All posts by standerinfamilycourt

I am a born again follower of Jesus Christ, married 40 years and have been standing for my marriage for 9 years. I am a mother and grandmother biblically concerned for wholeness and salvation of my family, and for the wholeness of our nation's families upon which I believe the survival of our democracy depends.
Church Discipline, Discipleship, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality

Rebuttal to ERLC: “IS DIVORCE EQUIVALENT TO HOMOSEXUALITY?”

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by “standerinfamilycourt”

“standerinfamilycourt” responds to a blog dated September 24, 2014 by Dr. Russell D. Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (ERLC) safe_image (2)

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,  nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”     1 Corinthians 6:9-10

‘If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.”  Luke 14:26

 

In the fall of 2014, Dr. Moore and the Southern Baptists, and separately, the Roman Catholic Church held conferences on the future of the traditional family and “inclusiveness” issues in the Church.    Following this, we started hearing a lot from the Catholics about how remarried divorced people should be made to  feel “better- included” in their church life.    It seems neither church was talking much about holiness, true repentance,  or pleasing the Lord.   The Catholics may need to watch who they seek to emulate, and retain their own saltiness, rather than seeking to stem the loss of divorced members, at all costs, to permissive Protestant churches.    Dr. Moore’s blog is from this conference time frame.

 

We shall start with the title to Dr. Moore’s blog, because the obfuscation of the biblical truth actually begins right there.   “Is Divorce Equivalent to Homosexuality?    The answer is “yes” and “no”.    In the first place, the manmade concept of legalized civil divorce has absolutely no meaning in God’s eyes.   Divorce’s impact in the Kingdom of God depends on its motivation.   If civilly divorcing the partner of one’s youth,  it is willful rebellion against God’s law.   If civilly divorcing someone in order to separate from an immoral subsequent union,  it is  a step in repentance, restitution and surrender to God’s law.   Either way, God is standing firmly in covenant with the original one-flesh union, which He exclusively and permanently  joined at the time of those holy vows.

BiblicalGroundsNot

We need to point out that Dr. Moore’s view is based on an explicit presumption that Jesus supported adultery as grounds for His disciples to both divorce and remarry, based on a phrase in Matthew 19:9.    Moore presumes no debate on this point, and because this view is so broadly accepted by the vast majority of the evangelical Protestant Church, he offers no biblical defense of it  in this piece.    We will therefore not lengthen our response by addressing something Moore did not argue, except to point out the significant conflict with the preponderance of other marriage scripture and church history.   All of the early church fathers of the Rome-based church up through the 4th century (Tertullian, Origen, Jerome, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Basil, Augustine) as well as Paul, instead centered the adultery discussion around the exceptionless pronouncement of Jesus in Luke 16:18 strictly forbidding both, consistent also with the tone of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount which raised the moral bar for a wide swath of Jewish life-conduct.   Marriage revisionists, beginning with clerics in the Emperor Constantine’s court, later persisted in shifting the debate to instead focus on Matthew 19:9 in order to accommodate Constantine’s ongoing adultery / polygamy, and this trend carried forward beyond the Reformation.    Dr. Moore assumes that some of the subsequent unions Jesus said were adultery, are not sinful and not adultery based on this revisionist view.

Nevertheless, God uses the Hebrew word   שָׂנֵ֣א [sa-ne] in Malachi 2:16 for detesting and intense hatred of the “putting away”- the wrongful repudiation or abandonment – שַׁלַּ֗ח [shalach] , literally “sending away”, which He states is an act of violence against one’s family.    Notice that there is no mention in Malachi of  any civil piece of paper nor an allowance granted by Moses to divorce,  many centuries after the journey through the wilderness.    Contrary to the false direction of Luther, God never intended for adjudication of covenant marriage to be a permanent matter of civil government ( 1 Cor. 6:1).

All that said, civil divorce is an easily reversible one-time event that (in isolation) is not at all comparable to the two ongoing states of sin entailed in homosexuality or unrepented, continuing adultery via remarriage while an estranged covenant spouse is living.   Marriage revisionists have grown quite accustomed to arguing (straight-faced) that the first abomination automatically confers God’s permission for the far worse abomination of trampling His holy matrimony covenant and misrepresenting His very character to the watching world.    We all know that the pagans know a bit of scripture, too, and of late they’ve grown quite vocal in letting us all know they are watching.

So, let’s suggest a more forthright title to Dr. Moore’s blog:   “Is  Legalized, Unrepented  Adultery Equivalent to Homosexuality?”   Based on the two scriptures quoted above, we can respond to the honestly-restated question, which now reflects the main issue of consequence before the eyes of God, with a well-supported and unequivocal “Yes”.     Continuing, unrepented practice of both adultery and homosexuality are God-substitutes of equal degree: idols.   Consequently, as long as either of these relationships continue, they continue in idolatrous competition with any relationship or fellowship with God.   Neither is worse than the other, both must be repented in exactly the same way.   Neither can be cleansed in any way other than cessation and permanent severance.  

1 Corinthians 6:11 goes on to say:

“Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”     (An exchange was made, idolatry was laid down for genuine  fellowship with the Most High.)

Dr. Moore opens his piece as follows:

This week my denomination, through its executive committee, voted to “disfellowship” a congregation in California that has acted to affirm same-sex sexual relationships. This sad but necessary move is hardly surprising, since this network of churches shares a Christian sexual ethic with all orthodox Christians of every denomination for 2,000 years. One of the arguments made by some, though, is that this is hypocritical since so many ministers in our tradition marry people who have been previously divorced.

In fact, “SIFC’s”  own large, conservative evangelical denomination did likewise up until 1973 with any pastor who performed a wedding ceremony where either the bride or the groom had an estranged living spouse.    The reason for that is, quite simply, a holy reverence for God’s unconditional participation in the indissoluble marriage covenant, which the bible teaches is a supernatural 3-party entity that scripture also tells us is broken only by the physical death of one of the spouses. (Ephesians 5:29-32, Romans 7:2, and 1 Cor. 7:39).    Ministers in the evangelical tradition who perform vain marriage ceremonies over people who have been previously divorced civilly, (but still bound spiritually to their 3-party original covenant), are jeopardizing their salvation and aiming two souls, if not their own, towards hell.   They are also destroying the power and witness of their church, for He is a jealous God.   He is a God who is most especially jealous of His symbols and the image they cast, of which biblical marriage is paramount.

Dr. Moore arrives at an entirely different conclusion, one that demands physical repentance only of homosexuality (even if legalized), but gives full accommodation to the continuance of adultery if it has been legalized.   “Grace” he says, is owed to the adulterer, but not to the homosexual, unless (only) their immoral and idolatrous relationship is terminated.    Let’s address the misuse of the concept of grace momentarily, but first let’s gain a proper understanding of the marriage covenant, what breaks it, and God’s revealed character toward it.   Once this is correctly understood according to the word of God, all of the rest of the fallacies laid out by Dr. Moore have proper context.

Covenant is a very deliberate choice, and by God’s very nature, a permanent choice.  Throughout His three-year public ministry Jesus very deliberately walked around announcing to us that He is our Bridegroom, and that He will never leave or forsake us, that He was going to lay down His life for us, that He was going to be spiritually responsible for us, even allowing God to punish Him for our transgressions by allowing God to break fellowship with Him, His only Son, for those agonizing moments on the cross.    His first miracle was by no accident performed at that wedding in Cana when He turned water into wine – not just a beverage, but symbolic of His blood and of covenant, of the indwelling Holy Spirit Who cannot abide in a sinful vessel .   He told us that nobody can contain new wine in old Pharisaical (Deuteronomy 24) wineskins.   At His last meal on earth before going to the cross, He very deliberately recited nearly all the traditional vows of the Jewish betrothal ceremony in order to comfort His disciples and to institute Holy Communion.   When He spoke His Revelation to the Apostle John, He again spoke of His wedding supper, the consummation event.

Ephesians chapter 5 gives us a definite glimpse that the marriage of our youth goes far beyond the civil certificate, and would permanently exist even without it.   True marriage represents the oneness of the Godhead, also the relationship between Christ and the Church, whom He will never permanently send away and never replace.    To blasphemously suggest that God would break covenant, and betray a living covenant spouse to join into an adulterous union suggests that He would allow His Own holiness to be defiled, and His faithfulness to be miscast as unfaithfulness.    In Malachi 2, when God is fiercely defending the covenant wife of the offender’s youth by withholding His fellowship from the adulterer, He could have referred to Himself as “YHWH” or “Jehovah”, but He did not.   He called Himself Elohim Tsebaoth, the God of Angel Armies, the Lord of Hosts.    God is also  El Kannah, the Jealous God, and whenever He sets up a symbol, lacing it in and out of holy scripture from Genesis to Revelation, it is a very big deal!

Next, Dr. Moore continues…

We don’t necessarily affirm this [welcoming of divorced and remarried people into their congregations] as good, but we receive these people with mercy and grace……

Anyone who has attended an evangelical church for any length of time can define these terms, mercy and grace, by rote.   Mercy is not receiving the bad consequences that we’ve earned or that we deserve from God.   Grace is receiving unmerited favor from God due to Jesus going to the cross for forgiveness of our past sins committed by us before we surrendered control of our lives to Him, while accepting His completed work on the cross and renouncing our own efforts to keep the law.    Another way to describe grace is the empowerment that regeneration gives us to keep moving toward holiness, due to the infilling of the holy spirit, in response to His mercy.   It is the empowerment to make it to the finish line without sin hardening our hearts again and causing us to fall away, as warned of repeatedly in the book of Hebrews.    Grace is a divine attribute that cannot be bestowed man to man, but only extended by men where God extends it.   Forbearance, on the other hand, tends to become confused with “grace”.   It is the patience and forgiveness Christ commanded us to have toward one another when we’ve been offended in some way.    Grace is never cowardly and silent (nor affirming) acceptance of a sinful way of life in a person, which the word of God makes clear will cost that person their place in the kingdom of God.   That kind of “grace” is actually man’s license, and it is decidedly unloving, because it leads to hell without warning.   Naturally, these words are offensive to a denomination which has embraced “once saved, always saved”, but not surprisingly, this false doctrine seems to accompany heretical teachings about divorce and remarriage.   In these last days, we can only call these brothers and sisters in the Lord back to the words of Jesus Himself,  much of whose unpalatable truth Calvin, Luther and Knox summarily rejected.   Jesus warned:

“Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.  Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.  But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved. “   Matthew 24:11-13

It is absolutely right for SBC congregations to welcome both adulterers and homosexuals into their congregations, but if they do, that local body is fully responsible for discipling them into the likeness of Christ, Who laid down His life and took up His cross.  Calvinist bodies, including the Southern Baptists, embrace the “once saved, always saved” mantra which is erroneous, in light of Peter’s instruction to “walk out your faith with fear and trembling”, and in light of Paul’s repeated warnings not to fall away, not to wander from the faith, and to finish the race.    The teaching that Christ died for present and future sins has no scriptural basis without active, ongoing mortification of those sins.   We are quite literally urged by Paul not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies.   By contrast, we are urged to confess and turn from our sins on an ongoing basis after salvation, and believers are repeatedly warned “do not be deceived” with regard to the controlling addiction of sexual sin, before being warned at least twice by Paul that this will cost them their inheritance in the kingdom of God.

 

The charge of hypocrisy is valid in some respects.   I’ve argued for years and repeatedly that Southern Baptists and other evangelicals are slow-motion sexual revolutionaries, embracing elements of the sexual revolution twenty or thirty years behind the rest of the culture. This is to our shame, and the divorce culture is the number-one indicator of this capitulation.

We would admonish that his is a much more perilous and urgent admission than Dr. Moore seems to grasp, in light of the rapidly escalating lawlessness of our times and the fully-evident meltdown of our society that resulted from outright licentiousness of the evangelical church in its unwillingness to call sin sin, and deal with it as Christ and Paul commanded.   The notion that it will take this cowering bride 20 or 30 years to embrace homosexuality in light of the persecution that is building at and within our borders is absurd.  We would further remind historically that the immoral compromise with God’s definition of marriage (Matt. 19:4-6) did not originate doctrinally for the Southern Baptists in the 1960’s but with Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and Knox in the 16th century.

It seems furthermore ridiculous to think that a church or denomination who wouldn’t risk offending congregants even for the sake of their souls over enforced societal normalization of adultery would suddenly develop an appetite and the discipline to weather persecution over enforced normalization of homosexuality as long as they cling to a belief of “once saved, always saved.”    After all, “grace” will cover it, and Jesus’ death paid for all present and future sins  – so insisting on physical repentance from remarriage adultery is “legalism”.

Legalism..huh

The preaching on divorce has been muted and hesitating all too often in our midst.

As we’ve just demonstrated, it’s a very good thing that it has been “muted” in many churches, for it has also been heretically distorted and false, when it does occur.   Better to have muted teaching than loud teaching that defies Luke 16:18 by claiming that an ongoing state of sin doesn’t persist in adulterous civil remarriages, or put forth blasphemous slander against the very character of God by denying His character revelation that He never breaks or abandons an original marriage covenant.   Better for such a  compromised pastor to remain silent in his deception than falsely claim from the pulpit that exiting immoral civil unions is “repeat sin” rather than the repentance and restitution it actually is.   Or to blaspheme that a Holy God would enter into “covenant” with adultery.   His position is very clear.   In Malachi 2, He says “I stand as a witness between you and the wife of your youth…she IS (not was) your partner, the companion of your marriage covenant.”   In Numbers 23:19, He says of Himself, “I am not a man that I should lie, nor a son of man that I should change My mind.  Do I speak, and not act?   Do I promise, and not fulfill?”

We love what Sam Crabtree, Executive Pastor of the Salem Baptist Church said  in the blog DesiringGod, April 9, 2014:
“We are free to divorce when Jesus divorces the Church, which is never. (Even the divorce in Isaiah 50 is not a divorce from those he predestined, called, justified, and glorified, but rather a temporary action taken against ethnic Israel, who was never en masse the true bride in the first place.).    We are free to remarry when Jesus remarries a bride other than the elect bride, which is not as long as the spouse lives.”    AMEN!

Continuing with Dr. Moore….

Sometimes this is due to what the Bible calls “fear of man,” ministers and leaders afraid of angering divorced people (or their relatives) in power in congregations. Sometimes it’s due to the fact that divorce simply seems all too normal in this culture; it doesn’t shock us anymore.     Exactly, Dr. Moore!

The fear of man brings a snare,
But he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted.    Proverbs 29:25

Continuing…

…there are arguably some circumstances where divorce and remarriage are biblically permitted. Most evangelical Christians acknowledge that sexual immorality can dissolve a marital union, and that innocent party is then free to remarry (Matt. 5:32). The same is true, for most, for abandonment (1 Cor. 7:11-15). If the church did what we ought, our divorce rate would be astoundingly lowered, since vast numbers of divorces do not fit into these categories. Still, we acknowledge that the category of a remarried person after divorce does not, on its face, indicate sin.

Dr. Moore is here arguing with Jesus Himself when he makes his last fallacious assertion.   It matters not one whit what “most evangelical Christians” opine.   All that matters is what Jesus actually commanded.    One day, He’s going to ask, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord but do not do what I say?”

Luke 16:18:  18 “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery.

Matthew 5:31-32:  31 “It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; 32 but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.“

Jesus made this statement in the midst of His lengthy Sermon on the Mount, where He talked extensively about suffering for the kingdom of God, where He completely abrogated numerous points in the Pharisaical Mosaic law that embellished the Ten Commandments to the point of conflicting with them, and where He was unquestionably raising the moral bar, requiring forgiveness and reconciliation, and demanding that we keep our hearts clean and soft.   Against this backdrop, the street-speak version of what He said in this passage Matthew 5:32 is:

“You married a ‘Ho’ you say?   Too bad!   You [are] one-flesh with her and I’m also a party to that, until one of you ain’t no more .  So, if you kick her out and run, even if you get a piece of paper from the rabbi, you makin’ her a ‘Ho’ if she ain’t one already!”

Permission to divorce for adultery?   Don’t think so, dawg!    Permission to marry someone else?   Not unless you want a wife and a concubine, and not if you want Me to bless it!   I just got done telling you that if you say one unworthy word about her,  you are in danger of hell, and if you so much as reach for another woman, you’re at strong risk of wishing for all eternity you had cut off that hand first!

The Greek tense used here for  “commits adultery” is vitally important as well, but some scripture revisionists like to falsely assert, like Moore, that even if the marriage was sinful, it’s “still a marriage” or “the adultery is only a one-time act, covered by grace”.    If that were so, let me suggest that the One Who never spoke an idle word would have saved His breath for something important rather than repeat it twice!    Jesus used the present-indicative tense to refer to an ongoing state of adultery.   This is not a marriage in anything but the 2-party civil sense, and it doesn’t become one just because the parties are “sorry” but do not terminate the relationship.   The original marriage(s) still stand(s) undissolved!  There is a difference between being sorry for the evil consequences of transgression, and being sorry because fellowship with God is broken, leading in the latter situation to removal of the competing idol.   Adultery, and any form of idolatry always leads to a hard heart, which leads to enmity with God and, if not corrected, eternal separation from Him.    This is the reason John the Baptist told King Herod, an unbeliever civilly married to another unbeliever who remained the covenant wife of his brother, “it is not lawful for you to have her.”  (Matt. 14:4), and showing, as well, there is also no exception for spiritual condition.

Dealing now with the inexcusable misuse of 1 Cor. 7:15, this too comes courtesy of Paul in the midst of a passage that was teaching exactly the opposite of a “right” to divorce and remarry after abandonment.   For that very reason, remarriage is not even mentioned in this chapter.   In verses 10 and 11, Paul has stated that the Lord commands  the husband not to divorce his wife (no exceptions mentioned), and the wife not to separate from her husband, but if she does separate, to remain unmarried or be reconciled with her husband.   The chapter ends with verse 39 reiterating the reason:  the marriage bond δέδεται (dedetai) “deo” cannot be broken by anything but physical death.    It is no coincidence that Paul’s teaching taken in correct context correlates more so to Luke 16:18 than to any other gospel rendering.   Several church fathers’ writings, such as Tertullian, give extensive account of the two of them travelling and ministering together,  along with Paul’s mentorship of Luke as eyewitness to Christ’s teaching.

220px-Tertullian

Aside from the obvious context issue, 1 Cor. 7:15 has for centuries suffered significant Greek language translation abuse, with several of the words in that isolated verse, including the words “departs” and “bound”, that are best resolved by looking up Romans 7:2-3, 1 Cor. 7:15 and 1 Cor. 7:39 in a Greek interlinear text tool.    Upon doing this, it becomes clear that the word δεδούλωται (dedoulōtai) or “douloo” is not the word for marriage bond at all, but means “compelled to meet the absent spouse’s needs”, rather than follow Christ with single-minded focus.   Consistent with the rest of scripture, abandonment indeed does not break the indissoluble covenant marriage bond, either.

If the church “did what we ought”,  pastors would immediately cease performing weddings over anyone with an estranged living covenant spouse – no excuses.   That’s what the Assemblies of God did up to 1973, until unilateral divorce became the domineering blight on the land.   The immorality of the world system and culture should never drive doctrine or practice in the church!
With actual souls on the line, if the church “did what we ought”,  pastors would start telling their flock that the only biblical grounds for divorce is to undo falsely-sanctified, legalized adultery so that they can go reconcile with the spouse of their youth, as Hosea did with Gomer.  If the church “did what we ought”, false doctrine would be rewritten and seminary courses on marriage returned to a biblical basis based on full and faithful application of the laws of hermeneutics.   Yes, those actions would indeed cause the divorce rate (and, most likely,  lukewarm membership in the body of Christ) to precipitously drop , but more importantly, it would restore power and witness to the church which has been missing for centuries.   In the two scriptures Dr. Moore cites to claim a “biblical justification” for remarriage, Matthew 5:32 and 1 Cor. 7:15, the mere application of just one of the “5-C’s” of hermeneutics (Context) would immediately debunk his perennially popular, ear-tickling assertion.   See above.

From this point on, we’ve probably made our case where addressing the remaining presumptions in Dr. Moore’s blog becomes redundant, but now that we’ve laid the essential groundwork, we soldier on to a few more points.   We’ll ignore a few, too, because they are too irrelevant to bother addressing.

Continuing…

The second issue, though, is what repentance looks like in these cases. Take the worst-case scenario of an unbiblically divorced and remarried couple. Suppose this couple repents of their sin and ask to be received, or welcomed back, into the church. What does repentance look like for them? They have, in this scenario, committed an adulterous act (Matt. 5:32-33). Do they repent of this adultery by doing the same sinful action again, abandoning and divorcing one another?

How embarrassing it must be to these churches, who have “married” people into soul-endangering adultery, when with increasing frequency, the Lord mercifully brings full reconciliation between the original covenant spouses!   In my own church, a covenant couple who has been divorced for decades is in their 80’s and dating again, taking care of each other, and coming to church together for the first time over the past two years.    We published an amazing story a few weeks ago that made national news when a man, divorced for 43 years took an engagement ring into Wal-Mart and wooed back the wife of his youth!   It has been well-documented that there is a 60-80% failure rate for serial legalized adultery that builds in direct proportion to the number of adulterous civil-only marriages one undertakes, and indications seem to be that civil “marriage” entered into from adulterous cohabitation fails at a 97% rate.   Yet that doesn’t seem to stop the harlot church from demonizing the covenant spouse (who actually has God’s intense favor), nor from treating him or her like an interloper in many churches because they continue to wear their wedding rings, to  obey 1 Cor. 7:11 and to take a biblical stand for the restoration of their covenant relationship,  most importantly,  the errant spouse’s very soul  following adulterous remarriage.   God is jealous for His symbols, and for the soundness of the generations of their covenant family, and for their souls.   In many cases, God glorifies Himself in restoring two marriages as a result of such repentance, and He snatches 3 or 4 people from the fire in such cases!   Any bloodguilt from “breaking up [non-covenant] families”  falls right back on the false shepherds who ignored God’s word and abused their ordination by immorally joining one person to another’s spouse in direct conflict with Luke 16:18.

Given the scriptural fact that nothing breaks the marriage covenant short of physical death, there is no need to carve out a “worst case scenario” for hypothetical purposes, as Dr. Moore suggests.   God has laid down and clearly defined the seventh commandment.   Violation thereof is violation thereof, regardless of the circumstances.    Repentance looks exactly the same as for any other sin:  cessation and restitution.    Failure to repent leads to an ever-hardening heart, continued idolatry and continued broken fellowship with God.    The act of repentance is hard, so hard that the apostate church’s utter lack of remorse for their part in fostering serial adultery is shocking, to say the least!    But the understanding of how to repent is not hard at all.    As long as these pastors keep performing weddings over biblical adultery, this entire line of argument is incredibly shallow and disingenuous!   We would set up an entirely different “worst case scenario” and pose this hypothetical to Dr. Moore:   a civilly-married homosexual couple has been born again, and they realize they are living in sin, so they come to you asking how to repent.   They have “been together” for 15 years and have children,  two through depriving the covenant parent custody after a civil, unilateral divorce that God does not recognize, and the other child through renting somebody’s womb.   Are you going to tell them that breaking up that “family” is a “repeat sin”,  (so do they repent of this sodomy by doing the same sinful action again, abandoning and divorcing one another? )  The obvious answer for both scenarios is “only if they, and we as their church body, care about their eternal destinies. ”

 

In most cases, the church recognizes that they should acknowledge their past sin and resolve to be faithful from now on to one another. Why is this the case? It’s because their marriages may have been sinfully entered into, but they are, in fact, marriages.

In most cases?   In what case would the church not recognize their (and the organizational) past sin?     Furthermore, adultery, covetousness and discontent are hard habits to break, because if the baggage they brought with them was actually shed, the irreplaceable, supernatural one-flesh condition naturally draws a repented heart back to their covenant spouse, because that is always God’s will and way.    For all of the reasons already laid out above, we will agree that these are indeed 2-party civil marriages, for so says the piece of paper, but it is only in this sense they are “marriages” and adultery.   The very same could be said of legalized homosexual unions, however.    Neither will ever constitute holy matrimony in God’s eyes, but rather unrepented  adultery, exactly as Jesus said.    1 Corinthians 6:9 applies equally to these civil unions where God is not a covenant party, as it does to the practice of homosexuality.

Jesus redemptively exposed the sin of the Samaritan woman at the well by noting that the man she was living with was not her husband. “You have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband” (Jn. 4:18). It could be that her husbands all died successively, but not necessarily.

Just like today, this woman most likely had quite a complicated mix of covenant husband, deceased partners, cohabitation and / or legalized adultery partners.    The fact remains that if the husband of her youth continued to live, all subsequent relationships were adulterous, and her present relationship was definitely adulterous.    If the husband of her youth was deceased, it’s possible a subsequent husband still living is now her estranged covenant husband.   We can’t speculate and there’s really no need to.   Again, looking at John 4:18 in the Greek interlinear tool, we find that one of the two words used here for “husband” is quite familiar –ἄνδρας (andros),  and ἀνήρ (aner) , either of which could also simply mean “man” or “companion”.   There is are numerous other Greek words for “husband” used in other New Testament passages, but not used here.  It is impossible to speculate from this passage which of her relationships beyond the first one constituted covenant marriage, and which were mere civil unions blessed by the rabbi under an outdated Mosaic “bill of divorcement” law that Jesus was about to abrogate. (See above).   Therefore, there is no more basis here for using this passage to support divorce and remarriage than there is in using Jacob, Elkanah,  Solomon or David’s experiences to support polygamy.    Jesus declared new rules as a result of the Sermon on the Mount.

Even if these marriages were entered into sinfully in the first place, they are in fact marriages because they signify the Christ/church bond of the one-flesh union (Eph. 5:22-31), embedded in God’s creation design of male and female together (Mk. 10:6-9).

As discussed above, God remains exclusively in the first covenant, rendering none of the above true of any attempt at remarriage,  except of remarriage solely following widowhood.   If civil marriages are entered into adulterously while the original covenant is unbroken by death, they can’t be marriage and adultery in God’s eyes at the same time, for that violates His holiness and misrepresents His faithfulness.   Jesus made it clear in Luke 16:18 that this is ongoing adultery not marriage.  The more-relevant scriptures, on which the Eph. 5 and Mark 10 scriptures cited by Moore actually depend, are:

Matthew 19: 4 -6 and 8:  And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” ….8 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.

Mark 10: 6-9:  But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. 7 For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, 8 and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”

Ephesians 5:31 echoes this, right after saying that any man who hates his covenant wife (obviously out of a hard heart, and due to the irreversible one-flesh connection exclusively  indwelt by God) hates himself,  hates his own body.   This is because a civil piece of paper cannot separate one-flesh or make it two again.   Physically and spiritually impossible, this is.   It is clear that what was established in God’s creation design per Genesis 2:24, to which Jesus was resetting the moral compass, is the husband and wife of youth being joined for life, and never again to be two separate people in God’s eyes.    God doesn’t issue “ideals” or “intents” with a Plan B- we are talking about the 7th commandment here.   This is the basis on which Jesus took the no-excuses hard line he did in Luke 16:18.

 

Same-sex relationships do not reflect that cosmic mystery, and thus by their very nature signify something other than the gospel. The question of what repentance looks like in this case is to flee immorality (1 Cor. 6:18), which means to cease such sexual activity in obedience to Christ (1 Cor. 6:11). A state, or church decree of these relationships as marital do not make them so.

All of what Moore has flatly stated about homosexual relationships applies in exactly the same fashion to the very relationships Jesus unambiguously described in Luke 16:18.   In fact,  those verses about fleeing immorality and honoring Him with our bodies were originally written to primarily address heterosexual sin including concubinage, false divorce, prostitution and polygamy.   Moore’s last statement is particularly salient with regard to remarriage adultery, in light of what Jesus said in Matthew 19:6 and 8.    Jesus made it crystal clear that man was never given authority to dissolve covenant marriage, nor to solemnize adulterous unions.

 

Instead, our response ought to be a vision of marriage defined by the gospel, embodied in local congregations. This means preaching with both truth and grace, with accountability for entering marriages and, by the discipline of the church, for keeping those vows. We don’t remedy our past sins by adding new ones.

So long as the definition of marriage is corrected to the  Matthew 19:6 scriptural basis, we couldn’t agree more.   However, once again, Moore’s last statement is particularly salient.   The SBC may legitimately lay claim to that declaration the moment they stop creating new cases of sanctified adultery through performing immoral weddings and counseling civil divorce on fabricated “biblical grounds”.

We conclude by returning to the (adjusted) question:  “Is  Legalized, Unrepented  Adultery Equivalent to Homosexuality?”

For purposes of restoring the church’s witness, restoring her power,  overcoming her enemies, for being pure and ready to meet her Bridegroom in the clouds, for withstanding the persecution of the last days, and for coming through the evaluation Jesus applies in Revelation 2 and 3, we say, yes indeed, they absolutely are equivalent.   Civil divorce, however,  is only equivalent to the extent that the root is equivalent to the fruit.

The attitude of evangelical churches in refusing to admit that remarriage after divorce is always biblically immoral has created an enormous obstacle over the past 40 years to driving any sort of godly family law reform that could rebalance constitutional protections between offending petitioners and non-offending, religiously objecting respondents.   The latter suffers oppressive religious discrimination in a myriad of circumstances as they are invariably punished, and made an example of,  by the courts for taking a biblical moral stand.   Pro-family, religious liberty legal ministries turn a deaf ear when embattled Christian spouses seek help in challenging the constitutionality of unilateral divorce, because these ministries don’t accept that it is morally unacceptable before God to remarry,  hence they don’t readily recognize the extent to which unilateral divorce laws burden a faithful believer’s free religious exercise and right-of-conscience.    Ideally, the government would not have any jurisdiction whatsoever over marriage, but the church would govern it righteously as Christ intended (1 Cor. 6 :1-2).    The government is an exceedingly unworthy steward of holy matrimony, and the harlot church no longer accepts her Christ-assigned accountability!

Additional resource:   Milton T. Wells, Does Divorce Dissolve Marriage?   Eastern Bible Institute (1957), available through Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, MO   (archives@ag.org)

 

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Discipleship, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

ONE-FLESH AND SPIRITUAL WARFARE

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ValentinesBlog2015 Have a blessed Valentine’s Day, covenant marriage standers!

 

When the hour had come, He reclined at the table, and the apostles with Him.  And He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer;  for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” 17 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.”   And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”    And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.   (Luke 22:14-20)

 

“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.  In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.   If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.”  (John 14:1-4)

 

“He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.   This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:28-32)   “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.   For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother,  and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Mark 10: 8)

 

When Jesus shared His last intimate moments over a Passover seder meal in the upper room with His beloved disciples, He did something very symbolic–apart from washing their feet.   He spoke to them in some very intimate and familiar terms which they all would have instantly recognized, for He re-enacted the traditional Jewish betrothal [“kiddushin”] ceremony, reinforcing His role as the Bridegroom to His Church by invoking the timeless word script (bolded above) spoken by Hebrew bridegrooms for centuries, so that it would forever be “married” to the sacrament of communion He was establishing.

 

Lord, may these words this stander shares this day be only the words sent by the Holy Spirit, and may they powerfully encourage all other covenant standers on this Valentines Day.  In Jesus’ name, I pray.  Amen.

 

I was in the early months of a project assignment in London when I found out that instead of arranging his work so that he could join me there, my husband had become involved with someone who coveted my God-given helpmate assignment.  She coveted my assignment  instead of the one assigned to her,  which I later found out she had forsaken and abandoned some 20 years earlier.    The bad news of my beloved’s betrayal arrived in a credit card statement and was later confirmed by the further investigation of our adult children.

I was blessed to be in fellowship while in the UK in a small nondenominational  country village church,  a collection really, of a few very warm, large families who loved the Lord.    One day in my pew in that quaint little rock church, I was preparing to receive communion.    As the Scottish pastor richly spoke the words of Jesus from Luke 22 over the bread and the wine,  the Holy Spirit strongly impressed on me on that day nine years ago, that the communion elements corresponded perfectly to the permanent one-flesh relationship with my husband (bread) and to our indissoluable marriage covenant (wine) of which Jesus was a party.   Not only that, but because of our one-flesh relationship,  I would be taking communion for the benefit of my life partner who was now running from his once-close walk with God.   I  would be doing so until my beloved was back in fellowship with his King and could resume doing so for himself.    This was now my second stand for what was at that time a 31-year marriage.   During my first stand, 25 years earlier, the Lord did not speak this to me, because my beloved had not yet come to faith in Jesus.    We are told not to eat the bread or drink of the cup unworthily, but to do so only in self-examination and remembrance of the Bridegroom (1 Cor. 12:27).

 

Most covenant standers, we who know that the Living God permanently and uniquely inhabits our pure union with the husband or wife of our youth,  we know that the Jewish custom around betrothal [“kiddushin”] is far different from our western tradition.   We know that Mary, mother of Jesus, was legally Joseph’s wife as a result of becoming engaged to him, though they had not yet come together.    Few of us know the rich details that go into the Jewish ritual of covenant engagement, so we cannot fully appreciate the deeply significant and comforting ceremonial words that Jesus spoke in the upper room before He said, “this do in remembrance of Me”.

At the Jewish betrothal ceremony, which usually took place over a meal in the bride’s home, a marriage contract [“Ketubah”}, was presented to the father of the bride.  The Ketubah consists of all the bridegroom’s promises to his bride. The bride cherishes her Ketubah.    ( A loving sister-in-law once decoupaged our wedding invitation onto a plaque that was given to us at our wedding, which has hung on the wall of every new home of ours for forty years.)   We in the Church, too, have a Ketubah from our Bridegroom.   Our Ketubah (God’s Word) shows us all we  are entitled to as the Bride of Christ.    All, not some, but all the promises in God’s Word, are for us.   As the Bride of Christ, we are entitled to them — they are part of our Ketubah.

At this ceremony the bride was given an opportunity to accept or reject the proposal.    If she accepted, she usually remained silent    Rebekah, however, chose in faith to verbalize her desire leave her home to go with Abraham’s servant be wed to Isaac, whom she had not yet seen or spoken with (Genesis 24:58).   After the terms of the Ketubah were accepted, a cup of wine was shared to seal the marriage covenant.    In Matthew 26:29, Jesus said, “I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s Kingdom.”  

The bridegroom would speak the ceremonial words sealing  the covenant before the family witnesses, “I go to my father’s house to prepare a place for you.  I will not drink of this cup again until I drink it new  with  you in my father’s house”.      The cup that Jesus took at His last Passover on earth was the cup of the new marriage covenant with His Bride.   In Luke 22:20, Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you.”    The second cup of wine would be partaken many  months, perhaps a  year or more later at the wedding supper.

Once the marriage covenant was sealed, the bridegroom left his bride to return to his father’s house where he would spend a year or so preparing the living quarters for his bride before returning for her.   It was actually up to the father to decree when the quarters were acceptably complete and the bridegroom could go after his bride to bring her back for the wedding supper and consummation of the marriage.    When Jesus said that only His Father knew the day and the hour He was to return for us, He was also likening that day to the wedding day to come.   The bride, therefore, knew with certainty that her groom would be returning for her, but did not know when, so she waited in faith and in preparedness.  

 

We all know what a powerful spiritual weapon we have in the shed blood of Jesus!

Nothing is more important than family restoration, because in it is tied up our  loved ones’ very souls.   In the same way that regular ministry can’t take precedence over our families and its generations, standers ministry is no exception.   But, in Hebrews we are sternly warned that a hardened heart that won’t repent will cause us to walk away from our salvation, and in some cases, run out of time and grace.   We must never give up praying for that not to happen.   It’s on my heart every time I’m taking communion – the Lord showed me years ago that as my beloved’s ONLY covenant one-flesh, I’m taking communion with and for him while he is spiritually unable to (the unbelieving/backslidden husband is sanctified by his believing wife)! 

 

The one-flesh relationship is just as powerful as a spiritual weapon.

I also invoke this uniquely-appointed spiritual weapon against the spiritual ravager of my beloved’s soul whenever singing a praise chorus with “I” or “me” in the lyrics, but I sing “we [one flesh]” turning that chorus into a golden bowl of prayerful incense that rises to the throne of El Elyon (God Most High), and reminding all the spiritual host of God’s indissoluable covenant with my beloved and me,  as I’ve done since way back in my first stand for marriage restoration:

“Draw [us] close to You [as one flesh],  never let [us] go.   [We] lay it all down again, to hear You say that [we’re] Your friend.   This is [our] desire.  No one else will do.   ‘Cause nothing else can take Your place, to feel the warmth of Your embrace.   Help [us] find a way to bring [us] back to You [as one flesh].    You’re all [we] want.   You’re all [we’ve] ever needed.   You’re all [we] want.   Help [us] know You are near. “

 

“Take [us] by the outer court, and through the holy place   Past the brazen altar, Lord [we] long to see Your face          Pass [us] by the crowds of people and priest who sing Your praise.  Lord, [we] hunger and thirst for Your righteousness, and it’s only found in one place…. Take [us] into the Holy of Holies, take [us] in by the Blood of the Lamb [as one-flesh].   Take [us] into the Holy of Holies, take a coal, cleanse [our] lips, here [we are]. “

 

In that one act of worship, a stander is wielding at least three spiritual weapons:  praise of God, the sword of the spirit, the blood of the lamb,  and invoking the unique one-flesh relationship that sanctifies the prodigal spouse, according to God’s word.   This provision for sanctification by the indissoluable one-flesh relationship is not just for estranged spouses, but also for those intact homes where a beloved spouse is estranged from Christ because he or she has not ever come to saving faith.

 

Could this be why Satan’s deception is so strong over the apostate church which teaches in direct contradiction of God’s word, that divorce and remarriage (legalized and church-blessed adultery)  is justified due to being “unequally yoked” ? “But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.  And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away.   For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.”      (1 Corinthians 7:12-14)    

 

Just as covenant marriage perfectly represents the Godhead (Father, Son, Holy Spirit / Christ, Husband, Wife), holy communion perfectly represents covenant marriage.   When Jesus took the cup and began to speak,  He deliberately chose to use the Hebrew ceremonial words for the betrothal ceremony in Luke 22:15-20.  The covenant and the one-flesh relationship.   The marriage supper of the Lamb.   I’m urging that covenant standers should never skip communion, and should never take it without a strong consciousness of the spouse of your youth, otherwise you are missing a potent and uniquely-appointed spiritual counter-attack, one that you are the only person on the face of the earth who can perform.   Grasping this truth alone would separate counterfeit , adulterous stands from authentic ones, and save a lot of “quitter’s anguish”.  

 

This revelation by the Holy Spirit instilled in me a righteous indignation at all forms of desecration of God’s definition of marriage, both the front and back ends  of Matt. 19:4-6,   and it called me to a purpose to invest my gifts in restoring His kingdom to this holy realm.  I have captured only a few elements of the rich custom that our Lord walked out as a metaphor establishing Himself as the one who prepares a place for us, and is coming for us.     This link will be helpful to standers who would like to  go  deeper in their understanding.

 

This stander is going to mark Valentine’s Day 2015 with a private communion ceremony.    Satan possibly has plans for my one-flesh to attempt to legalize his adultery that day with a hollow counterfeit, someone else’s covenant wife,  in a civil contract that will forever lack this powerful covenant blessing with the presence of El Kanna (our Jealous God).

 

Father God, in the Garden You said to our spiritual enemy: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.   He will crush your head, and you will strike his feet.”    We thank and praise You, Lord, that it’s not the other way around!   When You formed the covenant helpmate out of the rib of her husband, You were already putting in place the divine provision for this,  and when You declared over them “no longer two but one flesh, let no man put asunder”,  You were sealing them in a spiritual weapon far greater than any carnal weapon the evil one could form against the holy covenant that stands sealed in Your shed blood.    Thank You that You are not a man that You should lie, nor a son of man that You should change your mind, but that which You promise, You, by character, are flawlessly faithful to fulfill.   May this word comfort the hearts of those who are permanently faithful to their covenant with the One who is faithful and true!   In Jesus’ name, amen.

(Scriptures in prayer:  Genesis 3:15,  Genesis 2:21-23,  Matthew 19:5-6, Isaiah 54:17, Luke 22:20, Numbers 23:19,  Revelation 19:11)

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Discipleship, Marriage Restoration

Deut. 24:1-4 written in STORY FORM

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by Sharon Henry, guest blogger

Sharon is a Christ-follower who while not previously married, wed a divorced man whose covenant wife had divorced him and had remarried adulterously.   After 17 years, she became convicted that her civil marriage was biblically adulterous because she realized that despite the errant teaching of the contemporary evangelical church, that her husband’s original sacred matrimony covenant with God remained unbroken by anything but death.    She made the painful decision to come out of that otherwise happy marriage in 2012, releasing her civil husband back to the opportunity for reconciliation with the covenant wife of his youth as God commands.    It was a deep act of laying down her own life so that her beloved noncovenant husband might not die in the sin of remarriage adultery.  Sharon maintains, based on a corrected interpretation of scripture, that such an act of obedience is not compounding the sin as many pastors today like to counsel, but is the very essence of repentance.   (What pastor would counsel a homosexual, in light of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, to stay in a sodomous “marriage” so as not to commit a second “sin”?) 

 Sharon has since devoted herself to a deep understanding of Hebrew and Greek scriptural translation with overlooked cultural context, and she faithfully stands with those who obey 1 Cor. 7:10-11,  encouraging them in restoration of their covenant marriages and redemption of their prodigal spouses.    She addresses one of the most commonly misapplied scriptures  that today is used by the apostate evangelical church to rationalize the continuation of noncovenant civil marriages.   She does so out of deep concern for souls.  – SIFC  FB profile 7xtjw

 

March 23, 2013 at 6:02pm

DEUTERONOMY 24:1-4 does not address a particular case, but general scenarios of Jewish husbands wanting to dispose of a fully married wife. The Hebrews learned to divorce during their 400 years in Egypt and fine-tuned it to divorce for any cause, even for falling out of love with a wife (Deut. 24:3).  God does not condone a divorce for hate or incompatibility.

 

THREE TYPES OF DIVORCES FROM UNLAWFUL MARRIAGES:

There are three types of (unlawful) marriages that are forbidden by Moses. (DABAR means commandment.)

1. DABAR, Z’NUT (playing the harlot) Deut. 22:13-22 If a betrothed wife deceives her husband and is found not to be a virgin on her wedding night, she is stoned or divorced.

2. DABAR ERVAH (incest) Deut. 24:1 Torah ervah, or doubtful ervah (if the relationship is not clear, then he may divorce her). Ervah occurs 54 times of which 31 times it refers to incest.

3. DABAR (Deut./DABARIM 7:3-4) against marrying idolatrous foreign wives (Deut. 7:3-4, 11, Ezra 10 – divorced).

 

Otherwise, if a man divorces his wife not according to these Mosaic Law, the courts would penalize him with a hefty divorce settlement to the forsaken wife.

 

Read the scenario put into story form of a man (fictitious name, but true to the text) who has second thoughts about the wife he married based on Deut. 24:1-4, Jewish marriage customs, and courts.

 

His bride, Tamar, is from a good Hebrew family, and was a virgin when Joe took her and married her. She is not that beautiful, but neither was he that handsome. She soon fell into disfavor with him and Joe decided to divorce her, but he is a young man with little money. The Court demands a costly settlement if a wife is put away for frivolous reasons and not according to the law. Joe thinks, “Which law should I use? Tamar is not a foreigner, so I can’t use that law.” He thought about bringing an evil name upon Tamar for not being a virgin, (DABAR, Z’NUT) but her parents would bring forth the token of virginity (the wedding nightgown) and he would be whipped 40 strokes save one, and fined 100 shekels of silver. This made Joe think again.

 

Maybe he could use the DABAR ERVAH law to divorce her. According to the Rabbis, “These are the forbidden unions that stem from ervah (incest), those from the Torah (Old Testament) and those from the rabbis. Those that are from the Torah, kiddushin (betrothal/marriage contract) does not take effect. Those that are from the rabbis, kiddushin does take effect and you must deliver a get (divorce). And likewise a betrothal with a doubtful ervah also needs a get (divorce).”  He researches Tamar’s genealogy and lo and behold!  His grandmother married her great uncle. Tamar’s husband now goes to the court and asks for a get (a divorce), based on a doubtful ervah, that their marriage is a possible incestuous union.  It is granted and Tamar is sent out of the house with a writ of divorcement.

 

An older man marries Tamar, now a young divorcee with no children. Perfect! Soon his heart turns away from her. She is unlucky in love. Since he is well-to-do, he can afford to pay the high divorce settlement required by the court. He pleads no law, but just pays the divorce settlement to get rid of her. Tamar’s former husband hears that she is divorced again, and in the money. He thinks, ”I need her money to start a business. I will push her buttons and win her back!”  So you may ask, “What about the incest issue and their doubtful ervah?” That doesn’t stop Joe. His greed has taken over again. He determines to remarry her, regardless whether she is a close relative or a “doubtful ervah [kin].”  Then he hears the bad news!  Deut. 24:4!  He can’t take her back! He divorced her for Incest, so she is defiled to him. He is prevented from twisting the law to fulfill his greed and ever changing heart. He is told that it is an abomination to misuse God’s laws for personal gain or for frivolous divorce!

 

Deut 24 cultural depiction

 

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Discipleship, Marriage Restoration, Spiritual Warfare

31 Days of Prayer for My Husband

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Revive Our Hearts / Nancy Leigh DeMoss

 

Day 1 – Lord, I pray that my husband will grow spiritually and consider his accountability before You. I pray that he will guard his heart by developing spiritual disciplines – Bible reading and study, prayer, meditation, scripture memorization, etc. (2 Peter 3:18; Prov. 4:23)

Day 2 – Lord, I pray that my husband’s relationship with You and Your Word will bear fruit in his life. I pray that he will be a man of wisdom and understanding, fearing the Lord. (Prov. 3:7, 9:10; Ps. 112:1)

Day 3 – I pray that my husband will be humble and quick to agree with You about his sin. I pray that his heart will be tender toward Your voice, oh Lord. (Ps. 51:2-4; Micah 6:8)

Day 4 – Dear Lord, I pray that my husband will grow in leadership skills in our relationship – protecting and providing for us. I pray that he will lead us wisely and love us sacrificially, so that God will be glorified in our marriage. (Eph. 5:25-29; Col. 3:19)

Day 5 – Lord, I pray that my husband will be faithful to his wedding vows. I pray that he will have a desire to cultivate a stronger relationship with me as a sign of his loyalty and commitment, and as a picture of Christ’s love for the Church. (Prov. 20:6; Gen. 2:24)

Day 6 – Heavenly Father, I pray that my husband will love righteousness and hate wickedness, especially the evils of the culture. I pray that he will recognize and avoid wickedness in his own life, and if necessary, take a clear, strong stand against evil. (Prov. 27:12; John 17:15, 1 Cor. 10:12-13)

Day 7 – I pray that my husband will safeguard his heart against inappropriate relationships with the opposite sex. Lord, let his heart be pure and undivided in his commitment to me. (Prov. 6:23-24, 26; Rom 13:14)

Day 8 – Lord, I pray that my husband will work hard to provide for our family, to the best of his ability. I pray that the character qualities necessary for a successful career and ministry will be a growing part of his character – persistence, decisiveness, strength, an analytical mind, organizational skills, positive relationships with people, determination, etc. (Rom. 12:11; 1 Cor. 15:58)

Day 9 – Lord, I pray that my husband will handle finances wisely, will have discernment concerning budgeting and investments, and will be a good steward of his money in regard to giving to the Lord’s work. I pray that money will not become a source of discord in our family. (Prov. 23:4-5; Rom 12:13; Heb. 13:5)

Day 10 – Lord, I pray my husband will cultivate strong integrity, and not compromise his convictions. I pray that his testimony will be genuine, that he will be honest in his business dealings, and will never do anything that he needs to hide from others. (Prov. 20:7; 1 Tim.1:5,3:7; Eph.6:10-12)

Day 11 – Lord, I pray that my husband will have a humble, teachable spirit and a servant’s heart before the Lord. I pray that he will listen to You and desire to do Your will. (Prov. 15:33; Eph.1:9; 4:30)

Day 12 – Lord, I pray that my husband will yield his sexual drive to the Lord and practice self-control. I pray that our sexual intimacy together will be fresh, positive, and a reflection of selfless love. (Prov. 5:15,18; 1 Cor. 7:3, Song of Solomon 7:10)

Day 13 – I pray that my husband will use practical skills to build our family and make wise decisions for our welfare. I pray that he will serve unselfishly. (Gal. 5:13; Phil. 2:3-4)

Day 14 – Lord, I pray that my husband will speak words that build up our family and reflect a heart of love. I pray that he will not use filthy language. (Prov. 18:21; Eph. 4:29)

Day 15 – I pray that my husband will choose his friends wisely. Lord, I pray that You will bring him men who will encourage his accountability before God, and will not lead him into sin. (Prov. 13:20; Prov. 27:17)

Day 16 – I pray that my husband will choose healthy, God-honoring activities. Lord, I pray that he will not give in to any questionable habits or hobbies, but that he will experience freedom in holiness as he yields to the Spirit’s control. (1 Cor. 6:12, 10:31; 2 Tim. 2:4)

Day 17 – Lord, I pray that my husband will enjoy his manliness as he patterns his life after You and strong men in the faith. I pray for his physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual strength. (Eph. 3:16; 1 Peter 2:21; 1 Cor. 10:11)

Day 18 – Lord, I pray that my husband will have an eternal perspective – living in light of eternity. I pray, Father, that he will reject materialism and temporal values and put God first in his life. (Matt. 6:33; Deut. 6:5; Eph. 5:16; Ps. 90:12)

Day 19 – Heavenly Father, I pray that my husband will be patient and a man of peace. I pray that he will not give in to anger, but will allow the Holy Spirit to control his responses. (Rom. 14:19; Ps. 34:14)

Day 20 – God, I pray that my husband will yield his mind and thoughts to the Lord. I pray that he will not entertain immoral or impure thoughts, and that he will resist the temptation to indulge in pornography.(Prov. 27:12; 2 Cor. 10:5)

Day 21 – Lord, I pray that my husband will learn how to relax in the Lord and, in his greatest times of stress, find joy and peace in his relationship with You. I pray that he will submit his schedule and finances to You! (Neh. 8:10; Prov. 17:22; Ps. 16:11)

Day 22 – Lord, I pray that my husband will practice forgiveness in our relationship and with others. I pray that he will recognize any roots of bitterness and yield any resentment and unforgiving attitudes to the Lord. (Eph. 4:32; Heb. 12:15)

Day 23 – I pray that my husband will be a good father – disciplining his children wisely and loving them unconditionally. (If he is not a father, pray this. . . that he will find a young man to mentor in the things of the You, Lord.) (Eph. 6:4; Col. 3:21; 2 Tim. 2:1-2)

Day 24 – I pray that my husband will have a balanced life – that he will balance work and play. I pray that he will fear God, but also gain favor with people he knows at work and church. (Luke 2:52; Prov. 13:15)

Day 25 – Lord, I pray that my husband will be courageous in his stand against evil and injustice and that he will stand for the truth. I pray that he will protect me and our family from Satan’s attacks. (Ps. 31:24; Eph. 6:13; Ps. 27:14)

Day 26 – Lord, I pray that my husband will discover and live his God-given purpose. I pray that he will offer all his dreams to You, and pursue only those goals that will bring You glory and count for eternity. (Jer. 29:11; 1 Cor. 10:31)

Day 27 – I pray that my husband will understand the importance of taking care of his body – the temple of the Holy Spirit – for the glory of God. I pray that he will practice self-control by making wise food choices and get sufficient exercise to stay healthy. (Rom. 12:1-2; 1 Cor. 6:19-20, 9:27)

Day 28 – I pray that my husband will be a man of prayer. Lord, I pray that he will seek and pursue You in purposeful quiet times. (1 Thes. 5:17; Luke 22:46; James 5:16)

Day 29 – Lord, I pray that my husband will surrender his time and talents to You. Dear Jesus, I pray that his spiritual gifts will be manifest in his career, at church, and in our home. (Eph. 5:15-16; 1 Cor. 12:4,7)

Day 30 – Lord, I pray that my husband will serve You and others with pure motives. I pray that he will obey You from his heart and glorify You in everything. (1 Cor. 10:13; John 7:17-18; Col. 3:23-24)

Day 31 – Lord, I pray that my husband will recognize the lies of the enemy in his life. I pray that his attitudes and actions will be guided by the truth as he brings his thoughts into captivity to the Word of God. (John 8:44; 2 Cor. 10:4-5)

citizenship, Discipleship, Equal Protection, Prayer, Religious freedom

No Day in Court for (Stander) “Jane Doe” – Our Story, Part 4

3 Comments

 

An excellent wife, who can find?
For her worth is far above jewels.
The heart of her husband trusts in her,
And he will have no lack of gain.
She does him good and not evil
All the days of her life.

Proverbs 31

IlSupCtStatueby Standerinfamilycourt

The two-year ride through the Illinois family court system may be nearly over for Standerinfamilycourt,  several months ahead of our scheduled appeal docket date.    On December 2, 2014, the 2nd District Court of Appeals denied our appealed motion for anonymity to bring our religious freedom and equal protection challenge to Illinois’ unilateral divorce law, just as the trial judge had done back in August.     Our constitutional attorneys have confirmed that this denial cannot be appealed any higher.   This very important matter was firmly in God’s sovereign hands all along, and it was the subject of much prayer, both mine and that of our small band of supporters in this cause.    God’s people are right to obediently show up dressed for battle, but we must never lose sight that the battle belongs to the Lord, as does all choice of weapons and timing for the battle.

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.      –   Micah 6:8

Why was anonymity so important?   Doesn’t the public have a “right to know”?   In this case, probably so.     A consulting firm which employs an emotionally ill man in a very responsible position,  seeks new clients who will rely on this firm’s fiduciary integrity over $ million+  long-term contracts.   That firm allowed this principal to install a girlfriend under his direct supervision, and at least two blood relatives into jobs in the firm, possibly ahead of other more qualified people.   It further allowed per diem payments for lavish trips, and short-sightedly did not care that its employment policies were not only destructive to the families of its employees, but it tolerated illegal sexual harassment discriminatory to the rest of its employees in condoning and knowingly facilitating a known boss / subordinate adulterous relationship for many years.    SIFC is an employee of the sort of client who might hire such a consulting firm, and in fact, her employer is a chief competitor of this firm’s main energy industry client.   If SIFC can simply go to Bing and type in the first and last name of this regional business director who manages very important international engagements, and bring up all the sordid facts about this firm and that consultant in a published appeals case opinion that provocatively challenged the constitutionality of a long-standing state law,  she might well advise her employer to steer clear and find an alternative vendor who manages their business with far less drama.   Such is indeed the public’s right to know, and such are the facts already captured in the trial transcripts.

That said, I love my Lord who unconditionally loves both of us as one person, and I unconditionally love my life companion of more than 40 years.   I have no desire whatsoever to be out of alignment with either of them, unless my beloved is out of alignment with his Lord.   According to God’s clear word, SIFC remains the one-flesh covenant wife of this emotionally tormented man until God’s divorce parts us (God spells divorce  “D-E-A-T-H”) .   By God’s design, nothing happens to this petitioner husband of mine that does not directly happen to the one-flesh wife of his youth, regardless of anything the civil authorities will ever have to say on the matter.   Nothing happens to us as a covenant couple that does not impact the lives of everyone close to us: extended family members on both sides of the family, employers, friends and neighbors.   Which brings us to why anonymity was important in asserting this constitutional challenge in a godly way, if that indeed remains the Lord’s assignment for this time:

  • It would cover my distraught husband’s “nakedness” while he is haplessly under Satan’s control (Genesis 9:20-23)
  • It would be merciful, allowing him an avenue to return to walking with the Lord, without immense public humiliation to live down when God’s discipline eventually catches up
  • It would be equally merciful to his adulterous and extortionist partner whom the court record reflects received massive cash payments from my husband
  • It would protect innocent family members who became ensnared in my prodigal’s elaborately sinful scheming
  • It would avoid the appearance of vengeful or materialistic motives on my part in making a name for myself which would be a poor public witness for this much larger godly cause impacting our entire state, and possibly the nation

Job #1 for any Christ-follower who has been given a covenant life partner, is to unconditionally love, to fast and to  pray that partner all the way through this life and into the Kingdom of God – period.    Every other pursuit is secondary and human divorce decrees are totally irrelevant to that mission.    We will all stand before a Holy God who will ask us,  how did you steward the gifts I gave you, including the most important one, that husband or wife with whom you were joint heirs of My Kingdom and with whom you were made by ME one-flesh during your life walk?   Since we’ve been empowered by the Holy Spirit in a way that transcends time, distance and circumstances, with a holy authority that outranks civil authority, and since all of the host of heaven is fighting on the side of defending our covenant marriages,  He is not going to accept as an alibi that some civil judge, with no Kingdom authority whatsoever over what God divinely and permanently  joined,  has somehow excused me from His assignment just by writing out a sham human dissolution order that means nothing before His throne.

 

SIFC has repeatedly found throughout this legal journey that being restoration-minded, as God’s ways require, is totally incompatible with functioning under the unilateral divorce regime, even with Christian lawyers.   Even its godliest legal practitioners cannot seem to get their heads around maintaining truly biblical behavior and motivations in this profoundly wicked realm.    The very best of them truly fear what failure to submit to the thuggish web of state-sanctioned lies will do to their clients’ cases.   In this instance, my Christian attorney and his associates felt compelled to file his motion to proceed under fictitious name claiming in that document that I “feared political backlash” from those who support the continuation of no-fault grounds and who favor continuation of the tyrannical public policy banning marital fault as a basis in settling property and custody disputes,  rather than pleading the true family preservation reasons I have just stated.   I will always wonder whether the outcome might have been different if my attorney had simply filed his motion petition with the truth concerning my motives.   “She does her husband good and not evil all the days of her life.”    What if my Christian attorneys had had the integrity to truly speak for me with the mind of Christ in that legal motion?

 

I hope that sharing my learnings through this legal journey will help people understand more about what is keeping such an immoral and unconstitutional family law regime so deeply entrenched in our system of “justice”, and how very much the idolatry of doing so is costing us as a nation.      As time marches on, a  growing percentage of us have never known any other way!   Many presume that a law that has gone unchallenged for so long must be inherently right.    Indeed, it takes the lens of God’s word to truly appreciate all that’s wrong.  Many whose consciences tell them they should be challenging this immoral and unconstitutional singling out of a disfavored class of citizens, unfortunately fear men more than they fear God.     All of the powerful gatekeepers (judges, legislators and attorneys on both sides) are members of the legal community who economically benefit from it at the expense of all of the rest of society.    Goliath continues to taunt God’s people and there appears to be no champion in the land to ask His anointing on a stone and a slingshot to bring this giant down.    The expected champions, those national organizations who faithfully take on every other political threat to the traditional family and to every other form of religious freedom violation, quake in fear or denial on the sidelines when it comes to this particular Goliath.    Jesus rightly said we cannot serve God and mammon at the same time.

If I am unable to bring my case without destroying my life partner of over 40 years, how long until God raises up another David with the same reverence for holy matrimony, sufficient finances and zeal for God’s kingdom?   Under those circumstances, I have to have faith that nobody is indispensable, and I have offered my God everything I have in this effort, except the irreplaceable soul of my covenant husband which is, and which must remain, my very first priority and responsibility.

 

“Jane Doe” was not only fighting for the integrity of her own family, but for the families and for the fundamental 14th Amendment rights of all innocent contesting Respondents as a class:  Jack , Jill and Joe Doe, in bringing a constitutional challenge to a blatantly unconstitutional law.    As the politically powerful homosexual movement demonstrated over the past year, actions need to be replicated in many (perhaps not all) states for unilateral divorce in our democratic nation to fall into the dustbin of perverse human history , where it undeniably belongs.

As individual Christ-followers, we are told we must follow Jesus in emptying ourselves of our individual “rights”.  So how does this biblical wisdom “square” with asserting legal rights in the family court system as I and some other lone-wolf believers before me have sought to do?     I think it helps to take one step back from our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and hear what these documents say about all liberty and all justice being given by God as His gift and as a purposeful privilege.   Jesus said, “to whom much has been given, much is required.”   What we think of as fundamental rights can actually be revoked if abused by selfish motives, or if left unprotected through cowardice or slothfulness (i.e. prayerlessness, thanklessness and personal moral compromise) in how we defend them.     The possibility of revocation makes these things divine privileges, more so than rights with responsibilities attached, in sharp contrast to the way most of us have become accustomed to thinking of our constitutional rights.

 

As providence would have it, the day I received the notice from the Appellate Court denying our anonymity motion,  I came home to my devotion book published by Revive Our Hearts,  Nancy Leigh DeMoss’ ministry to women, True Woman Manifesto – the chapter next up was Day 11:  Selfish Insistence on Personal Rights ( is contrary to the spirit of Christ who humbled Himself, took on the form of a servant, and laid down His life for me.)   This devotion further challenged:

“Have you been acting more like a temporary servant of God or like His willing and permanent slave?”    Being honest with myself, I journaled: “the idea of being a permanent slave,  unentitled to the personal fruit of my time, treasure and talent is haunting and chilling to me.  Help me, Lord!”

On the one hand, many years of experience with the Lord has shown me He never fails to restore what the enemy has stolen, and in fact heretofore has always restored it in a multiple!   That is not the issue for me.    The issue is being willing to lay down all the research, financial sacrifice, suffering and risk to my own family, to wait and pray while God accomplishes this momentous state-wide and national task His way.   The issue is continuing to have faith while being humbled and possibly obscured for now.

This devotion reflected on the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, widow of missionary Jim Elliot, both graduates of nearby Wheaton College, who was murdered with several colleagues on the mission fields in Ecuador.    Nancy Leigh DeMoss writes:

‘What are some of the rights that as Jesus’ disciples we need to be willing to surrender?   Here’s the list that Elisabeth Elliot came up with:

  • First is the right to take revenge (Romans 12:19-20).   (if not against my husband, perhaps against the judge who brutally punished me for my convictions?)
  • The right to have a comfortable, secure home. Jesus said, “The birds of the air have nests, the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Luke 9:57-58). The right to have a comfortable, secure home. It’s a right we surrender to Christ.
  • The right to spend our money however we please (Matthew 6:19-21).
  • The right to hate an enemy (Matthew 5:43-48). We have to surrender that right.
  • The right to be honored and served (Mark 10:42-47).
  • The right to understand God’s plan before we obey (Hebrews 11:8).
  • The right to live life by our own rules (John 14:23-24).
  • The right to hold a grudge (Colossians 3:13).
  • The right to fit into society (Romans 12:2; Galatians 1:10).
  • The right to do whatever feels good (Galatians 5:16-17; 1 Peter 4:2).
  • The right to complain. “Ooo. I can’t have the right to complain? ” No. That’s a right you’re to give up. By the way, you find that in Philippians 2, verse 14: “Do all things without complaining or murmuring.”
  • The right to put self first. That’s the passage we’ve been looking in, Philippians 2:3-4).
  • The right to express one’s sexuality in ways that are contrary to the ways of God (1 Corinthians 6:18-20).
  • The right to rebel against authority (1 Peter 2:13-15).   Acceptable to do so only where there is a clear conflict with God’s law.
  • The right to sue another believer (1 Corinthians 6:1-8).

FB profile 7xtjw (SIFC was summoned into court in this instance because as a follower of Christ she refused to sign a document that affirmed the civil charge of “irreconcilable differences” even though doing so might have protected more of our family’s [in reality, God’s] assets.)

There’s more we could say about all those, but just a sample list from God’s Word of rights that we’re asked to surrender as followers of Christ.  –  Nancy Leigh DeMoss,  www.reviveourhearts.com.

Being a student of the bible, I know it is not acceptable to God to shrink back in fear from a God-appointed battle.    I also observe from the ill-fated battles of the bible that complete obedience is required in all aspects of a God-favored battle:  timing, tools, size of army, willingness to accept seemingly impossible circumstances and trust God, instead of our own resources, to overcome unfavorable circumstances and obstacles for His glory.

2 Chronicles 14:11

Then Asa called to the Lord his God and said, “Lord, there is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty. Help us, Lord our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this vast army. Lord, you are our God; do not let mere mortals prevail against you.”

Though I was by now pleading with the Lord to write His instructions on my wall,  I still felt as though I was not getting any clear answer from Him whether to pursue or drop the appeal without the anonymity protection for our family.    I had (perhaps wrongly) treated this anonymity item as a Gideon-style “fleece”.    Was God spanking me for not having more spiritual maturity after 35 years of walking with Him, or was this His actual revelation according to that extended “fleece”?   I had no peace with either pursuing the appeal under our actual names for the sake of the people of our state and all that has been invested,  nor with dropping it for the sake of our family’s peace,  privacy and recovery.     So, I located a comprehensive study of all the biblical battles, their issues and outcomes, and I spent a couple of days studying it, hoping for more clarity.    To get inside the skin of another long-sacrificing soldier of Christ with a similarly monumental task of marshalling an army to change both internal church culture and government policy on a profoundly vital moral and human rights issue on which the future of nations turned – ending the African slave trade,  I dove into Eric Metaxas’ biography of William Wilberforce, called Amazing Grace.   Could some of Wilberforce’s processes be applicable to my approach to this hard decision, and more specifically, to my discipleship path in this?

One passage in this Wilberforce biography seemed jump out and grab me, standerinfamilycourt,  by the throat:

“And so he took stock of himself.  He well knew his mind’s natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose — indeed, he called it his ‘butterfly mind’…..He knew that his world-class wit could turn into the vicious and wounding sarcasm, and that his ability to mimic others and joke and sing and generally be charming could be used to merely draw attention to himself, merely to exalt himself and to feed his personal and vain ambitions….Wilberforce alone knew how constitutionally weak he was with regard to self-discipline…”  

Ouch!   It’s encouraging to reflect that God with whom nothing shall be impossible still found a way to astoundingly use such an inherently flawed vessel!    When I went on to read about the elaborate and regimented tracking lists Wilberforce used to hold himself accountable for correcting these flaws,  I sincerely wonder if I could stay at it for long.    Is that the bottom-line cost of success in an endeavor so much bigger than can be handled in the natural?

In the meantime, some external events transpired that were very encouraging, making it very clear that others are forcefully carrying  this banner alongside me.    Our facebook community page, Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional has rapidly gained international followers, including a couple of like-minded U.S. state and national organizations, despite its intensely unpopular cultural message.   By the hand of God, one re-post of Dr. Albert Mohler’s  2010 blog on the hypocrisy within the church’s official position on divorce and remarriage which sharply conflicts with what Jesus taught, was directed into the strategic hands of some seminary theologians and a group of Catholics who care about this subject.    It has been re-shared 21 times in 5 days as I write this, and has had over 8,000 views, with dozens of thoughtful debate comments by important people that seemed to take on a life of its own.    Other posts are also getting large audiences and great feedback very suddenly.   I made personal connection with no-fault opposition pioneer Judith Brumbaugh, who has extended us the honor of her helpful background guidance for which we are so grateful.    Perhaps most significantly, standers from all over are beginning to message our page for prayer and guidance.

With all the praise and the thanks to God, the Illinois legislative session miraculously adjourned without passing the deplorable bill HB1452, or the ERA (equal rights amendment) bill.    Both would have been monumental threats to Illinois families.     Many prayers went up across the state for their defeat, and God was faithful.

Last month, the Catholic-leaning religious magazine First Things started an excellent debate on whether pastors should continue to sign off on civil marriage certificates, or should force a godly separation between God-joined biblical unions and the world’s severely-devalued civil constructions brought on by nearly 5 decades of destructive redefinition.    Additionally, they published the excellent article, Time to Challenge No-Fault Divorce, by Drs. Thomas F.  Farr and Hilary Towers.   The article very significantly validated what the national religious freedom legal organizations are so reluctant to acknowledge:   that divorce Respondents do suffer genuine religious persecution in the family court system, (as all perceived opponents of the sexual revolution do).   Perhaps it’s this group of Catholics through whom our post was circulated so wildly beyond our expectations this past week.   Did some influential people get a good look at our pages and think concretely about a potential alliance?   It is very comforting at a time like this and on the cusp of such a pivotal personal choice that I have to make to see God’s hand and some strong evidence that all of this is part of a larger move of God in which I may not have to be a very significant player nor the lone voice in the wilderness.    May God give me the mix of humility and ambition that is most appropriate here, since I’ve lost all hope of a “cloak”,  and only He can see the larger picture ahead.     May He direct my thoughts and my steps!

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court is reportedly going to decide whether to hear arguments in cases that upheld state constitutions in their voter-approved traditional marriage definitions coming out of the 6th Circuit which conflict with rulings in several other Federal Circuits around the country.   Some of those rulings and cases assert the fundamental right to remain married.      What  is the sustainability of unilateral divorce if the Supreme Court affirms the fundamental right to maintain civil marriage intact?     SIFC was on the Washington Mall with 10,000 other traditional marriage supporters on the chilly day in March, 2013 when the first round of marriage definition arguments were heard during the March for Marriage sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage.    No doubt there will be a similar rally organized in 2015 on the date of these new arguments.   The speeches SIFC heard that day from inner city pastors and the young adult children of divorce galvanized this stander’s resolve that unilateral divorce must be abolished.    SIFC is likely to be there again.

 

Yesterday I mailed off to the attorneys an envelope containing the case history and analysis I researched on prior constitutional challenges to no-fault divorce laws in various states since 1970,  and a glossary of legal concepts that have been impacted by very recent cases.    After much prayer I’ve come to the place where I will not feel any peace about dropping the appeal until my Christian attorneys have reviewed this work and also sought God’s direction specifically concerning the 14th Amendment equal protection and due process aspects of the case.      If our attorneys are willing, I will find the funding somehow for this round of the appeal, but if we win that, God will have to step in and provide the finances to go up against the deep state pockets we would then be facing.    If they discourage me from this aspect of the case, and I can’t find a suitable legal team,  it is unlikely I’m going to be comfortable putting my family through any further litigation rigors.    Prayer warriors reading this post, SIFC would be so grateful if you would pray for our family and our two law firms.

 

Even with dropping the appeal, the Lord will have other, slower avenues to work toward the goal of ending the tyranny in the family court system.    I am confident He is about to raise up further opportunities for challenge across the country.   Important alliances are being formed in the background, and I see SIFC’s pages as a linkage between people and needed resources in the future.    I see these pages as a continuing resource for committed Christ-followers in having the difficult conversations within their churches and denominations to begin to change the culture much the way the abolitionists slowly changed the culture in Wilberforce’s time.    Perhaps with the social media resources we now have and the Lord’s end times timeline, the process will be much more rapid.    We’ve seen the meteoric speed with which evil social change can sweep the nation in the past 5 years.    Yet the word of God says “greater is He that is in us, than he who is in the world.”

Until the hearts of the leadership of the state family policy councils and of the Christian public service legal funds change to embrace our cause legislatively and judicially,  I have a vision for starting a fund that will help people in other states in the appeal stage who have been bullied for their convictions by the family court system.       I don’t have any idea how I’m going to accomplish this just yet, but I know Who must be the Provider.     While we probably can’t afford to fund primary divorce challenges, there are some legal aid groups who may be able to fill that role, and perhaps knowing such resources may be available at the appeal stage may encourage individuals to do as I’ve done in challenging the “irreconcilable differences” civil charge in order to gain standing to bring a 14th Amendment constitutional appeal in other states.    Perhaps the presence of an appeal fund may reform the egregious behavior of the legal community including the bench.

 

Meanwhile, I challenge the state family policy councils, and indeed the many Christian denominations at headquarters level – what are you willing to do to be a godly voice on the  offensive in changing these laws?    Will you trust God enough to risk offending some donors or losing some members ?    When your next meeting comes to debate the cultural “relevance”  of your official position statements on Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage, will you honor God and move back toward scriptural purity and eternal relevance?

I challenge the religious liberty legal funds whose mission statements all say they defend the “traditional family”:  same sex marriage is going to be a waning issue by next year, and there are credible reports that some of you are already feeling it in reduced coffers.    Honor the One you should  be looking to for those coffers, as well as for the tide to turn in court.    Why not look to help the millions who would be only too willing to send in their $50 in exchange for your pledge of solid commitment to this cause, rather than appeasing larger donors out of an unexamined and untested fear that they may be offended because their lifestyles may be biblically immoral.     Soon enough, everyone is going to see the obvious and unavoidable connection between unilateral divorce and same sex marriage.

 

May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.  – Ps. 90:17

Our Story:  7 Times Around the Jericho Wall – Part 1

Our Story:  7 Times Around the Jericho Wall- Part 2

Our Story:  7 Times Around the Jericho Wall- Part 3

 

 

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

citizenship, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, marriage, Religious freedom

You Asked: How Can “No-Fault” Divorce Laws be Unconstitutional?

1 Comment

constitution-burningReagan

by Standerinfamilycourt.com

This post goes out to Barney, who raised a very valid question last weekend on our companion facebook page:   https://www.facebook.com/nofaultequalsnoaccountability/posts/1527839317455483

Considering the current reach of our fairly new page, there must be dozens of critical thinkers like Barney out there with the same question.    SIFC is thankful for the question and the engagement,  an opportunity to contribute some expanded thought.    All great social reform conversations began exactly this way, and we of course could have just as easily been ignored, so Barney (and his silent counterparts) are sincerely a blessing.    Our legal team will, no doubt,  get the very same question from the bench next spring.     Indeed, I can quote a recent definition-of-marriage judicial  assertion very much to the point from Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the (liberal) 9th U.S. Circuit:

“If the defendants [states of Idaho and Nevada] really wished to ensure that as many children as possible had married parents, they would do well to rescind the right of no-fault divorce, or to divorce altogether.   Neither has done so.  Such reforms might face constitutional difficulties  of their own, but at least they would further the states’ asserted interest in solidifying marriage.”      

– Latta v Otter,  October 7, 2014

Judge Reinhardt, we’ll notice,  stopped well short of saying that such reforms would be unconstitutional.    As the spate of 5-4  Supreme Court decisions clearly demonstrate in cases where the competing fundamental rights of the opposing parties are actually valid on both sides, these competing rights must be prioritized and  must be carefully balanced.   Brilliant legal minds can honestly disagree on the appropriate balance of fundamental rights based on their particular world view, and hopefully they are not wasting taxpayer dollars by accusing one another of misunderstanding the Constitution.

In this blog, we could paste in links to various cases, but we’ve actually done so in several earlier posts, and will be doing so in the very next planned weekly post on relevant legal definitions, so for brevity we won’t do so here.   We’ll come back later and make appropriate linkages.

The basic rule is that a law is presumed to be constitutional if it is aimed a legitimate state purpose (however ineffectively).    That is, it is deemed constitutional unless it intrinsically, or by its means of implementation, it deprives a citizen or class of citizens of one or more fundamental rights.    In one recent example, various U.S. Circuit Courts have ruled that homosexual couples legally married in one state have a fundamental right to stay married if they move to another state:

JudgeSutton

What are some other fundamental rights?    They are basically anything in the Bill of Rights, or that an authoritative ruling has established as a binding precedent: (free exercise of religion, life, defense of property,  family privacy, parental rights in the education and direction of their children, the equal right to bring a defense against a criminal or civil accusation that would strip life, liberty or property, etc.).

If it’s established that a citizen’s fundamental right is being infringed by a state law, then it is no longer good enough just to have a legitimate state purpose behind it.    In that case, the state must prove two additional things for the law to still be deemed constitutional:   (1) that the state interest is compelling, AND (2) they are implementing it by choosing among available alternatives only the means that least infringes or deprives citizens of that fundamental right.   The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that the 14th  Amendment requires this.   Meeting both the compelling interest and the least restrictive means tests becomes very difficult for the state where there are indeed fundamental rights being intruded upon!

And how should valid but competing fundamental rights be balanced?   For example, in late term abortions, shouldn’t a 7-month pre-born child’s right to life be prioritized over the mother’s asserted  right to privacy?   Does the state truly have a compelling interest in guaranteeing the mother’s right to privacy under the 14th Amendment, to the extent that it actually supercedes another person’s right to life?

How should someone’s fundamental right to liberty and freedom of association be balanced against their innocent spouse’s right to protection of property, to defend against a civil accusation (as “irreconcilable differences” most surely is) that would strip their freedom of association (with children) or strip their property (such as their retirement funds while the other spouse has committed financial abuse in pursuing an affair)?

Many states do not allow marital fault to be considered in either dividing property or determining child custody.   What is the state’s compelling reason for this, given that a dozen or so states do take marital fault into consideration for these purposes, and given that not doing so sets an offending spouse up to actually profit from their own destructive acts against the marriage?   In fact there may be some legitimate state reasons for this,  but this surely does not offset a non-offending spouse’s fundamental right to due process over their property and parental rights!   In practice, some states may only allow the defrauded spouse to prove any financial abuse in court if they agree with the state and their petitioning spouse that a marriage is “irreconcilable”,  which may conflict with their biblical convictions, and conflict with any right a few states still give to bring evidence that irreconcilable differences do not actually exist (as in the case of an emotionally ill spouse who in reality needs treatment more than they truthfully need a divorce).   What about a discarded spouse’s right of conscience, guaranteed by the 1st Amendment and by most state constitutions, to act according to their biblical conviction if they believe and obey the truly startling and radical words of Jesus (Luke 16:18):

 “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”    

The state may have a legitimate reason for seeking to provide a low-cost exit from a marriage, but since all 50 states’ current no-fault laws infringe on the fundamental constitutional rights to stay married, and to family privacy and self-governance for both spouses and any children, what’s the compelling state reason for not having minimum requirements and evidence of professional counseling before accepting only one spouse’s opinion concluding that “all efforts to reconcile have failed”, or that “future efforts to reconcile would not be in the best interests of the family”?   What’s the compelling state interest in not considering other impacted family members’ views on their best interests?   What’s the compelling state interest in facilitating and sanctioning adultery in preference to the existing low-conflict marriage, or in shielding the offending party from incurring meaningful natural financial consequences of divorcing for selfish reasons?    Given the vast amount of damning evidence on the cost of unilateral divorce to state and local governments (hence, taxpayers) over the past 45 years, isn’t the compelling state interest actually in the opposite direction?

It’s also instructive to look at what marriage has become under the no-fault regime.   Unilateral divorce was supposed to “reduce acrimony” (although stripping all of the fundamental rights of one spouse to give blatant legal preference to the other makes it seem like the framers were smoking something),  it was supposed to “protect the children from harm in watching their parents deal with conflict” (never mind the tenfold physical and emotional abuse that is typically in store for the kids at the hands of the live-in boyfriend or girlfriend that has replaced the legitimate mother or father).    When individual sexual autonomy started to trump the compelling interests of society and the extended family as a whole, the meaning of government’s role in protecting marriage profoundly shifted.   Another recent ruling on a gay marriage case stated this point brilliantly, in SIFC’s estimation:

“One starts from the premise that governments got into the business of defining marriage, not to regulate love but to regulate sex…..one can well appreciate why the citizenry would think that a reasonable first concern of any society is the need to regulate male-female relationships and the unique procreative possibilities of them.   One way to pursue this objective is to encourage couples to enter lasting relationships through subsidies and other benefits and to discourage them from ending such relationships through these and other means.     People may not need the government’s encouragement to have sex.   And they may not need the government’s encouragement to propagate the species.  But they may well need the government’s encouragement to create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish.”

– DeBoer v Snyder,   November 6, 2014

Judge Jeffrey Sutton,  U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals

Unilateral divorce laws intrude into the integrity of the family in a tyrannical attempt to regulate mere affection.   Or, as Texas attorney Ed Truncellito describes our post-1970’s stripped-down version of matrimony in  his blog  “Why No One Is Married“:

“In truth, our no-fault laws, as implemented, abolished true marriage…….Although cohabitation is handicapped in many ways, it unfortunately has one important advantage: ordinary cohabitation keeps government out of the home.    In contrast, the registered cohabitation that we still call “marriage” invokes the jurisdiction of government officers. They receive authority to manage the lives of both spouses and their children with legal force. ”  

 

So given all this, what would a constitutional no-fault law look like?

(1) Irreconcilable differences as a non evidence-based ground for divorce would be available only by mutual or cross petition — with fully agreed child and property terms, otherwise it would revert to fault-based procedure to protect the due process rights of the non-offending spouse who for moral or religious reasons does not want to end the marriage.

(What we currently have, while deceitfully called “no-fault”,  is actually forced, unilateral, guaranteed divorce that excuses and often rewards destructive behavior toward the marriage).

(2) Proof and balanced consideration of marital fault would be restored in all contested cases where property and child custody matters could not be agreed between the spouses, and would be done without intrusive and non evidence-based court assessments of when the marriage allegedly broke down.   Proof of dissipation and marital fault would be merged and would simply follow the full proven time frame(s) of the offense(s).

(3) Contested, non-mutual out-of-state and offshore divorce decrees where the grounds and agreed settlement terms do not conform with (1) above will not be honored against assets and child arrangements domiciled in the state, and in-state marital fault proceedings will be required to effect those divisions.

(4) Equal evidence parameters and time frames to bring proof of fault would be restored to both spouses by abolishing court rules and operating procedures which are currently designed to suppress evidence of fault in order to give preference to the Petitioner over the Respondent.

Will these reforms force people to stay married against their wills?   That’s an interesting question since studies show that 80% of spouses in this country are divorced against their will.    It’s also an interesting question because additional studies show a high rate of remarriage to the same first spouse after civil divorce  and even after subsequent remarriage(s).   Other studies show a 60-70% divorce rate for second and subsequent remarriages, and a 97% failure rate for any relationship begun in adultery (this may include cohabitation and marriage combined).     In practice, these reforms will more likely just even out the power balance between spouses in resolving their differences, possibly increasing the percentage of mutual petitions if honest reconciliation efforts fail.   It will certainly make non-mutual divorces more expensive in some cases.    In a rare few cases, people unhappily married to a non-offending religious objector to divorce may not be able to obtain an in-state divorce because they can’t prove serious fault where none exists.   Under the Fourteenth Amendment, that’s as it should be.

Parting wisdom from Jesus:   “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning……”

The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”    – Matthew 19:10

 

Indeed.   One may freely choose their behavior,  but they should not get to also choose the consequences.

 

 

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

www.standerinfamilycourt. com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

citizenship, Discipleship, family law, Fundamental Rights, Spiritual Warfare

One “Stander’s” Vote

HopeInTheLambby Standerinfamilycourt

“Like a roaring lion and a rushing bear
Is a wicked ruler over a poor people.
 A leader who is a great oppressor lacks understanding,
But he who hates unjust gain will prolong his days.”  – Prov. 28:15

“But the vine was plucked up in fury,
    cast down to the ground;
the east wind dried up its fruit;
    they were stripped off and withered.
As for its strong stem,
    fire consumed it.” – Ezekiel 9:12

“I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah,
And you were like a firebrand snatched from a blaze;
Yet you have not returned to Me,” declares the Lord.”  – Amos  4:11

“If you will return, O [ United States, the nation I, the Most High established], says the Lord, if you will return to Me, and if you will put away your abominable false gods out of My sight and not stray or waver,  And if you swear, As the Lord lives, in truth, in judgment and justice, and in righteousness (uprightness in every area and relation), then the nations will bless themselves in Him and in Him will they glory.”  – Jeremiah 4: 1-3

“Whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much, and whoever is unrighteous in very little is also unrighteous in much.”  (Jesus)                          – Luke 16:10

 

Not that there’s any special recognition due me, but in between election days this stander/citizen, like so many others across the country, I fasted and prayed extensively for godly leadership to be restored to our nation through the 2014 mid-term election.    I’ve  been personally serious about this since at least 2008, when my only practical choice for President of the United States was between a rabidly pro-abortion (and, as it turned out, pro-faux marriage) ultra-liberal and a conservative serial adulterer who had abandoned two prior wives, including a disabled one, because his god is his appetite.    Neither candidate seemed likely to serve our nation unselfishly, nor honor God in doing so.

2008 would not be the last time I had to hold my nose from the moral stench while casting my ballot.    It is simply the escalating curse our nation has been under at God’s hand since the 1970’s when the twin abominations of abortion on demand, and unilateral divorce were imposed across our land – the worship of Baal and the worship of Asherah (the absolute right to immoral remarriage), respectively.    I believe  God was especially provoked to bring progressive discipline on our nation  when His bride the Church was not only silent about the latter,  but chose to widely embrace it.

It was an amazing week, the week of November 4, 2014 across our nation.   I once again complained about the lack of acceptable candidates on the ballot, this time for governor of our state.    One of the candidates had signed the marriage redefinition bill in 2013, flouting God’s (Matthew 19:4-6) timeless definition of marriage.   The other is yet another serial adulterer who also supports abortion-on-demand.    The U.S.  Senate race was just as bad:  a choice between the liberal incumbent with the near-100% voting record against the sanctity of marriage, life and traditional family versus yet another adulterer who had recently made a public statement that he now favored marriage redefinition despite his 2013 state legislature vote against it.    The state family policy counsel published a link to an interesting viewpoint on how to handle that situation while staying true to my godly responsibility to cast my ballot for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God.    Early on election morning, I was personally messaged by its leader, which the Holy Spirit quickened in me as confirmation that this was how God wanted me to vote in resolution of my moral dilemma.   I was grateful not to have had to abstain in those two races, or write-in a throwaway name.

Aside from these legislative and executive candidates, several judgeships were on the ballot.   How many times in my roughly 40 years of adult citizenship had I gone into the voting booth with not a clue who these individuals are who hold such sway that with a mere stroke of a pen they can override what GOD has permanently joined as one person  (Matt. 19:5-6), and change the course of a family for GENERATIONS to come?   I spent a year, approximately 10 court sessions, finding out precisely who these black-robed marriage executioners are!      Once again our state family policy council has greatly improved my citizenship by reporting on who is endorsing and financially supporting those candidacies.   (It also helps to have an increased acquaintance with seasoned attorneys!)

With our constitutional appeal awaiting trial next spring, I realized I could also be voting on retention of two of the judges who may potentially be on the panel who will hear our case.   Of all the previous constitutional challenges to the unilateral divorce laws which I researched in other states, 2 or 3 pivotal decisions that could have spared our nation (particularly the budgets of local governments) some 40 years of evil fallout from this unconstitutional unilateral divorce law turned on the opinion of only 1 judge out of 3, while the dissenting judge’s opinion was actually far more creditable.   You can bet I burned up Google the night before, trying to find out all I possibly could!

 

And the outcome?   The nation was abundantly blessed that the Lord established a meaningful check on the despotic power of the current Chief Executive.    The cause itself of socially conservative godly government was also blessed when diverse candidates by age, race and gender in an overwhelming number of  states replaced liberals who were poised to continue and to step up their attacks on the traditional family.   Our own state didn’t fare so well in comparison, but largely because the fruit had already been “cast from the vine” (Ezekiel 9:12) long before the ballots were even compiled.     Nevertheless, God seems to be hearing the prayers of the saints for the leadership of our nation as a whole.

I’d urge that before we get too smug about drubbing the liberals, we keep seeking the Lord for our further repentance as a nation.    I believe He’s watching to see how we steward the graciousness He’s extended to us.   Will we return to Him?   Most of the national legal ministries do not consider unilateral divorce – which tramples on the very image of God’s covenant with ALL  of us, to be a fundamental rights or religious freedom problem,  and they fail to grasp (or admit) the very real connection between marriage redefinition 2014 and marriage redefinition 1969.    This is despite the various organizational mission statements on which they raise donor funds:

Organization A –  “Restoring the culture by advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family.”

Organization B – ” …free legal assistance to Bible-believing churches and Christians who are experiencing difficulty in practicing their religious faith.”   

Organization C – “the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family..”

And so forth.    One admirable exception of “walking the talk” is the Family Research Council who in 2006 materially supported a serious legislative challenge to Michigan’s unilateral divorce law.    Cynically, it seems there are far more numerous powerful individuals whose adultery or commercial interests have benefited from state unilateral divorce laws (some of whom are most likely large donors to these ministries)  than there are homosexuals who have benefited from  the current wave of state marriage redefinition.   (Always best to gore someone else’s ox if you are a 501(c)3.)

Did God directly reward righteous political courage around the (heterosexual) sanctity of marriage issue last Tuesday?    I’ll let the reader ask Him and judge.  The following states have either enacted covenant marriage laws or mounted recent legislative challenge attempts to their longstanding unilateral divorce laws:

Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Kansas, Iowa, Michigan,  Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Georgia

The following states defeated a liberal incumbent to fill a Senate seat with a conservative, family-values replacement, checking the President’s amoral social agenda by the resulting gained majority of seats:

Iowa, Arkansas, South Carolina, West Virginia, Colorado, and South Dakota.  (Louisiana’s Senate race was forced into a run-off election for early December, and Kansas held on to  its conservative senator.)

 

Two days later, it got even more exciting as state traditional marriage referenda and traditional marriage definition legislation were upheld by the 6th Federal Circuit in their ruling on the case DeBoer vs.  Snyder  for 4 states:

Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan.

 

Our state, on the other hand, failed to benefit from the strong citizen showing in 2013 in the state capitol which miraculously held off marriage redefinition for several months after it seemed sure to pass quickly, stunning the whole nation and chagrining the media.    Meanwhile, the unwillingness of that family policy council to publicly oppose and EXPOSE the truly catastrophic pending “family” law bill that would shorten the unilateral divorce waiting period to 6 months from 2 years, would remove any option for fault-based grounds, as well as remove legal sanctions against deliberate spouse-poachers and firms (such as employers) who knowingly allow spouse-poaching to occur, the near-universal silence ultimately allowed this repugnant legislation to pass 90-17 in one legislative chamber without the public’s knowledge or meaningful media publicity.    The real enemy of true marriage is Satan, and you don’t beat him with the resources of mere men, you beat him with the unmerited favor of God in response to obeying Him completely and trusting Him with any consequences of putting His kingdom first.   Tough to walk out before a very human ministry board, but no less what it takes.

As a result of policy leadership  mis-steps, one of the two states with heretofore the lowest divorce rates may gain the unsavory distinction of being the only state resisting the national trend of rethinking no-consequences unilateral divorce in the face of very well-documented societal damage resulting from it.   Citizens should keep in mind from past occurrence that a doubling of the divorce rates has in the past led to a proportional ramp-up in government fiscal woes, something our state could not recover from in its current financial condition.   As a Divinely-orchestrated result of all the foregoing, we now have a Republican governor who’s on record as not concerning himself with “social issues” other than the unfettered access to abortuaries,  and who is poised to retool his state party accordingly.    We have a state senator who failed to unseat an ultra-liberal U.S. senator because the Lord saw no reason to swap one LGBT partisan out for another.    And He had already delivered the U.S. Senate to the faithful without any help from our state.

I think He truly does care very deeply about this unilateral divorce issue, and He let us all know it. FB profile 7xtjw

 

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Church Discipline, Discipleship, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

All Saints Day / Reformation Day Reflections of a “Stander”

asherahpole2 by Standerinfamilycourt

Our family wasn’t big into celebration of Halloween, but in raising our kids, we tried to take them to the “harvest celebration” at our church.    The next day, November 1 would be a remembrance of the persecuted church, perhaps reading from Foxe’s Book of Christian Martyrs.     This year, it hardly seemed necessary to open that book because of being literally surrounded by modern-day martyrdom for the faith.   I reflected back on the day about a year ago when I met up with my estranged prodigal husband in a coffee shop to talk about a court hearing I was unable to attend earlier that day, and I mentioned the martyring of some 50 Korean believers when government officials paraded them into a packed stadium, tied them to posts and opened machine gun fire on them.    The remainder of 2013 brought nerve gas butchery in Syria, Boca Haram violence in Nigeria,  ISIS beheadings, sometimes of little children in front of their Christian parents, sometimes of Western aid workers or reporters, and posted on the internet.    It brought threatened hangings of pregnant women who would not renounce their Christian faith, and other atrocities.    We kept hearing that more followers of Christ were martyred last year than in the first several hundred years of the church.    People tend to be martyred when they stand against the authority of various “god substitutes” of the ruling class of the day.

Though nowhere near in this league, this past year brought personal persecution to bear on this stander too, as I told the family law judge from my perch on the witness stand that our 40-year covenant marriage, which His Honor was about to civilly dissolve to accommodate an adulterous relationship, was indissoluable in the eyes of the One Who truly held the sovereignty over it, and Who more importantly held the sovereignty over the soul of the deceived adulterer to whom I was permanently joined as one flesh.   I was brutally punished by the court for my stand  financially.    I had quoted the words of Jesus that condemned all remarriage of divorced persons as adultery, and got pretty much the same reaction in that courtroom as did my Savior on that long ago day among the gathered crowd.
I was shaking my spiritual, fist in Jesus’ name, at a black-robed high priest of the Sexual Revolution,  and such defiance of Baal was not to be tolerated!  I must be made an example of lest my defiance spread.

As this November 1 date stands for Reformation Day, it in effect marks the divorce of Protestant believers from the Catholic Church.  Quite rightfully, grace and the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross replaced penance and salvation by works.    However, quite wrongfully, an unholy alliance between Martin Luther and the Catholic humanist Erasmus, influenced by King Henry VIII’s adultery-birthed Church of England,  replaced sound doctrine concerning the unconditional permanence of marriage with the new false doctrine of finding “biblical” grounds for divorce.    Anything to distance the new church from its Catholic roots!    Satan always has to make sure there’s a fissure in the foundation of any move of God!

The Catholic Church holds to the scriptural word of the Lord about divorce, but to allow for “permissible” remarriage, the RCC annuls the holy symbol of the relationship of Christ with His bride, the Church as though it never existed – the expunged bride of Christ, if you will.    This is honoring the letter of what Jesus said, but not the spirit.

The Protestant Church ignores those words of Jesus altogether and twists three or four scriptures out of context to create a contorted scenario of “permissible” divorce.   And she overlays that with a humanly extrapolated “permissible” remarriage basis with which the pastor can then “sanctify” a biblically adulterous union, entirely contrary to what Jesus said.    This is invariably accompanied by heavy reference to a tenet not emphasized in scripture, but also originating with the humanistic philosophy of Erasmus, that of “free will”, which is touched on in that 1 Corinthians 7  passage which he distorted in his rogue commentary.   This is then applied out of context by the evangelical remarriage apologists, while completely ignoring verses 11 and 39 of the very same chapter.  Thusly, we now have fabricated “biblical” grounds to divorce and remarry if “abandoned by a non-Christian spouse”.   What results is a deceitful rationalization to disobey God in a very central matter to the transformative power of the Church and to her ultimate ability to overcome persecution.    It is the compulsive need to “update” denominational position statements as the prevailing popular culture changes, and to train its shepherds accordingly.

It is salt losing its savor.

Jesus told a very interesting parable that comes to mind as I reflect on this:

Parable of Two Sons – Matt. 21: 28-32

“But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go work today in the vineyard.’  And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he regretted it and went.  The man came to the second and said the same thing; and he answered, ‘I will, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?” They *said, “The first.” Jesus *said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you.  For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him.

The other two abused scriptures used to rationalize divorce in order to spiritually accommodate adulterous remarriage are the related scriptures,  Matthew 19:9 and Deuteronomy 24:1-4 (referred to in that Matthew 19 passage.)   Jesus was confronted by a group of Pharisees seeking to entrap and condemn Him by a spiritual controversy.   The  Holy Spirit moved three disciples, Matthew, Mark and Luke to write about the same incident.    Mark and Luke did so to a mixed-gender Gentile audience.    Matthew, on the other hand, is the only disciple / apostle to address an all-male Hebrew audience – men who invariably stoned adulterous wives and a culture that denied any such marriage rights to women.   Matthew was uniquely addressing an audience that included men who had remarried because they were now widowers.    The evangelical church would claim that adultery is the other “biblical exception” that permits sanctified remarriage.

How does one reconcile Matthew 19:9 which appears to contain an “exception clause”  to Luke 16:18, which is perfectly consistent with all the rest of scripture on marriage and divorce, and in which Jesus made it unmistakably plain that marrying a divorced person is adultery?    This disciple believes it is in recognizing that the Gentile cultures condoned divorce and did not stone adulterous spouses. With this in mind, the Gentile Dr. Luke realized his audience needed blunt clarity, instead of the tongue-in-cheek dryness with which Jesus relished delivering this truth to His original Pharisee audience!    The Pharisees, referring to Deuteronomy 24:3  asked Jesus, “why then did Moses command a husband to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”   Jesus redirected their twisted inference and their condemning question back to the eternal truth: “It was due to the hardness of your hearts that Moses permitted men to divorce their wife, but from the beginning it was not so!”   He had already asserted in Matthew 19: 4-6 God’s timeless and complete definition of marriage reflecting both complementarity of the genders and unconditional permanence.    The scripture says that this troubled his disciples who came to him afterward in private and said, “If this is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry at all.”    Jesus had just kicked over an idolized Asherah pole, one that was dear to the church of that day!    Is it so different today?

And who was Asherah (or Ashtoreth)?   She was a pagan goddess who, like Baal, was of the heritage of cultures like the Hittites whom God drove out before Israel.    Different cultures in the region worshipped her variously as a consort of Yahweh, of Baal, of a god named Anu, and so forth – the embodiment of serial monogamy, if you will.   Babies, including Hebrew babies, were sacrificed to Baal, representing the abomination of abortion of our day, a culture of utter disrespect for life and personhood in God’s image.    Similarly, covenant marriages are commonly sacrificed to Asherah, consort of Baal, even in the evangelical church, as in Jesus’ day, reflecting a culture of utter disrespect for the very symbol of the Godhead, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Every marriage to the spouse of our youth, until death separates, is an indissoluable  covenant union between husband, wife and Jesus Christ, the eternal Bridegroom.    Each such covenant marriage uniquely creates a sanctified one-flesh entity that cannot be dismembered except violently, damaging both spouses until divinely healed.    Asherah poles were also known as “high places”, phallic symbols in the cultures that worshipped her, and today’s divorce and adulterous remarriage culture, even within the church, is sexual idolatry.    It is a devastating impurity in Christ’s bride who is commanded to be without spot or blemish.    That “woman, Jezebel” whom Jesus refers to in Revelation 2, is in essence, Asherah.    The reference to killing her children in that passage is, in my view at least,  a prophetic reference to the widespread abortion of our day.

As history has shown us, both Catholic and Protestant purported followers of Christ have found various ways to cling to Asherah.    John the Baptist, and then Jesus, paid with their very lives.   Many of us have paid a heavy price for pointing this timeless truth out to secular and church authority.   Many an ordained shepherd has shrunk back from biblical truth because they feared men more than they feared God.    At least one evangelical denomination’s official position paper misrepresents God’s very character by falsely claiming that civil divorce removes Christ’s participation in that “old” covenant  and establishes a “new” covenant in a marriage that Christ in fact has called adulterous.

Am I condemning those who with clean hands and in good faith relied on the misguidance of their denomination and their pastor in remarrying a divorced believer?   No.   Unless, like me, a disciple was warned otherwise by the Holy Spirit yet unlike me, still chose in their heart to disobey, I believe God pours out grace in His sovereignty, temporally blessing that second marriage beyond what the statistics say about their marginal chances of success.    He alone knows hearts; who will be ultimately saved and what works we are called to in this life.   In the godly marriage ministry I’ve supported for many years, God sometimes removes a non-covenant spouse through death or subsequent civil divorce and restores a covenant marriage after decades of civil divorce that was never His will.
All that said, such non-covenant marriages will never be the equivalent of covenant marriages, either morally or spiritually, because they do not have the same underlying  foundation, and because Jesus, (without exception) called them adultery.    They look good temporally, but they still come at the cost of forfeiting the kingdom of God unless they are terminated and acknowledged before God as adultery.

I am saying that the church today is paying with a heavy yoke for disobediently going AWOL in first allowing marriage to be redefined in the 1970’s from God’s definition.    How long before denominational position papers are again “updated” to accommodate homosexual and polygamous “marriages”?   And how does the Church only partially repent?

Standers of every faith tradition, on the other hand are a holy remnant in these last days.   We are the Ezra’s of our day, fasting and praying to rebuild the church spotless again at great human cost, rebuild our ransacked marriages, and set an example that ultimately rebuilds the greatness of our nation under God, turning back His commenced and worsening judgment.    First and foremost, our stand is motivated by a deep burden for the priceless redemption of the soul of our one-flesh covenant partner in the fearful shadow of 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 and Galatians 6:7.  We are unpopular, especially when we speak out.    When we do so in family law court, we are punished.   When we do so in church, too often we risk cherished friendships.    In our families, we as a group risk our reputations among family members where we tend to absorb blame and hostility  for bucking the anti-biblical norms of our culture, sometimes at the perceived cost of another family member’s “happiness” – we continue to wear the covenant symbol of its eternity,  our wedding ring, in defiance of the civil death certificate issued against our covenant marriage by an amoral county judge.

However, if because of this high emotional price we make the choice to fear man instead of continue to reverence God, we risk our holy anointing, our very saltiness.   FB profile 7xtjw

 

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

 

Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Religious freedom, Substantive Due Process

Legal Glossary for Disenfranchised “Respondents” Fighting for their Marriage & Family

1 Comment

 

 

constitution-burningReagan

Prayer for Rescue from Enemies.   A Psalm of David.

Contend, O Lord, with those who contend with me;
Fight against those who fight against me.
Take hold of buckler and shield

And rise up for my help.

Psalm 35:1-2  New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Respondent Memeby Standerinfamilycourt

Blogger’s Note:   the discussion that follows reflects only my own research and independent thought, and does not necessarily reflect the advice of my attorneys.   (Wherever a legal term with significant meaning and constitutional  implication has been used in general discussion, it is bolded and italicized.  On the other hand, wherever gratuitous terms from the statute are used that are vaguely defined, and are accepted as true by assertion and inference only – example: “irretrievable breakdown”,  they are left in normal font. )

ABSTRACT:

Two elements render unilateral divorce laws unconstitutional in all or most states:

(1)  availability of “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for dissolution of marriage  in contested cases

(2) the exclusion of marital fault as a factor in determining disputed property and child welfare matters

These elements violate several constitutionally-protected fundamental rights owed to non-offending Respondents in a divorce case, and do so without a compelling government interest.

Innocent spouses who have found themselves on the receiving end of an offending spouse’s unilateral divorce petition are treated civilly by the court only so long as they don’t contest the “irreconcilable differences” allegation, and don’t mind splitting the marital estate 50/50 regardless of serious fault or financial abuse .  Sometimes Respondents can work out something more favorable than 50/50 with a fair-minded spouse.   Often, however, due to the Petitioner’s spite, which is enabled by  the resulting unbalanced legal preference afforded when marital fault is excluded by statute from being considered in property settlement,  or by unscrupulous influence from the opposing attorney,  or by depleted assets due to the offending spouse’s gross financial abuse,  and/or  biased early rulings by the judge,  a compensatory split is not possible and a trial ensues to preserve constitutional protections.   (In this Respondent/”stander’s” case, it was all of the above circumstances.)

If you are a religious or moral objector to divorce, or there has been significant financial abuse that the court wrongfully declined to consider,  a constitutional appeal may be appropriate.    Forty-plus years of such cases challenging the constitutionality of the state laws have failed in appeals because the aggrieved spouse and their attorneys may not have realized what is required for the courts to actually give a Respondent’s constitutional rights sufficient consideration to outweigh the legislative objectives of the enacted laws.    Case law defining these terms in a way that could be beneficial to non-offending divorce Respondents, as a class, has only emerged fairly recently, particularly in cases involving marriage rights.   (See Part 1 and Part 2 of our Constitutional Case History.)

 

What follows below are some legal definitions and case citations that may be useful to a Respondent in seeking constitutional relief against the sort of judicial favoritism overwhelmingly shown to Petitioners under the prevailing system.    These definitions may help in persuading a judge to go beyond applying a “rational basis” standard of review to the appeal.    If this can be accomplished, the civil authority must then bring evidence that the results of the law match the intent of the law, and that there was not a more effective and less constitutionally-invasive alternative of accomplishing the objectives of the law.

It is very difficult to get consideration as a disfavored class outside of religious or race/gender/nationality protections, but once this is achieved, it becomes pretty difficult for the state to meet the more discerning and demanding tests that result.   Someday, sooner or later,  this overlooked issue will topple a state’s unconscionable unilateral divorce laws.    High courts normally require “narrow tailoring” of a law to meet its stated objective, but various features of existing “no-fault” laws generally paint a very broad brush stroke, with widespread disparate impact, in order to favor a small ideological minority such as homosexuals or battered spouses  at the expense of everyone else, including taxpayers and society at large.

 

Respondent – the term given to a defendant in a civil divorce case as a result of the unilateral divorce laws.    Respondents seem to need a special name to denote for the legal community the singling out versus ordinary defendants because they have fewer constitutional protections than any other class of civil or criminal defendant.  This is in order to give intentional legal preference to the Petitioner in the event the litigation is contested.

 

Standard of Review – a defined process courts must follow to determine whether there is sufficient justification to impair the 14th Amendment constitutional protections of an individual adversely impacted by a law that favors one group over another

Strict Scrutiny –  the most favorable standard of review to Respondents as a class, or as individuals who have been denied their fundamental rights (religious expression, parental sovereignty, family privacy, defense against a civil charge, defense of property).    For a law to pass the test as constitutional under this level of review, the civil authority must prove that the law serves a “compelling” purpose, and that the means chosen to accomplish that purpose is the “least restrictive” alternative available.   This more exacting standard of review must be applied where a Respondent demonstrates that a clearly-defined fundamental right has been impaired or denied, or that their free exercise of religion has been substantially burdened.   (See also “RFRA” below).

Heightened Scrutiny –  standard of review that is analogous to Strict Scrutiny.

Korematsu v United States (1944) U.S. Supreme Court         (heinously, the compelling interest test was deemed to be met which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII)

Burwell v Hobby Lobby (2014) U.S. Supreme Court                                Korte v Sebelius (2013)  U.S. 7th Circuit

 

“Suspect Class” & “Quasi-Suspect Class”–  an aggrieved class of citizens who are deemed by the court to be entitled to the protection of a heightened standard of judicial review due to one or more of several factors:

To prevail here, it needs to be shown that Respondents can be identified as a minority class that shares much of the following experience….

(1) longstanding pattern of animus or systemic discrimination,          (2) politically weak and legislatively / societally disfavored,                  (3) some disfavored immutable characteristic or other characteristic not within their control:  race, gender, nationality, deeply-held conviction about the indissoluability of marriage, etc.                                     (4) the characteristic bears no relation to their ability to perform or contribute to society.

Judge T S Black_quote

Where a quasi-suspect classification is established, intermediate scrutiny applies.  Here the burden shifts to the state to prove that the law serves an “important” governmental objective that could not be met without the means chosen, and that there’s a close fit between the outcome of the law and its claimed objective.   We all know by now that unilateral divorce laws cannot stand up against that kind of scrutiny due to the range of well-documented perverse outcomes, and due to the varying ways these laws have been enacted in different states, especially in that not all states apply marital fault to child custody and property division yet still enforce no-fault grounds.

Kerrigan v Public Health Commission, CT Supreme Court, (2008), pages 5-40 of embedded link, which in turn cites several Federal cases.

  Varnum v Brian,  IA Supreme Court (2009)

 

Intermediate Scrutiny  –  standard of review that is moderately protective of the constitutional rights of Respondents where the burden of proof is also with the civil authority which must prove the law serves an “important” interest which could not be achieved in the absence of that particular law, and the law actually has a close enough fit with its objective such that it actually achieves that interest or result.    Presumably, a Respondent can bring refuting evidence around the last two points, since years of evidence have stacked up in every state that unilateral divorce works against the stated purposes in the statute, and have produced the exact opposite of the objectives espoused in the legislative history, along with disastrous unintended consequences.   For this standard of review to apply,  however, there has to be evidence that the contesting Respondent is a member of a “Suspect Class” or “Quasi-Suspect Class”.

Craig v Boren (1976)  U.S. Supreme Court

FB profile 7xtjw(SIFC commentary:  if Respondents were to be treated as a quasi-suspect class, or if any of the above levels of review were applied, it would be difficult for the civil authority to obtain a finding that unilaterally-asserted and unsubstantiated “irreconcilable differences”  grounds accusations constitutionally withstand 14th Amendment equal protection and substantive due process tests.   However, all rulings to-date on constitutional challenges to divorce laws have applied “rational basis“ as the level of review, mostly due to insufficiently developed case law and unjust failure to recognize contesting Respondents as a “Quasi-Suspect Class” or as having protected fundamental rights, as individuals or as a class.)

 

Rational Basis –  the level of review most beneficial to the civil authority seeking to defend a law and enforce it against an injured party who brings a constitutional challenge.    To gain priority over a Respondent’s equal protection and due process rights, a civil authority must establish only that the law serves a “legitimate” purpose, and the means is reasonably / rationally connected with furthering that purpose.    The burden in this situation is on the Respondent to prove otherwise.    Unjustifiably, this has been the review standard applied at the state level to all past constitutional challenges of unilateral divorce laws,  occasionally in 2-1 split appeals panel decisions concerning the level of scrutiny that should be applied.

United States v Carolene Products Company (1938)  U.S. Supreme Ct

 

Legitimate Purpose –   There have been a bevy of recent homosexual marriage redefinition cases that struck down voter-approved constitutional amendments defining marriage by finding that such laws had no rational relationship to meeting a legitimate state interest.     Yet, according to legal scholars,  Kathleen M. Sullivan and Gerald Gunther,   under this standard of review, the “legitimate interest” does not have to be the government’s actual interest.  Rather, if the court can merely hypothesize a “legitimate” interest served by the challenged action, it will withstand the rational basis review.     These volatile extremes in potential judicial outcomes show that the concept of “legitimate purpose” appears to have degenerated from its original aim of protecting separation of powers, to an area ripe for judicial anarchy, as ideological politics increasingly infect the bench.     However,  it is clear from a preponderance of  recent rulings that state legitimate purposes still cannot deprive a class of citizens of their fundamental  rights.   In other words, state legislatures can’t override fundamental rights,  and they are not subject to the will of the majority without a compelling state interest at stake, provided the states’ high courts are doing their job without class bias .

Bostic v Schaefer, 4th U.S. Circuit (2014)                                                                   Kitchen v Herbert, 10th U.S. Circuit (2014)

 

Important Purpose –   this level of review requires that the law or policy being challenged furthers an important government interest in a way that is substantially related to that interest.    As  contrasted with “legitimate” purpose, the burden shifts to the state, and there must be shown a reasonable fit between the law and its objective.   Presumably, this still cannot deprive a politically disfavored group of their fundamental rights.      As contrasted  with  “compelling” interest,  there’s no requirement for least restrictive means.

 

Compelling Interest –   historically defined as something necessary or crucial, as opposed to something merely preferred by the prevailing state ideology.    Examples include national security, preserving the lives of multiple individuals, and not violating explicit constitutional protections.    However, the recent religious free exercise case,  Korte v Sebelius   (7th US Circuit) added a lot of flavor,  which was fortunate because the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to go there  in  the  companion  case,  Burwell v  Hobby  Lobby.      According to Korte, the 7th Circuit stated, “the compelling interest test generally requires a high degree of necessity.   The government must identify an actual problem in need of solving, and the curtailment [of the fundamental right] must be actually necessary to the solution.   In the free exercise context, only those interests of the highest order and those not otherwise served can overbalance the legitimate claims to the free exercise of religion… some substantial threat to public safety, peace or order.   Finally, a law connot be regarded as protecting an interest of the highest order when it leaves appreciable damage to that supposedly vital interest.”

Brown v Entertainment Merchants Assoc.  (2011)   U.S. Supreme Ct     Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v City of Hialeah (1993)  U.S. Supreme Ct

What has unilateral divorce done to the actual instances of perjury in family court?    What have been the documented child welfare results?    What impact has unilateral divorce had on the poverty rates in single parent households?    What has it done to the demand for deviant forms of marriage requiring further redefinition?    What has it done to the actual demand for heterosexual marriage?   What has it actually done to all of those lofty elements in the preambles that incongruously “grace” most all state marriage destruction statutes (i.e. public health and morality, parental cooperation, etc.) ?    Could a more powerful case be made after 45 years of documented experience that the compelling government interest actually lies in the opposite direction of unilateral divorce,  and that stripping literally millions of citizens of their fundamental rights to carry out this failed social experiment was totally unwarranted?

 

Fundamental Rights –  Those rights enumerated in the US Constitution are recognized as “fundamental” by the US Supreme Court.    According to the Supreme Court, enumerated rights that are incorporated are so fundamental that any law restricting such a right must both serve a compelling state purpose and be narrowly-tailored to that compelling purpose.   The test usually articulated for determining fundamentality under the Due Process Clause is that the putative right must be “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” or  “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”.

For  Respondents opposed to unprovoked government intrusion into  the sovereignty of their covenant marriage and family, including irreparable harm to subsequent generations,  several fundamental rights are ignored by state law in order to guarantee the nonconsensual availability  to the Petitioner of  “irreconcilable differences” as grounds  for unilateral marriage dissolution without economic consequence, and because of the statutory exclusion of marital  fault in  determining  child welfare and property  division, which include:

  • The fundamental rights of liberty  and freedom  of  association,  of non-offending spouses  with their  children,  as well as the right of association  with  beloved members of  the  extended marital  family, often after decades of perfectly healthy marriage.

In some cases, restraining orders are obtained against non-offending Respondents where no warranting circumstances exist,  for example.

FB profile 7xtjw(SIFC was slandered and accused in  court by opposing counsel, then excoriated by the trial judge as a “stalker” for attending a post-petition family reunion with her husband’s permission and his  accompaniment, as testified to by two other accompanying witnesses!)

 

  • The fundamental right to freedom of religious expression and conscience in opposing the divorce action, in particular, declining on biblical authority to agree that a marriage joined by God is ever “irretrievably broken” since such an assertion is contrary to His Word,  also in the right to make financial decisions in the face of a prodigal spouse’s misconduct based on a biblical model of family role accountability instead of one imposed by the courts as their case law prerequisite to preserving property rights.   Finally, religious exercise in unilateral divorce is abridged  in a Respondent parent’s right to make decisions about the direction of their children’s education and other best interests, as opposed to what the court deems so.     Expressing biblical truth from the witness stand can result in personal credibility being slandered by the judge without any substantiation ,  for example, even when massive perjury has permeated the courtroom from the Petitioners side.

Burwell v Hobby Lobby (2014)   the U.S. Supreme Court upheld religiously-motivated choices and behaviors, as well as declining to engage in certain behaviors,  as constitutionally-protected religious expression  and right of conscience under the  Free Exercise Clause of the 1st Amendment .

 

  • The fundamental right to bring an equal and effective defense against a civil charge –  the statute of our state still pays a little bit of “lip service” to what four or five elements constitute a finding of “irreconcilable differences”.   The statute implies that both parties have an equal right to bring evidence to support or refute those elements.    SIFC’s Christian attorney made a valiant and compelling effort to do so, and at the same time appeared markedly reserved in seeking to do so.    However, the judge has the sole latitude to determine who may be allowed to do so.   Unfortunately, since allowing such evidence is deemed “prejudicial” to granting the divorce, Respondents are increasingly overruled in bringing such evidence, even denied the right to refute perjurous testimony by the Petitioner.    A unilateral divorce petition is a lawsuit guaranteed in all 50 states to remove liberty, status, privacy, property and parental rights from the Respondent, with or without just cause.    The statutory semantics of terming a civil charge as “grounds”  instead of an “allegation” to curtail the right of defense,  and denying a jury trial is unique to family court and affords Respondents fewer protections than any other type of criminal or civil defendant.

 

  •  The right to marriage (and by recent corollary, the right to remain civilly married after moving to another state) have consistently been ruled fundamental rights.    Absent proof of serious harm done by the Respondent to the Petitioner or to the marriage, state government violates this fundamental right guaranteed to non-offending Respondents  by the 14th Amendment when state courts allow Petitioners to unilaterally dissolve a marriage against the will and moral convictions of their non-offending spouse.    Inasmuch as Jesus said, “he who divorces his wife forces her to commit adultery”…and “he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery”,  many religious objectors who are stripped of their marital status for no cause by a court are effectively stripped of their fundamental right to remarry except to their covenant spouse.

Loving v Virginia  (1967)  U.S. Supreme  Ct

Obergefell v Kasich (2014)    US District Ct, Ohio

JudgeSutton2

Barrier v Vasterling (2014)  Jackson  County Circuit Court, MO

Judge J Dale Youngs MO Circ

 

 

  • The fundamental right to marital privacy and protection from unwarranted intrusion by government into the home –  state legislation of a generation ago impeding the distribution of contraceptives and information by parties outside the marriage was deemed an intrusion into marital privacy, yet state legislation forcing the unilateral on-demand breakup of the family for no spousal cause and with no economic consequences, beginning just 4 years later, somehow escaped the same scrutiny as reflected in this lofty and very true sentiment which was brushed aside by liberal state courts in the fostering of unilateral divorce, and apparently only got dusted off in 2003-2014 for the benefit of further redefining marriage into its current genderless form:

“We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school system.   Marriage is coming together for better or worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.    It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects.”

Griswold v Connecticut  (1965)   U.S. Supreme Ct

Is it not true, that the nonconsensual / unilateral availability of “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for dissolving a civil marriage  creates a violation of the marital privacy right of the non-offending, non-consenting spouse?   Is it not true that it does so without a compelling state interest in a way that is not narrowly tailored?   After all, neither the 14th nor the 9th Amendments grant fundamental rights to marriages, they grant them to individual citizens.     Furthermore, access to unilateral divorce without mutual consent appears to undercut the fundamental right of one spouse to seek appropriate therapeutic care for the other spouse where severe emotional illness may actually be the root cause of the perceived “irreconcilable differences”.      The U.S.  7th Circuit found in Drollinger v Milligan that the right to care for family members is also a fundamental right.

 

  • The fundamental right of parental authority and determination of children’s education and welfare

Pierce v Society of Sisters  (1925)  U.S. Supreme Ct

“It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder….It is in recognition of this that these decisions have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.”

Reno v Flores (1993)  U.S. Supreme Ct

“In a long line of cases, we have held that, in addition to the specific freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights, the “liberty” specifically protected by the Due Process Clause includes the rights….to direct the education and upbringing of one’s children.”

 

Troxel v. Granville  (2000)  U.S. Supreme Ct

[Justice Thomas, concurring opinion;]  “The opinions of the plurality, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Souter recognize such a fundamental parental right, but curiously none of them articulates the appropriate standard of review.   I would apply strict scrutiny to the infringements of fundamental rights.”

 

Stanley v Illinois  (1972)   U.S. Supreme Ct

“The private interest here, that of a man in the children he has sired and raised, undeniably warrants deference and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection. It is plain that the interest of a parent in the companionship, care, custody, and management of his or her children “come[s] to this Court with a momentum for respect lacking when appeal is made to liberties which derive merely from shifting economic arrangements.” Kovacs v. Cooper, 336 U.S. 77, 95 (1949) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).

The Court has frequently emphasized the importance of the family. The rights to conceive and to raise one’s children have been deemed “essential,” Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923), “basic civil rights of man,” Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942), and “[r]ights far more precious . . . than property rights,”

 

Drollinger v Milligan  (1977)     US 7th Circuit

“The interest in the custody and care of a child by his family which has been granted paramount importance within our constitutional framework, is rooted in the right of privacy and involves the freedom to make certain kinds of important decisions involving a broad range of marital, sexual and familial relationships.”

 

 

  • The fundamental right to protection of property from government confiscation / redistribution without due compensation

W. Virginia State Board of Educ. v Barnette  (1943)  U.S. Supreme Ct

In the Supreme Court’s discussion of fundamental rights in Barnette,  they state: ” The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.   One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be put to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

State divorce legislation that imposes divorce unilaterally at the request of an offending spouse, then excludes all consideration of marital fault in distributing property, violates the fundamental right to retain and defend one’s property, especially retirement assets of the non-offending spouse who is morally opposed to the divorce.    Since several states still grant unilateral divorce without finding it necessary to exclude marital fault for this purpose,  even the rational basis for doing so appears highly questionable.

Additionally, the practice creates a sharp contradiction in the law.   The 1888 Supreme Court case, Maynard v Hill was a particularly bad decision that singled out the marriage contract as beyond the protections of Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution from ex post facto state legislative acts that would impair the contract.    Then, some 80 years later, this heinous legislation took the conflicting position that marital fault should not be considered as a factor in dividing marital property because marriage was deemed to be “an economic partnership”.    Partnerships are in fact economic contracts, that are normally subject to a host of protections from financial malfeasance if the partners are not spouses that the marriage contract does not enjoy.

 

RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) –  a law sometimes passed in a state following the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court decision that restricted the application of the 1st Amendment Free Exercise clause on a individual’s rights if a law is one of “general application”.    Language (and effectiveness) varies by state, but generally such laws require strict scrutiny once the Respondent has shown that their free exercise of religion has been burdened by application of the law to them, and it usually provides that this constitutional protection applies to laws of general application.   There is also a Federal RFRA, but this cannot be applied to divorce cases where the state has not enacted a similar law.    Many states have only recently enacted these laws after the original dozen or so states who did so in the 1990’s.    Application of RFRA to a case provides only narrow relief that is limited to the specific individual seeking it, not any class.

FB profile 7xtjw SIFC commentary:  RFRA’s  can give important relief to Respondents who are religious objectors to divorce, especially where the trial court judgment was punitive and taken in reprisal for contesting the grounds or pressing a large (albeit lawful) dissipation claim that spans several years of concealed financial abuse, perhaps in pursuit of an affair.  [Ideologically, allowing compensatory dissipation claims to be honored weakens the portion of the law that bars any consequences for marital misconduct].   It is not uncommon for some judges to make a political example of otherwise-innocent contesting Respondents through disallowance of or barring due process around dissipation claims.    In SIFC’s case this was done by requiring her to agree with the court that the marriage was “irretrievably broken”, which was against her long held biblical convictions.   

 

Animus –   State laws which have been shown to target a disfavored class and deprive them of equal protection in order to give legal preference to an opposing class have been subjected to heightened scrutiny under the 14th Amendment.   There is no question that unilateral divorce laws were enacted with the express intent of removing the protections historically afforded to defendants in divorce and downplaying both the role of willful acts against the marriage by the offending Petitioner,  and the objective interests of their minor or  emancipated children.    Today, in courtrooms across the country,  those who seek to preserve the integrity of  their families are labeled “stalkers”, “religious fundamentalists”, “mal-adjusted” and worse!    Recent legislative bills in Illinois seeking to remove even more protections from Respondents are replete with similarly-disparaging references for anyone who stands in moral opposition to unfettered sexual autonomy.    This could be unrecognized  “class legislation” similar to that repudiated by Justice Kennedy in Romer v Evans:

“A law declaring that in general it shall be more difficult for one group of citizens than for all others to seek aid from the government is itself a denial of equal protection of the laws in the most literal sense.  “The guaranty of ‘equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.’

As stated in Bishop v Smith:  evidence of animus requires  “some structural aberration in the law at issue, like the imposition of wide-ranging and novel deprivations upon the disfavored group or deviation from the historical  territory of the sovereign simply to eliminate privileges that the disfavored group might otherwise enjoy.”

Romer v Evans  (1996)  U.S. Supreme Ct

Bishop v Smith  (2014)  U.S. 10th Circuit

 

Procedural Due Process –  constitutional principle related to the 14th Amendment that aims to protect individuals from the coercive power of government by ensuring that adjudication processes under valid laws are fair and impartial, that both parties are accorded the right to sufficient notice, an impartial arbiter,  the right to give testimony and  bring relevant evidence, enforcing equal compliance with discovery process, etc.    Family law courts frequently violate procedural due process in a contested unilateral divorce case by giving permissive treatment in many of these areas to the Petitioner while holding the Respondent to an exacting standard.

 

Substantive Due Process –  constitutional principle related to the 14th Amendment that aims to protect individuals against majoritarian policy enactments that exceed the limits of government authority by infringing on fundamental rights without a compelling state interest and narrow tailoring (close fit with state objective and least restrictive means) to achieve that interest.    Invoking substantive due process is intended to prevent singling out a disfavored group and removing their rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, marital privacy, parental authority or religious expression in order to shift the power to an opposing group or its economic beneficiaries.    In the case of unilateral divorce and family law courts, those economic beneficiaries also tend to be the very gatekeepers of justice in a severe conflict of interest!

It is vitally important to recognize that typical contested unilateral divorce proceedings will often violate both types of constitutionally-protected due process in the same case, but the tendency in the legal community is to focus on procedural due process and say the judge erred, rather than that his acts were intentional, pre-emptive or punitive.  

 

Disparate impact –   unintentional impact on a protected, disadvantaged group from enforcement of state laws.     Studies available by 2010 of the economic impact of unilateral divorce on low-income minority families, especially those headed by single mothers, caused the New York State Chapter of the National Organization for Women to actively oppose enactment of that state’s unilateral divorce laws, though broadly supported by other feminist groups in the state.   Additionally, inner city pastors are among the few clergy who will officially and publicly speak out against unilateral divorce for this same reason.     Though not a protected class, the next group to be hit by disparate impact is Respondents over age 50  in “gray divorce”, nearing retirement after 30-40 years of marriage who are suddenly stripped of that retirement when the court awards QDRO’s diverting retirement assets to the offending spouse whose financial planning was not as responsible as their own, and whose offending spouses brought the unilateral petition.   Some of these cases harbor untreated emotional illnesses which family courts will not give the responsible spouse any latitude to testify about or seek help for their beloved life partner in violation of the fundamental right recognized in previous high court cases to care for one’s family members.   In cases of severe concealed financial abuse, no-fault confiscation of retirement assets can happen even when the income of the offending Petitioner far exceeds that the of the non-offending Respondent.

SUMMARY

Despite the strong parallels between Respondents and  recent high court precedents protecting other politically-disfavored classes in marriage rights, and despite the presumptive validity of the fundamental rights of individual Respondents,  SIFC is struggling to convince her constitutional attorneys to pursue a serious and sufficiently-vigorous 14th Amendment challenge,  while there is individual relief available to her under religious freedom protections.      There could be fear that the state appeals courts will deem maintaining parity with other states’ unilateral divorce laws a important state interest, fearing that citizens may then be forced to defend actions undertaken by a malicious spouse in a more permissive state.  

There could be fear of an unknown retroactive liability impact for the state if  either nonconsensual “irreconcilable differences” as unilateral grounds for dissolution were ruled  to be  an equal protection violation, or if exclusion of marital fault in property and custody determination were ruled a substantive due process violation.    Would tens of thousands of forcibly-divorced former Respondents who contested the state-imposed unilateral dissolution of their marriages and were badly treated by the courts then be able to sue the state for restoration of property and parental rights, plus damages?

Though such an outcome would balance and restore fundamental rights that failed to be protected for “Respondents”  under Rational Basis Review a generation ago, which were wrongfully stripped away from a politically weak and disfavored class , there are some liberals and conservatives who politically would still see this outcome as “judicial activism”.   However, this is quite different from the sort of judicial activism that creates new special rights for a politically powerful and well-funded minority group.

 

In  SIFC’s estimation, two elements make unilateral divorce laws unconstitutional in all or most states:

(1)  availability of “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for dissolution of marriage  in contested cases

(2) the exclusion of marital fault as a factor in determining disputed property and child welfare matters

Standerinfamilycourt.com believes these laws give rise to the unconstitutional failure to balance between the fundamental rights of the Petitioner and the fundamental rights  of the Respondent (along with the fundamental rights of other adversely-impacted family members).    All state encroachment on the integrity and sovereignty of the family without a compelling state interest actually transfers societal control from private citizens and families to the government in an unwarranted way, even if it comes at the request of one of the spouses.     Public interest groups devoted to constitutional protections and to the defense of the traditional family should begin  taking this issue very seriously, even if belatedly and for the first time.

 

 

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com