are not deterred, even though the demographic trend in Texas points to an even more liberal-dominated legislature in 2021 when it next convenes.

Is a Constitutional Amendment Needed to Allow the Texas Legislature to Convene Annually?
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 46 state legislatures meet annually today. The remaining four states—Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas—hold session every other year, each in the odd year. Illinois convenes annually but holds approved, pending bills open for two years, rather than require them to be reintroduced each session, which seems to be a cost efficiency to the taxpayers, not to mention, a bit of a safeguard against the effects of voter fraud and rapid demographic change (such as via unchecked illegal immigration) in elections, and possibly curbs the sort of Calendar Committee chicanery the Texas House is bloody infamous for. In each span between legislative sessions, committee membership changes along with the makeup of the House, with a definite recent “bluing” trend in this (once) deep-red state, as people move into Texas from economically-failing liberal states losing several large employers each year.

The frequency of legislative sessions is set by the Texas Constitution, which reads as follows:

Sec. 5. MEETINGS; ORDER OF BUSINESS. (a) The Legislature shall meet every two years at such time as may be provided by law and at other times when convened by the Governor.

Hence, any change would require passage of a measure to put a statewide referendum on the ballot to change Article 3, Section 5. This actually brings up one key example of the effect of biennial legislative sessions in Texas: we are coming up next month on 4 years elapsing since the capricious Obergefell decision legislated a “right” to gay “marriage” from the Federal bench, and nullified all of the DOMA (defense of marriage) amendments passed by citizen referenda a decade or so before, in numerous states. Although a bill, HJR 64 was debated to put the DOMA repeal measure the ballot in the fall, astonishingly it still sits in committee, with only three weeks remaining in the session. It appears that both the Texas marriage statute and the Texas constitution will continue to officially define marriage as being only between one man and one woman well into 2021, the 6th anniversary of Obergefell, since the constitution must be amended before the statute can be changed.

As the moral fabric of society has continued to fray, at least in part due to the societal destructiveness of divorce-on-demand, so has the legislation load perceived by citizens and their state leaders as necessary to manage all of the ever-worsening symptoms from this disease, now in its 3rd and 4th generations since enactment (boomers, gen-X, millennials, nextgen). The NCSL article cited earlier makes this interesting observation:

“In the early 1960s, only 19 state legislatures met annually. The remaining 31 held biennial regular sessions. All but three (Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia) held their biennial session in the odd-numbered year. By the mid-1970s, the number of states meeting annually grew tremendously—up from 19 to 41.”

Gun rights activist Rachel Malone provided her Facebook followers this statistical breakdown of Texas bill activity as of May 1 or so:

722 bills passed by the House (693 are HB’s)
640 bills passed by the Senate (632 are SB’s)
37 bills passed by BOTH chambers (but some still in process / conference)
16 bills sent to Governor

In the past 6 sessions, an average of . . .
– 6,363 bills were filed
– 1,382 bills were passed by both chambers (trending downward to the 1200’s)
– 1,342 bills were signed by the Governor / went into effect
– 389 bills died in Calendars (about 25% of the bills sent there)
– 258 bills passed the Senate but died somewhere in the House
– 368 bills passed the House but died somewhere in the Senate
– 11 bills died on the House floor
– 0 bills died on the Senate floor

How does this compare with other populous states that meet annually, such as Florida and California? A good topic for study!
In the meantime, anyone can see that there’s basically only a 5% chance per biennial session that any bill in Texas would make it to the governor’s desk, including (apparently) a SCOTUS-dictated matter from 4 years ago– and plan their activist activities accordingly.

The power of life and death is literally in the hands of the Committee Chairman’s scheduling choices
Attorney Harold Dutton has been the Chair of the Juvenile Justice and Family Issues committee for the past several legislative sessions. He is a man with a very checkered family life of his own, and has apparently treated this standing appointment as a personal fiefdom, according to a 2007 article in the Houston Chronicle. The Chair of each House committee controls the hearing calendar for that committee, a fact which is absolutely key to the difference in what occurred this year with HB’s 922 and 926.

Not that Rep. Dutton had all that much to fear in terms of a repeat of the 4-3 party line committee approval that occurred in 2017 for HB 93, the predecessor bill to HB 922, since the Democrat majority on that committee was now 5-4, with 100% turnover in the rank-and-file members. But just to be on the safe side, a bill filed in January was not scheduled for a hearing until May 1. Two business days’ notice of the scheduling was given after business hours on the Friday before. The hearing was scheduled on a day when there was a very heavy agenda on the House floor, typical for this point in the year when the session’s calendar days are dwindling, so the hearing scheduled for 10:30 a.m. didn’t actually start until after 7 p.m. That was tough enough, but these bills were heard alongside a litany of bills whose numbers indicated they were filed substantially later on, including an albatross of a bill opposed by an army of LGBT activists: HB2109 which sought conscience-based protections from liability for wedding officiants to recuse themselves from certain weddings. This testimony was, of course, prioritized to lead off (and, cynically, it set the political tone for) the entire evening.

SIFC expects that Chairman D was giving himself high-5’s for preventing the parade of constitutional law attorneys who testified in 2017 before his committee that Texas’ divorce law is profoundly unconstitutional, and replacing that with a literal Gay Pride parade twice as large. Despite the bills being introduced for the 3rd time by a practicing constitutional attorney, and despite ever-faithful veteran constitutional attorney Shelby Sharpe reprising an abbreviated portion of his 2017 testimony (given only 2 minutes this time instead of 3 minutes), and despite another family law attorney echoing the unconstitutionality with handouts to the committee, what wound up resounding from the testimony was the technically-true but woefully-incomplete declaration of Texas Family Law Foundation head lobbyist Stephen Bresnan that “no court in the United States has ever found no-fault divorce to be unconstitutional.”

The final injury came in the departure from the room of most of the GOP members shortly after the gay rights debate, which ended around 8:30 p.m. After powerful reprise testimonies by Kristi Davis and Jeff Morgan and a few other excellent witnesses, none of them got any questions from the committee members, mostly because there were few or no Republican committee members present any longer to give them a hand. Ditto for when Texas Values Sr. Policy Analyst Nicole Hudgens was peppered by feminist committee members with repetitive ideological “questions” she couldn’t quite handle to everyone’s satisfaction (partly due to coming off as being a bit unprepared). Last time, executive director Jonathan Saenz testified in favor of the predecessor bill. Whereas the victim witnesses got no questions, Ms. Hudgens’ 2-minute debut testimony evoked 6 contentious minutes of questions from the remaining committee members.

Another pivotally-damaging moment in the testimony questioning….

Rep. Callani to Ms. Hudgens: “Why do people get divorced?” (@1:57)

Texas Values’ Nicole Hudgens: “There are a number of reasons you can get divorced, but you have ‘insupportability’ which is no-fault divorce but this is not talking about…in the case of abuse or in the case of neglect..others, this is simply talking about ‘no-fault’ divorce…”

Rep. Callani: “Right, but what do you think the reason for that is?”

Hudgens: (pause) “It can be a number of reasons.”

Callani: “Just one of them”….(after longer Hudgens pause)…”Like a reason that people would get divorced…other than abuse?”

Hudgens: “Other than abuse?” [Way to affirm Callani’s pet ideology there, Ms. Hudgens!]

Callani: “So in your work for the Texas Family Law Foundation….”

Hudgens: “That’s Texas Values”

Callani: “OK, Family Texas Values…and you’re against divorces…so when…what types of divorces have you seen being…that were insupportable…what was their reason for wanting to get divorced?”

( SIFC: Noooo, Nicole, please don’t assent to her rhetoric again!! Proper response: “there can’t be any ‘insupportable’ marriages in the legal sense because the term has not even been objectively defined in the statute.” Legislator lecture coming in….4, 3, 2, 1… )

Hudgens: “There could be a number of reasons. We’re for government promoting a policy that keeps families intact as much as possible, so…it could be a number of reasons…right now you can just get divorced for pretty much any reason.”

Callani: “All I want you to do is just give me one reason why people would get divorced.”

Hudgens: “A lot of people would say ‘it’s complicated’…”

( SIFC: Callani could easily have gone in for the kill right here, but she was having herself a ball playing like a cat with her helpless prey….)

Callani: “But what do you think is complicated about it?”

Hudgens: “One person says they don’t want to be in the relationship anymore….”

Callani: “So if that’s reason, if this bill were to pass, it defeats the whole purpose.” (She didn’t say of what, but it’s clear that she believes in the “force people to stay married” dogma.)

( SIFC: While every question couldn’t have been anticipated, less than two minutes invested in a Google search would have produced this fairly accurate study information, courtesy of AARP, which places “abuse” far down the list, and would have put up a far better fight against Callani’s media-driven assumptions…the fact is that the vast bulk of divorce is driven by adultery, and in a lot of cases, deliberate spouse-poaching in older, more affluent couples with older kids, and often grandkids….creating massive retirement problems, and rewarding the offenders while severely penalizing the non-offenders. If this kind of informed content had filled those 6 minutes, they would at least have had something substantial to chew on, and it would have raised the opportunity to educate the committee on at least two important points that almost never get talked about!)

(Please click to enlarge)

Perhaps the most harmful moment that carried the evening, as a result of the GOP lawmakers all leaving the room, is the patently false statement by TFLF lobbyist Bresnan which went shamefully unchallenged because nobody remained present who was both entitled and motivated to debunk it at that point:

Bresnan: “And the third thing I’d like you to consider is leverage. If I’m in a relationship with someone and they can’t leave without my permission,
I have extraordinary leverage over them. I want the kids, I want the car, I want the house, I want the business. I want everything. If you want out bad enough, that’s what you’ll give me. Right now, people are on an equal basis and they can dissolve their marriage, and in no way should you allow the law to..uh..change the leverage in a relationship.”

But suppose GOP Rep. Faithful had been in the room, wide awake and on the ball — despite it being 9 p.m. by then (since the liberals somehow managed not to take a dinner break, no doubt because of the wherewithal for campaign contributions that were on the line here)….

Rep. Faithful: “that’s certainly an interesting point of view, Mr. Bresnan. Let’s probe that a bit further, if you don’t mind. Do you think it’s really necessary, in the best interest of the family as a whole, for the idea of “leverage” to be a zero-sum game, where the petitioner has 100% of the leverage and the respondent has zero percent? How do you see this as being an ‘equal basis?’ The AARP has rightfully been growing concerned because the most recent studies show that due to the effect of no-fault divorce laws on younger adults opting not to marry at all, the only growing category of no-fault divorce is what is commonly called “gray divorce”, often where a couple has been successfully married for decades. Often these divorces leave an innocent spouse, who wanted to save their marriage, with half or less of their retirement savings, 401K’s, IRA’s and pensions. So, AARP published a 2004 study report showing that the chief driver for these gray divorces is adultery and / or the selfish desire to marry someone else, and the divorce petition filer is typically the adulterer. Let me ask you: should the adulterer have 100% the leverage over an innocent spouse who has done nothing substantial to harm the marriage? Should they get the house, the business, the kids? Could you tell us how that is good for society, Mr. Bresnan?

Of course, back in December, following the disastrous 2018 mid-term election results which reflected the changing demographics in Texas, Rep. Krause tried to warn us (privately) that there “would be little appetite for” family law reform in the 86th session. He was a little reluctant to re-introduce the bills, but thankfully was persuaded (late). The video feeds showed him looking a bit disengaged, overtaxed and disinterested throughout the May 1 committee proceedings, and he apparently did little to encourage his conservative peers to stay in the room when their pushback against commercial / special interest testimony was absolutely crucial.

Taking the picture as a whole, SIFC believes it was still right to keep re-introducing the bills despite the formidable obstacles to enactment rehearsed above. William Wilberforce did this before Parliament for more than 20 years, across the entire spectrum of political circumstances, in order to engage the uphill battle to abolish the slave trade. The activist community can do a much better job of supporting Rep. Krause’s political courage by taking all of the following steps:

(1) praying for Dutton’s defeat in 2020. He’s been over the JJFI committee for far too long, and was morally ill-qualified for that pivotal Chair to begin with

(2) making a lot of off-session visits to allies for educational purposes, especially Texas Values, but also sympathetic family law attorneys like Cecilia Wood (who seems as well-informed as anyone). Ideally, we’d be visiting those same committee members with educational materials, but historically each session typically sees new faces under Dutton on that committee, so perhaps the only solution is to see all incumbent Reps in the off-session season, and from Nov. – Jan. 2020 visit the newly-elected (who are likely to wind up on the committee). This means Jeff Morgan, who has purposed to focus on enlisting the support of the state’s churches in the off-season, will need a lot more hands.

(3) re-courting the constitutional attorneys who testified in 2017

(4) entreating Rep. Krause to file his bills on Day 1 of filing rather than in January, so that testimony in both chambers can occur by March

(5) prioritize the courting of Senate concurrent sponsorship

(6) recruiting the testimony of once-divorced couples who remarried each other (#somuch4irreconcilabledifferences)

(7) solidify ties now with the Constitution Party of Texas who might be able to help Jeff Morgan with some of the ground work over the next two years

(8) write Rep. Krause a heartfelt thank-you now, hoping for his re-election, and advising him how we will be doing our part to better support his efforts next session

For just one example of potentially effective connections, HB 2109, the wedding officiant recusal bill, which had six co-sponsors (Reps. Flynn, Bonnen, Dean, Schaefer, Springer and White) has already died on the vine this session, which really need not become a tragedy that leads to a similarly ill-considered Alabama-style reaction. Would these gentlemen not be great candidates for some timely education on why the successful repeal of unilateral forced divorce would make their issue go away altogether — by quickly killing the demand for gay “marriage”? This is before even mentioning the budgetary heroes and rock stars they would become over the next few years! According to a 2008 study, unchecked unilateral divorce was costing Texas taxpayers almost $3 billion each and every year. This might be a great conversation to have with these gentlemen even before this session adjourns at the end of the month, if their attention can be had during crunch-time.

The debate on HB 2109 was (in reality) about compelled moral approval for sodomy-as-marriage, and by extension, the morality of sodomy in general. May 1, 2019 needn’t have become Gay Day in Austin, and it needn’t have been a Democratic committee member pointing out how this bill reflected a “fire, ready, aim” mentality
(Flynn testimony: “I thunk it up mahself”) behind it. Passage of HB 922 (accompanied by the future repeal of Sec. 6.006 – forced divorce with a 3-year delay in redundancy of Sec. 6.005) would have made that whole debate moot and unnecessary. Hence, there seems little reason why all six should not have been co-sponsors on Rep. Krause’s bills during the 86th session, and why they shouldn’t be courted by our team to become co-sponsors during the 87th session.

“standerinfamilycourt” is retired from corporate life, and lives several states away, but would have loved to spend part of 2018-19 in Texas for the reasons mentioned above. Steps are being taken to find a way to monetize Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional so that the finances to do so, and to start working other states, become available in 2019-2020. Prayers are appreciated for success and God’s direction in this fundraising vision. We have a formidable adversary, but a mightier Lord, so it all boils down to: who’s hungrier to win?

Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
– Hebrews 10:35

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

#RuthSummit 2019 – How Did It Go?

April 30, 2019 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt

For by wise counsel you will wage your own war,
And in a multitude of counselors there is safety.
– Proverbs 24:6

As soon as the speaker list was released, this blogger knew that this conference was simply not to be missed, come hell or high water (SIFC literally experienced a little of both before arriving there, but that’s a story for another day). “Standerinfamilycourt” has always had the greatest respect and admiration for its sponsor, The Ruth Institute. Many of the scheduled speakers have long been personal heroes (and heroines). The trip to Lake Charles is easily 15 hours each way by car, but that was no obstacle. This will by no means be a post about “buyer’s remorse”. There is no question that some very important connections were made at the Summit, and much cross-awareness “landed” for the participants, SIFC included.

And, there’s no question that what transpired in that venue absolutely fulfilled the objectives for the gathering that the Ruth Institute promised in the promotional information…

“Discover why the Church has been right all along about marriage, family, and sexual morality!

Stories from:

Children of Divorce
Abandoned Spouses
Children of Same-Sex Parents
Refugees from the Gay Lifestyle

Learn what it’s costing: in child trauma, clergy sex abuse scandals, runaway government power, and more.”

But…a day after returning, some of us were still feeling the effects of a few unmet hopes, including the action-oriented hope that it would be considerably more “shirt-sleeves” and interactive in its format, at least for the sessions involving “activist” panels. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse was careful to explain to participants that The Ruth Institute is not a lobbying organization (according to IRS rules for 501c3 and 501c4 educational organizations, TRI being the former). However, the distinction seems to be more philosophical than strictly legal in how “Ruth” defines her mission and organizes the organization’s engagement with issues and social change. For example, according to the website:

“In the summer of 2013, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases signaled a new level of governmental commitment to the Sexual Revolution. Dr. Morse and the team at the Ruth Institute concluded that the opponents of natural marriage hold a commanding position on the legal and political fronts. At that time, the Ruth Institute made a strategic decision to enter into the cultural and social fray in a new way.

“With Ruth’s renewed focus on the social and cultural arenas (as opposed to the political and legal arenas)…”

Tidy strategy, this is: hoping to drive culture change in order to ultimately reform the vicious “teacher” that this law has become —except that, all the signs of the times ( for example, 70 years elapsed since Israel’s re-establishment as a nation, the emergence in Europe of mandatory RFID chipping of corporate employees, Russia’s renewed aggression, Trump’s move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple) ….seem to point to the Lord returning and rapturing away His church long before such a strategy might ever come to fruition, after which, the bible tell us the influence of the Holy Spirit will be removed from society remaining on earth, and the Antichrist will have a brief reign that will make all of this moral concern seem wildly irrelevant anyway. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the U.S. has already been “given over”, as described in Romans 1 because heterosexual moral reform has been rejected, especially in the church, long before the Windsor / Perry / Obergefell decisions of 2013-2015. Those of us who are impatient about the timeline of family law reform are impatient mostly because the souls of loved ones remain in serious jeopardy in the meantime. Some of us want the drag queen fired as “teacher” yesterday, and a morally worthy role model hired in “her” place for the sake of our kids and grandkids. No society in all of recorded history has survived more than 3 or 4 generations in the utterly bankrupt moral climate we have now, almost all of it driven by nefarious family laws and institutional acquiescence to them.

What’s largely forgotten in that 2013 strategic thought process at TRI is the need to change not one, but two grossly sinful cultures that sprang from the Sexual Revolution, the sodomy-as-“marriage” culture, and the sequential-polygamy-as-“marriage” culture (still seen by most in Christendom as what TRI refers to above as “natural marriage”). As our friend, Pastor Jack Shannon pointed out in his 2017 book, Contra Mundum Swagger, those heavily invested in the second culture (relying on either RCC “annulment” or evangelical hypergrace) tend to see the first culture as befalling them from out of nowhere, and by no fault (pun not intended) of their own, seeing it fatalistically as a “test” or “cross to bear” rather than as an immediate call to individual and collective repentance. It was not lawful for Herod to have Herodias, his (living) BROTHER’S wife, and a man of God gave up his own saved life to warn their souls. It is no more lawful today for a few of these repeal movement leaders to have their current mates, while SIFC has not shrunk back from warning them in various ways (and is probably not on the short list of suitable conference speakers for that reason alone).

The Lord may not continue to forbear for two or three more decades for culture to change, under a strategy of incremental influence, in order “ease into” legal reforms. It might be different if we were not citizens of a constitutional republic that His extreme favor gave us in the first place, and which we are now basically squandering when we fear reprisal, or fear suffering persecution and loss of comforts – steep costs that the early church joyfully bore in order to introduce the world to true Christian morality, though they had little or no formal voice to the Graeco-Roman government systems at all.
For anyone, with both a representative vote and a state of living estranged from their true, God-joined spouse, to compare a reticent approach toward contemporary government engagement with the example set by the early church is just not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Wrote Anglican church historian Kenneth E. Kirk in the 1940’s:

“What is more astounding than the mere fact that the early Church taught and practiced the complete indissolubility of marriage for so long, is the fact that the Church chose to take its stand against the strong contemporary lax social and legal attitudes toward divorce which prevailed so universally all about them. The Church, today, feels that it is on the horns of a dilemma, because so many divorcees are coming to her for help and encouragement. Shall she accommodate the Scriptures to the apparent need of the unfortunate divorcees, or shall she uphold the Biblical standard of the indissolubility of marriage for any cause while faithfully discharging her duty to such distressed individuals? Every church of today which considers the lowering of its divorce standards should remember that the early Church stood true to the Biblical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in a world that was pagan and strongly opposed to the moral and marriage standards of the New Testament. Not only did the Church maintain her stand on the indissolubility in the early centuries, she changed the attitude and standards of the whole world toward it. Even today the whole Church of Christ and the entire western world is still reaping the rich benefits of that heritage. Shall the Christian Church of today be less courageous and faithful than the Church of the early centuries of the Christian era? Does she not under God have the same spiritual resources?

“There were other grievous social evils in the early Christian centuries. Slavery enveloped the Roman Empire of that age, yet the Christians did not set themselves to change the thinking of the masses against it, but they did set themselves to change the thinking of the masses toward marriage and divorce. Why did they not attack slavery with the same vehemence? The reason was that the Apostles had not received a “thus saith the Lord” from Christ respecting it. They had, however, received such in the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. No sect or school of philosophy is known to have influenced the early Church in this teaching. From whence, then, did she get the teaching? Certainly she received it from the teaching of the Gospels and from the teaching of the Apostles, who had earlier conveyed the same orally (as well as in writing) to the leaders of the early Church who succeeded them.”

(Marriage and Divorce. 2nd ed. London, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,1948)

For the action-oriented participants (who would like to stay God’s hand in the timing of His finalized judgment), important collaboration items had to be relegated to the conference breaks, such as asking Fr. / Dr. Sullins how one might get important outdated research refreshed, or undertake a child-outcome study for a sociological group that has never been addressed before (children of biblical standers being segregated out from those of generic and incomparable “single parents” because the former are likely skewing that measure by their growing numbers and superior child outcomes from walking out biblical principles in the home).

Perhaps there’s no avoiding the fact that panelists addressing the hydra-headed issue of what’s being done to reform unilateral no-fault divorce laws (and resulting injustices) would have a more difficult time being brief enough to allow feedback and interaction afterwards in a uniform allotted time slot, which was 30 minutes total. This seemed to be less of a problem with the personal testimony panels where there was ample time for some follow-up, in most cases. As it turned out, there was no time for such in the “activist” panel led by Matthew Johnston, Jeff Morgan and Christopher Brennan (~47 minutes into this link). The personal testimonies, while significant and powerful, mostly represent the symptoms of the disease, while the “activist panel” (in effect) represents a proposal for the surgical approach to excising the disease that is causing the cascade of symptoms. Yes, this does involve a process for influencing policy and legislation to some extent, but the IRS has given 501(c)3’s a little bit of leeway for potential indirect involvement in this:

501(c)(3) organizations ARE allowed to take part in small amounts of political lobbying. There are two ways to determine how much nonprofits can legally lobby: 1) Insubstantial Part Test and, 2) Expenditure Test. In the first option, an organization’s lobbying activities cannot constitute a substantial part of the organization’s total activities and expenditures in any tax year. This option is somewhat vague, as it does not define “lobbying activities,” “substantial amount,” or how that amount will be calculated. The second option is somewhat clearer. The Expenditure Test defines permissible lobbying activities and measures an 501(c)(3)’s lobbying activities only by the amount of money spent on lobbying activities.

Surely, providing an annual venue for meaningful strategy development, and possible nonprofit mentoring (or incubation) for an allied-but-separate non-profit that could take a more activist role which complements TRI’s core strategic mission would not get TRI into any difficulty with the IRS, nor divert significant resources from “Ruth’s” preferred core activities. The fact that TRI awarded an “Activist” recognition this year is a good demonstration of that point. Quite often, when a problem seems complex and intractable, effective solutions are “both / and” rather than “either / or”, meaning that involved organizations can certainly specialize where they feel their strengths are, while maintaining supportive ties with other organizations whose strengths may be complementary but not duplicative.

Perhaps some time allowance is necessary for “ice-breaking” when diverse allied interests and players (who started out not knowing each other very well) begin coming together for the first time, but the road home from this conference felt as though an untamed “adhocracy” will continue to be aimed in 2019-20 at the political realm, rather than a purposeful coordination of collaborating efforts based on experiences shared, and consensus-finding. This seemed like a sad waste of the rare and valuable face-to-face time we were afforded in Lake Charles. Hopefully, some of this occurred at the smaller dinners that were organized for the invited speakers outside the formal agenda. From SIFC’s seat, it appeared that some panelists were not in consensus with each other about specifics of the way forward. When the other side plays dirty (as we know they do), one option indeed is to wait until conditions are more favorable before ever engaging, another is to peck away randomly which isn’t likely to be very successful, and the third way is to go after them with a solid, coordinated and well-vetted battle plan that takes into account a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) that is updated at least annually. One possible solution for the next conference might be some breakout time by interest area.

We all tend to come to these events with a few individualized sub-agendas, in addition to the main agenda items. SIFC is the first to admit that what will be gleaned from this year’s Summit participation and deemed most valuable is steps to meaningful reform that will come sooner rather than later, and divert that many more precious souls from hell (at least, on account of dying while in a sinful subsequent union). Another sub-agenda, for somebody else, might be gleaning whatever will most quickly lessen parental alienation or reduce onerous child support payments. Some standers in the room might prefer for divorce to remain cheap, easy and certain so that their prodigal spouse has an easier path to repentance some day. Some individuals will be looking to make or continue a livelihood from the reform effort. These things will, of course, cause some differences in preferred approach and timeline to reform. Possibly, a sub-agenda for the Summit sponsors is to be inclusive of non-Catholics while not doing anything that might unnecessarily alienate the material support of RCC hierarchy for the organization’s efforts and vision. Can a mutually-supportable action path be found through all these sub-agendas? Possibly, but not if insufficient interactive discussion time is allotted among key stakeholders in the program agenda! This is the first major conference in recent memory attended by SIFC where some sort of general participant evaluation feedback was not requested.

It did not take long for word to get out among the covenant marriage stander community of this #RuthSummit, and of the livestream video resources that Family Research Council staffers so generously provided. “Standerinfamilycourt” awoke to an email from a male leader in the movement Tuesday morning, sharing that another abandoned, standing husband had emailed most of the faithful pastors in the movement, and several other standers. This young husband who originated the email chain had been texting me on Friday, eager to get to the livestreaming links before the opening dinner got underway. All of this is truly a blessing to that large community, who has (admittedly) mixed views on the actual repeal of unilateral, no-fault divorce laws and the biblically-appropriate level government engagement by Christ-followers.

“Standerinfamilycourt” would like to wrap up this post by giving a hearty “thumbs-up” to a few points in the long list of positives from #RuthSummit 2019 over this past weekend:

1.) Auspicious, God-orchestrated timing: As we sat at dinner Friday night, while Texas activist Jeff Morgan was receiving TRI’s award as “Activist of the Year”, SIFC received a text on the cell phone: Both HB922 and HB926 had been scheduled for their committee hearings on only 2 business days’ notice. SIFC is “sure” there was no mal-intent with this timing, which is “done all the time”, we hear. Little did House committee chairman Harold Dutton know that his maneuver increased the joy of the evening, as the veritable who’s who of activists in were in the same room to receive the news while gathered over dinner. This would include Dr. Morse, Leila Miller, Matthew Johnston, Chris Brennan, blogger Kristi Davis, Dr. Stephen Baskerville, and new repeal enthusiast Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon. Just picture the phones ringing off the hook in Austin all day today and tomorrow, and the prayers going up for some of these folks who will be there in Austin testifying tomorrow at 10:30 local time.
The timing actually helped increase the chances that if both bills fail against the very long odds of getting to the House floor for a timely vote, there will at least be solid backing for simultaneously introducing them in both chambers (with needed improvements) in 2021, next legislative session. The Lord works in mysterious ways. – praise Him!

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.
– Gen. 50:20

Dear Readers, here is the list of committee members and their contact information.

ACTION REQUEST: Would you consider being a part of history-making and giving each of these committee members a timely call, asking them to support both bills? You do not necessarily have to be from Texas to weigh in, but if you are from Texas, and either you or somebody you know from Texas has a restored marriage after a Texas “no-fault” divorce, this will be very important information to leave with the staffer when you call, in order to deliver a strong message that “insupportability” is nothing more than a subjective legal fiction on which no law depriving citizens of their parental or property rights should be based in a constitutional republic.

A key tidbit about Mr. Dutton, the committee chairman: he went through a messy divorce in the 1990’s. Among other traumas from his own divorce, he experienced the horror of having his wife’s live-in boyfriend physically abuse his sons without being able to do anything about it, like many other young men who are subjected to forced divorce. If the situation is that he did not actually initiate his divorce (almost a 70% chance), this could provide something to widen his perspective a bit.

The current legislative session in Texas adjourns for two years at the end of May. If you are interested in watching tomorrow’s proceedings live tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, try this link (no promises they will actually have it on camera, but there’s a chance). Alternatively, it’s likely Jeff Morgan will be videoing capturing the testimony for upload to you his youtube channel as he did two years ago.

UPDATE: Testimony on the bill to repeal one spouse’s subjective and unsubstantiated declaration of “insupportability” as a ground for divorce in Texas was heard on May 2, 2019. On May 3, the bill failed to achieve the necessary votes in the Democrat-dominated Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee to move on to the Calendar Committee, despite having done so two years earlier, and despite dozens of covenant marriage standers calling these committee members’ offices in support of HB 922. It will now have to be introduced again into the 87th legislative session in 2021.

2.) Wonderful connections with another strong group of Catholic standers was forged: We already have solid connections with Catholic standers through Bai MacFarlane’s wonderful ministry, Mary’s Advocates. SIFC learned at the Summit that Covenant Keepers has been working closely with a well-established group of Louisiana standers who have formed a weekly group locally called “Hosea’s Hope” (no apparent online presence). These standers shared another tidbit of good news: it appears that Covenant Keepers has worked recently to cleanse its local group leadership of adulterously remarried leaders, which would be an update on our earlier reporting, if confirmed.

3. ) The value that covenant marriage standers bring to the effort to save biblical marriage was publicly recognized at the Summit. Dr. Morse asked all the standers in the room to “stand” right after the panel on marital abandonment spoke. We were able then to identify each other, perhaps half a dozen people. Hard copies of this recent blog post , “7 Important Contributions Covenant Standers Are Making Toward the Repeal of Forced Divorce” were brought to the conference for handouts, and Dr. Morse very graciously gave us impromptu table space in the venue. She told the invited stander speakers, “when the history is written that this ship got turned around, y’all are going to be mentioned…” This was said in front of some of the most important Christian scholars we have today by one of the most important Christian scholars we have today, and it went out over the Family Research Council media machine. It was a mighty proud moment for standers everywhere. Dr. Baskerville gets a lot of feedback from the (justifiably) angry MGTOW crowd (“men going their own way”). It must have been refreshing to hear for once about grace-filled men and women going GOD’s way under the same profoundly unjust circumstances.

4.) Dr. Baskerville hit yet another one “out of the ballpark” (opening wide the eyes of some very influential people). These were the exact words of a stunned Dr. Gagnon on his Facebook wall after hearing Stephen Baskerville’s riveting 40-minute address:

“Dr. Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College, hitting his critique of “No Fault Divorce” out of the ballpark. It is one of the most anti-constitutional measures imaginable, incentivizing family break ups, rejecting basic standards of justice, and giving the state unlimited tyranny…”

Most serious standers who follow our pages were not surprised by this at all, since it is quite customary for the blunt Dr. B to hit things out of the ballpark every time the mic is on. That said, there is a famous moment in the movie, “Amazing Grace” where MP William Wilberforce has conspired with the head of the Tories to take one well-heeled set on a party-barge tour of the harbor, complete with powdered wigs, wine, hors-d’oeuvres, and a string quartet. SIFC could go on to describe the proceedings, but it would be more fun to just let the readers watch it instead, while emphasizing that in no way are any Summit leaders or participants being compared with the insensitive lot in the movie, but the “turning point” feel of that moment is still quite similar indeed. Picture Dr. Baskerville on the bridge of the sailing vessel that carried the slaves – not hard, is it?

5.) The language of the thought leaders in the room appeared to be slowly changing for the better (and root causation finally being acknowledged out loud). Dr. Gagnon also gave an excellent address Saturday afternoon. Although it was (by title) about homosexualist twisting of the scripture, he had a lot to say about holy matrimony. Across several of the speakers, we started hearing a bit less about the looser “standard” of “permanence”, and considerably more about the far more demanding state of indissolubility that Christ laid out. Desirably, we also started to hear a lot about the one-flesh state, notably at ~ 11:55 in Dr. Gagnon’s address, when he says this about the one-flesh state (echoing Paul in Ephesians 5): “…so whatever you do to your spouse, if it’s a negative thing, it’s a self-inflicted wound.” And again, at ~ 21:30, and at ~40:00 where Dr. G comes oh-so-close to appropriately recognizing the instantaneous, supernatural, metaphysical nature of the God-joining that is the very Creational basis for indissolubility, and for “remarriage” while an original spouse still lives, constituting papered-over adultery 100% of the time. It’s not the repeated physical uniting that creates the one-flesh state, according to Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 and Paul in Ephesians 5:31, it’s God’s actual hand in the wedding itself that permanently does so. If this were properly acknowledged, the witness against homosexual “marriage” (and practice) would become so much more powerful than any attempts to “rank” soul-corroding sexual sin.

At ~ 18:00: “When Jesus talked about marriage in Matthew 19 as being indissoluble, permanent, lifelong…a vision largely lost by the church, which is the beginning of our problems. We would never be at this place on the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism if we hadn’t already lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage…if we had not caved on those issues, we would not have come to this extreme point, and we are at an extreme point now.”
(SIFC must still respectfully disagree with any attempt articulated between 22:00 and 40:00 to claim that one sexual sin is “worse” than another, when Paul said this in 1 Cor. 6:18-20, about heterosexual defilement of the temple of the Holy Spirit, and warned at least twice, “do not be deceived” : both receive the same eternal outcome if unrepented, we’ve lived to see that both equally undermine the biblical family, hence entire societies, sending the unrepentant to hell in both cases. SIFC believes such a philosophy is a large part of the reason we “lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage”, as Dr. Gagnon had earlier put it.)

We believe it’s the patient, continued voice of the scholar-standers who are respectfully challenging the comfortable presumptions of the more conventional and acclaimed scholars and bringing about this necessary evolution in the latter.

6.) There also seemed to be a “lessons-learned” readiness to jettison the unhelpful idea of 5 years ago, that the sexuality debates can leave God out and prevail. The best indication of this maturation, of course, is the theme for the Summit: “Why the Church’s Teaching Was Right All Along” (that is, “right all along” if you ignore the 12th century fabrication of “annulment” doctrine under Pope Innocent III, and you also ignore Luther’s humanistic 16th century innovations.) The absurdity of this notion should have been obvious on its face in 2013: “we battle not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities and dark forces in the heavenly realm.”

7.) Satan so feared the impact of the #RuthSummit livestreaming result that he felt compelled to harass the Family Research Council technicians on both days. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit was invited in both days in prayers to open and close the sessions. Organizing this kind of an event around a controversial topic that brings together people of different faiths, but the same biblical truth, is never as easy as it looks. This one came off very well, and was an endless encouragement to thousands of covenant marriage standers around the world who were not able to attend, but wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

We are looking forward to next year already!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Myth-Busting: Will Restoring Fundamental Rights to Respondents “Trap” People in Unwanted Marriages?

April 23, 2019 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt

The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him. – Proverbs 18:17

As sure as death and taxes, any time a “family law” reform bill is before a state legislature which seeks to curb unconstitutional, non-consensual “no-fault” grounds being allowed to shred a family at the selfish whims of one of the spouses, there are two media responses:

(1) loud howling about people “trapped” in “bad marriages” (the Left), and

(2) deafening silence (the hypocritical Right).

“standerinfamilycourt” humbly submits (and will demonstrate) that these objections are overblown and way out of proportion in the “fairness” picture.

The model reformed “no-fault” statute will do a few essential things (all are a necessary minimum):

(1) limit the use of subjective grounds like “insupportability”, “irreconcilable differences” and “irretrievable breakdown” to a mutual, joint petition, where all the terms and conditions are agreed by the parties at arms-length (rather than by strong-arm). The mutual petition part is important here. No-fault dissolutions should never be obtainable by default judgment, or where the effects of divorce are not mutually agreed. All default judgments should be fault-based, without exception.

(2) restore the availability of fault-based grounds in the alternative, which is important because many state legislatures have eliminated and disallowed these.

(3) ensure that desertion or “living apart” grounds are only available to the non-offending party.

(4) ensure that marital misconduct is a material consideration in child custody and property division judgments if the parties cannot agree these things mutually and state them on a joint petition.

Yes, this kind of reform will (at least temporarily) leave some parties legally married against their wishes. However, there are several reasons why both the time frame of delay in legally “dissolving” the marriage, and the number of such cases has been greatly exaggerated. This is especially true in contrast with the millions involuntarily divorced today against their consciences and against the best interest of the children and grandchildren of the marriage.

Here’s why:

=> although this 1980’s statistic needs to be refreshed by a study, 20% of dissolution requests are mutually agreed between the spouses. It is quite possible that the legalization of homosexual “marriages” has increased this figure a bit.

=> of the remaining 75-80%, perhaps half (under current law ) do involve fault grounds, but the Petitioner is choosing “no-fault” grounds for cost and privacy reasons. Cost should not be as big a deal as it’s made out here, since the statutorily at-fault party can ultimately be made responsible for the costs if the non-offending party has no resources for filing and legal costs.

=> in the case of endangerment, there will be restored fault-based grounds and fault-based remedies available immediately., as covered above.

Of the remaining 40% of potentially negatively-impacted parties being compelled to remain legally married longer than they’d prefer, the following mitigations still remain:

=> nothing in this reform prevents an unhappy spouse from separating and living apart — an act that is biblically forbidden in an original marriage unless there is danger to family members (covered above), and living as immorally as they wish with whomever they wish. They will simply no longer be rewarded by the powers-that-be for doing so.

=> in the case of abandonment, the story is the same, with perhaps a delay of a year or two. This is not really an unreasonable delay for the sake of restoring the ongoing integrity of our Constitution and our society.

One canard that keeps surfacing is very true, but very selectively applied by the shameless propagandists who skillfully trade in emotional manipulation: “you can’t force people to stay married”.
Indeed! We’ve shown here that over a year or two time frame, anyone who wants to legally “dissolve” their marriage, or cause it to be “dissolved”, has a clear path to doing so under virtually all circumstances in a meaningful “family law” reform scenario. The more accurate saying is “you can’t force someone to live with a person they don’t wish to”, but their legal marital state is irrelevant in any case. What is relevant is WHO PAYS under the law.

The emotionally manipulative howling in the press is really about the economics and incentives changing from those that reward the offending spouse and divorce industry, to those that protect the spouse who is committed to family integrity and the true best interests of the children and grandchildren.

Non-consensual “no-fault” divorce laws strip non-offending spouses of their free speech, free religious exercise and conscience rights, along with other fundamental Bill of Rights protections including the right to raise their children according to their convictions, the right to free association with family members on both sides of the family, their property rights, 4th amendment rights against warrantless search of their finances without being accused of a crime, their right to live under an enforceable marriage contract, their right to a jury trial when confiscation of those things is sought by the state. The best and only way to distract from all of these harsh truths is to howl loudly about very shallow considerations. In interests horribly adverse to the nation as a whole, they strip us of the separation-of-powers guaranteed by Article 3, allowing the legislatures of these states to override constitutional separation-of-powers protections by legislating away true judicial discretion, true cause of action, and true due process.

Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.
– Proverbs 14:34 (Douay-Rheims Version)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

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April 14, 2019 standerinfamilycourt

citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

The Marriage Moral Space Between The Bible and The Constitution – Conscionable for Christ-followers?

April 13, 2019 standerinfamilycourt 1 Comment

by Standerinfamilycourt

For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:32-33

Video credit: Jeff Morgan. Matthew Johnston interviewing Dr. Stephen Baskerville, February, 2019

Our blog spends most of its time and words mapping out the moral space between scripture and unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, all the while being well aware that this is “taboo” space which is alleged to be at odds with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Actually, this moral space consists of three moral sub-spaces:

(1) the moral space between scripture and the allowance of fault-based divorce which does not violate the Constitution, but severely violates scripture (Matt.19:6,8 ) – Space “A”

(2) the moral space between fault-based unilateral divorce (Romans 13:4) and mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce – Space “B”,

and, finally

(3) the moral space between mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce and forced, unilateral “no-fault” divorce (Isaiah 5:20) – Space “C”.

(please click to enlarge picture)

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

“standerinfamilycourt” began pondering this due to the repeated persistence, in a small strategy discussion group, of a Catholic man who refuses to budge from Space “A” on both moral and constitutional grounds. He therefore stands opposed to the apparent consensus of the majority in that group: that our divorce law reform objective, particularly insofar as it encompasses the legislatures, should be Space “A” + Space “B”. It’s not at all that this gentleman believes per the bible that death is the only thing which severs and dissolves holy matrimony. On the contrary, as a “good Catholic”, he also believes that an “annulment” decree from the bishop does this, but in that case he would argue that some extrabiblical “defect” somehow made it “not a marriage”.

At the same time, a brilliant young legal scholar in the group also believes in reform encompassing only Space “A” – on technical constitutional grounds related to Articles 3 and 10 of the Constitution, but for pragmatic reasons, can settle for Space “A” + Space “B”, so long as this result doesn’t get overturned in court on those same constitutional grounds. (“Get ‘er done”!) The difference between the two gentlemen is in their motives and reasoning in arriving at the same end point. Our Catholic friend believes there are some instances other than physical death which lead God to assent to “dissolution” if church leadership does, and absent leadership corruption (a huge presumption), this would normally track with fault-based jurisprudence which would be better for the children of the marriage than their parents having an option to decide together to end their marriage. (Church tradition elevated above God’s commandment, by perceived “delegation”). Meanwhile, our millennial believes that God has delegated so much authority to the state that the Establishment Clause must override God’s law in order to prevent a “theocracy”. (State over God, because the alternative in a pluralistic society might be worse.) SIFC cannot agree with either view, because of Who God says He is, and the outright blasphemy involved with corrupting in any measure one of the key symbols of His holiness and His relationship with His people.

That said, SIFC can also “live with” a pragmatic reform result of Space “A” + Space “B”….but upon deep reflection, believes that if Jesus Christ were in this discussion group, He’d say that even Space “A” is too much “daylight” between the instructions He left us with and what we as Christian citizens will settle for in our family laws. Space “A” actually reflects the Pharisaical school of Shammai which He rebuked in Matthew 19, while Spaces “A” + “B” + “C” reflect the Pharisaical school of Hillel which He also rebuked in Matthew 19.

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter heaven. Matthew 5:20

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.” Matthew 19:8

Christ’s position would be: only God, and not civil government has authority over holy matrimony, and nothing short of holy matrimony is actually moral:

Space “A” + Space “B” + Space “C” – Space “A” minus Space “B” minus Space “C” = zero human authority to create holy matrimony or grant a divorce from it.

Christ would grant civil government the authority to track marriage and death records to support the union, but would say that all divorce is man-made and of no effect in the kingdom of God, unless the “marriage” it purports to “dissolve” was invalid and kingdom-unlawful to begin with. He would say that all authentic marriage is only God-made, and anything outside of that is adultery, which sends people to hell if they don’t repent of it, and for which He will eventually judge our unrepentant nation, especially if the shepherds of His church remain complicit. By contrast, one recent state is attempting to keep the usurped authority for the state to continue granting unilateral “no-fault” dissolutions, but prospectively only record God-joined unions (and all manner of other man-fabricated cohabitation arrangements) upon affidavit, and doing so in order that the state’s judges may escape perceived persecution and actual liability at the hand of the homosexualist community from conscience-based refusal to officiate sodomous weddings.

“Standerinfamilycourt” is sincerely wrestling with this….
So…just how acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for change in a law that is presently sending people to hell by the millions, in favor of a reformed law that maybe only sends people to hell by the thousands (on the prevention side), and increases the legal avenues for repentance which avoids hell (on the rectification side)?
How much more or less acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for a law that prohibits divorce altogether (that is, strikes the dissolution statute in its entirety — whether or not there exist what men might consider to be “fault-based grounds”), thereby sending few or no one to hell because they divorced their true spouse, but sending some to hell because they can no longer civilly-divorce a faux spouse, and which also closes off all avenues of biblical repentance via man’s law? After all, it can’t be emphasized often enough: the law is a teacher, (especially with regard to the unregenerated who have no way of being counseled from within by the Holy Spirit), for better or for worse.

“standerinfamilycourt” may never have the answer to this dilemma until actually standing before the throne of God, when all of a believer’s life works will be judged to see what survives the fire:

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.
If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.
1 Cor. 3:10-17

“standerinfamilycourt” is right to be concerned that all of the very costly and difficult activism, in terms of changing man’s divorce law, is only “wood, hay and stubble”. But if legal reform could also change hearts, reduce the massive number of people dying in a state of adultery, and increase the harvest of godly offspring who ultimately become citizens of heaven, that becomes a precious metal which will withstand the fire.

In Mathew 6, Jesus told us to seek His righteousness (presumably for ourselves, but perhaps also for others) while we’re first seeking the kingdom of God. In Matthew 5:6, He declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Both verses clearly promise a fulfillment from Him if our heart motives are what they should be, and we’re doing our part to obey the seeking, hungering and thirsting part.

Many earnest believers will argue either (1) “No one serving as a soldier entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he might please the one having enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4), and therefore eschews all political involvement by Christians, or (2) God’s law of marriage only applies to the redeemed. Although the first idea has some merit, the second is completely contrary to Christ’s instructions, so “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully rejects both notions, in times like these.

It seems, therefore, the moral focus needs to be on the net effect on souls arriving in the kingdom of God, in clean wedding garments. That is all that will survive the fiery test of our life works. Obviously, if the “dissolution” statutes were all repealed from the lawbooks of all 50 states and not replaced, the expected result would be a wave of both righteous and unrighteous marital abandonments, the former resulting in repentance from adultery , and the latter resulting in a massive, if not unprecedented, increase in adultery because of the cultural intolerance of being told by government what to do. As predominantly immoral as our society has grown in the past five decades (encouraged by the enactment of increasingly immoral civil laws), perhaps the effects would initially “wash”, then who knows what would follow after that?

Situational ethics and moral relativism are never healthy things, and are downright nauseating to SIFC. This is the mistake Moses appears to have made, in endeavoring to “manage” sin in a pretty identical situation (Deuteronomy 24:1-4) instead of strongly rebuking it, and Christ showed that He was less than impressed with this. After all, it was not Moses whom Christ commended as the “greatest among all men born of woman”. It was instead His cousin, John, who sacrificed his very head to try and warn two adulterers to repent to escape hell. The kingdom of God suffers violence, not appeasement and accommodation! In accepting moral Space “A” or moral Space “A” + “B” for pragmatic reasons, there is both situational ethics and moral relativism involved, because human compromise is being aimed at seeking to prevent a perceived greater evil anticipated from a stricter law, due to inherently evil human nature.

Talk like this can be very unsettling to those who have never had the constitutionally-false notion of a thick wall of separation between church and state meaningfully, intellectually challenged. Certainly, among millennials, there is a long-fed fear (much of it, historical-revisionism-driven and propaganda-driven) causing this generation to struggle in particular with the Establishment Clause, and almost elevating it over the Free Exercise, clause out of concern, (perhaps) that Christianity will lose its moral authority and representation if Allah, Buddha, Krishna and Marx are not given equal place with the Most High God of the bible in our society. A lot of it has to do with the time period in which boomers vs. millennials and generation X-ers lived and grew up. And that has a lot to do with (believe it or not) the downstream effects of enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce. Those of us whose hair is now graying grew up for at least a couple of decades during a time when Christian values indeed dominated, and families under all religions actually thrived, even if they were prevented from dominating or having equal representation. That’s because we still HAD our families, directly due to Judeo-Christian domination of power structures and government.

In another February interview, Dr. Baskerville told World Magazine ,

“The churches withdrew from private life? And the state moved in. What had been the role of pastors and priests became the role of lawyers, judges, and social workers. The church has never tried to reclaim its turf, and has been a major contributor of secularization, of people feeling the church is not part of their life when it’s not enforcing the marriage contract.

“What can be done now? The church has got to step in. Much of the history of the Christian church has been brave churchmen speaking out when the state overreaches its authority. This whole area of sexual morality is, frankly, our turf and God’s turf. The state has a role but is overstepping.”

Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no? But he perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, Why tempt ye me? Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar’s. And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace.
– Luke 20: 22-26

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse posted another excellent question from that interview on the Ruth Institute facebook page: Q: Were churches sleeping when no-fault divorce emerged?

A: Some churches did raise their voices, but much of their attention was diverted at the time by Vietnam and civil rights. There was very little debate, very little discussion. No-fault divorce, the welfare state, and the cohabitation explosion were all usurpations of the church’s role by the state. Governmental power was inserted into a realm of private life that had been the realm of the churches.”

All of the above is true enough, of course, but does not represent the whole picture, at least with regard to the Protestant churches:

[standerinfamilycourt 3/6/2019 on this Ruth Institute Post ] Martin Luther & co are partly to blame for the church apathy. Forced divorce would be a much bigger issue had he not turned over the authority to the civil state to regulate holy matrimony in order to obtain access to man-made “dissolution” certificates, then established the Reformation church on the outright heresy that original holy matrimony bonds can be severed by anything but death. The real insult to the church is that the civil state is deigning to regulate marriage at all, much less on a “no-fault” basis, but heresy reigns supreme, and revised bibles back it up. For the church to do much to oppose state regulation of marriage, much less any kind of tyrannical divorce law, they would have to acknowledge that all resulting “remarriages” are morally and spiritually invalid adultery in all cases. When they can get away, and indeed grow rich, with not doing so, that’s too big a morsel for most to bite off.

One of Martin Luther’s more outrageous quotes (actually acknowledging that only death dissolves holy matrimony, and providing a very creative solution) goes thusly…

Dr. Morse’s Roman Catholic Church has their own canon law, and has continued to claim its authority over marriage, notwithstanding the state’s competing claim to that authority. Both claims are overstated and distorted from a kingdom of God perspective.

Perhaps it’s best to step back and look at the behavior of our nation’s founders and their choices with regard to allocating authority over marriage, between human government (Caesar) and God’s commandment that marriage was indissoluble except by physical death. It was these men who claimed “certain inalienable rights” directly from God, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is interesting to note that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any of the original state constitutions eventually ratified in the thirteen colonies even attempted to allocate the authority to regulate marriage to civil government at all, even though Federalism and Article 10 left the states this space. Based on this, SIFC believes it is fair to say that our nation’s founders started off on the conservative end of Space “A”, fairly aligned with biblical instruction, and this is one of the reasons God incubated and fostered our nation, making it extraordinary in its greatness. In other words, there wasn’t a lot of moral space between the Bible and the Constitution until case law and legislatures put the moral separation space there later.

A Word About Our Founders, the Framers of the Constitution
Were all of our principal founders followers disciples of Jesus Christ? No. Many were deists and humanist subscribers to natural law, including Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen and Benjamin Franklin. Others, like John Jay, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster were unequivocal about following Christ. Virtually all of them knew and expressed an overt warning that the form of government they had designed and bequeathed to the future citizens of this nation would only continue to function in an environment of national biblical morality.

Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence said: “Without morals a nation cannot subsist for any length of time.”

John Adams said, “Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.”

Though widely assumed to be a deist, Benjamin Franklin said, “God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?”

( SIFC: That can be the rise of a nation for a kingdom purpose, or it can be tolerated rise of a malevolent stronghold into an empire to punish an unrepentant nation that once enjoyed His extreme favor, and in yesteryear faithfully carried out that purpose, but now is leading the world into deeper debauchery and idolatry.)

Also, observed by Ben Franklin: “Only virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports”, and, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the bible.”

John Adams declared, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

(Tell us 21st century citizens about that, Mr. 2nd U.S. President!)

Finally, Noah Webster said, “…the moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis for all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils that men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from the despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the bible.”

It is frequently argued today that we can’t go back to what we first had as a nation (as if the Lord God were indifferent), because our nation’s residents are no longer homogenous enough for it to work, therefore, we have no practical choice but to govern according to the prevailing cultural morality. (Much of this, it can be quite accurately observed, is said with the motive of coddling and appeasing the homosexualists.) “standerinfamilycourt” hereby prophesies that if we continue on as a nation with this ridiculous fallacy, the Muslim caliphate ultimately will not share that opinion with us, and will not hesitate to impose Shariah law on a morally-unruly citizenry. There is plenty of historical precedent for this in the bible and recorded world history. God owes the United States of America nothing, but He allowed first the Assyrians and then the Persians to overtake the nation of Israel. After seven decades of subjection, He required an intense purge of unlawful “marriages” and restored societal morality before He would restore sovereignty to His favored nation whose religious leadership was complicit in the systemic evil.

The following is only a theory on SIFC’s part, but it has been well-tested by the first nearly 200 years of our nation, when Baptists, Anabaptists and Methodists (who were socially disdained back in England) got along just fine with the Anglicans and Presbyterians. Later on, the Jews and Catholics got along just fine with the Protestant leaders and citizens under the civil marriage laws that prevailed until 1970. God’s moral favor gave cover for civil governments to impose that morality on the Mormons and Muslims, a circumstance that today shows signs of beginning to break down. Civil law does not need to prohibit man’s consensual divorce in order to appease God and wisely govern the people, but it must never force family dissolution and fragmentation on innocent family members while morally and financially rewarding the guilty family members. Society begins to break down at the point when obeying God’s biblical family law (whose very core is Gen. 2:21-24 and Matthew 19:4-6,8) becomes either very difficult or impossible under the corrupted civil laws of men.

Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
– Proverbs 14:34

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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