Category Archives: Equal Protection

By Standerinfamilycourt.com

PART 1 – 1970 to 1999

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

My divorce attorney and I caught the commuter train together to travel downtown and present our appeals case to constitutional attorneys whose specialty is religious freedom cases. I had been googling and downloading various divorce appeals cases for weeks where challenge had been brought to the constitutionality of the unilateral divorce regime in other states, while looking for the history of such cases in Illinois, religious (1^st Amendment), and secular (14^th Amendment). I wanted to know what I was getting into with a constitutional appeal, and whether I could hope to find the resources to sustain one. I wanted to know how such a blatantly harsh law could survive challenge, when it stripped constitutional protections from the spouse who wanted to heal their marriage, and handed everything on a platter to the spouse who had already behaved destructively toward the marriage, had then brought the petition, and stood to gain financially from it at the other spouse’s expense and that of the rest of the family. What sort of rationale was the constitutional portion of my appeal going to face?

I knew from the way I was being bullied by the trial court that, at a very minimum, my First Amendment rights to freedom of conscience and biblical conduct had been seriously violated. I had been chided by the judge and by opposing counsel for attempting to disprove the statutory grounds with legitimate evidence. I had quoted Luke 16:18 from the witness stand concerning the utter illegitimacy of the concept of “irreconcilable differences” and “irretrievable breakdown” between a brother and sister in Christ. When I was reminded by the judge that the absolute right to dissolve one’s marriage for no cause was the law of the land, I sealed my economic fate in that courtroom by affirming the power and authority of God’s law, stating “God’s law is higher than man’s law” and stating that God’s law forbids irreconcilable differences. I also knew that although I was the non-offending spouse who believed biblically that I was married for life in God’s eyes and I never asked to live separately or any other way except with the husband I still dearly loved, the court was seeking to award my husband a sizeable portion of my retirement savings just because my balance was larger than his – and marital misconduct (his expensive years of adultery) could not be taken into consideration by the court, according to the Illinois statute which appeared to be blatantly violating the Fourteenth Amendment, …yet,

The Illinois constitution reads as follows, in the Bill of Rights:

SECTION 1: INHERENT AND INALIENABLE RIGHTS… to secure these rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and the protection of property, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

SECTION 2: DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION – No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law nor be denied the equal protection of the laws.

This is verbatim the U.S. Constitution, and each state constitution for the cases I read had analogous provisions. If this was so, why hadn’t a case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the state courts were not upholding their own constitutions in these unilateral divorce appeals?

The principle of Federalism weighs pretty heavily here. Since the U.S. Constitution left all marriage law to the states and took no authority for the Federal government, it is a blessing that state constitutions emulate the U.S. Constitution in these key provisions. Nobody can attempt to bring an appeal on a marriage case before any Federal court until it has (very expensively) worked its way through the state appeals courts. Shockingly, in case after case, state after state, those state supreme courts ruled that they were required to construe duly-passed legislation in a way that presumed constitutionality, and the burden was on the individual bringing the appeal to prove the state’s aims weren’t legitimate on any level(while at the same time allowing no evidence of the unwise or corrosive impact of the law as a whole).

Dissenting minority opinions to those state supreme court decisions asserted arguments including

(1) objection that Petitioners are given control of the proceedings while sometimes lacking “clean hands” (implying an equal protection problem with regards to the legitimacy of the grounds for divorce) – FLORIDA (1973)

(2) objection that some statutory wording of the grounds for divorce impacting three states, excluding Illinois, violates the Establishment clause by entangling the state in impermissible religious inquiry – TEXAS (2001)

(3) objection that Respondents’ right of conscience must not be violated in the granting of “no-fault” divorce unless the statute can stand when tested under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – TEXAS (2001)

What I have just described is the concept of “Rational Basis” being applied by the majority in a typical three-judge panel in all the constitutional appeals cases to-date. Absent some basis on which to prove intentional legislative discrimination or disparate impact against a politically disenfranchised “suspect class” which deprives them of their fundamental rights, state appellate and supreme courts are going to impute “due process” to any regime that can be shown to be reasonably connected to some “legitimate” government aim, even if innocent parties are substantially harmed by offending parties, and even if society is harmed rather than benefited, as many cases have gone into court with empirical evidence that has been consistently dismissed. I could find no relevant state case that has ever been accepted for hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court in all the years since 1970 up to the present, that is, until all of the homosexual cases came along, armed with equal protection victories in the lower courts and with government entities appealing.

In 1986, a religious freedom case brought by non-attorney citizen Judith Brumbaugh of Florida, was docketed at the U.S. Supreme Court, but was declined without hearing “for want of a Federal question”. There normally has to be a disagreement about constitutionality among several states and their corresponding regional Federal circuits before the U.S. Supreme Court will take on a marriage case. In 2013-2014, however, judicial activists planted in the court system, principally by President Obama but also by earlier administrations, have greased the skids and changed the precedents for marriage cases because of the lawsuits against governments brought by homosexual activists seeking marriage rights and recognition. This development could present a potential turning point in the eventual defeat of unilateral divorce for several reasons.

What follows is a synopsis of some key state cases ruled on appeal since shortly after first unilateral divorce laws were enacted 45 years ago. A handful of these cases are religious freedom / discrimination cases, but most are based on either Article 1 Section 10, asserting impairment of the marriage contract, or the 14^th Amendment Due Process and Equal Protection clauses or both. I believe they are interesting to study, and they show that there has been persistent spirited resistance over the years to the unconstitutional nature of unilateral divorce both by citizens, and even by a handful of dissenting judges.

Walton v Walton, California (1970-1972) 28 Cal. App.3d 108

In the first state to enact unilateral divorce, and in the first year following enactment, the husband brought a unilateral petition where strict allegation of “irreconcilable differences”, not further defined in the statute, was accepted as irrefutable evidence of breakdown in a marriage of more than 20 years duration. In circumstances most likely beyond the Respondent wife’s control or consent, the couple had been said to have lived apart without a legal separation for over two years.

(SIFC commentary: According to a plurality of behavioral science studies, two years is the average life for infatuation typically associated with an uninterrupted and unimpeded adulterous relationship, a time period over which an innocent conscientious moral objector to divorce has no control and little influence.)

In a situation much like mine, the embattled wife felt compelled to assent to the existence of “irreconcilable differences” in court documents, in an attempt to protect her property rights under the law. Unlike me, however, she lacked the biblical imperative of answering first to God to resist doing so, and the appeals court held that fact against her in its determination. Additionally, she was at the time of her appeal seeking separate maintenance under the same statute as an alternative to dissolution of the marriage, most likely for financial dependency reasons. This fact unconscionably worked against the deemed validity of some of her appeal points. Lastly, and keeping in mind that this was a groundbreaking new law at the time, the appeals court stated that she (or her attorneys) failed to invoke some “discretionary” powers of the trial court to hear evidence of the marital misconduct that was nevertheless barred by the statute, and therefore, according to the court, she waived consideration of the due process aspect of the marital misconduct clause.

The appellate court rejected all of the wife’s secular constitutional assertions: (1) impairment of the marriage contract by ex post facto change in grounds definition, (2) statutory vagueness of “irreconcilable differences” as a grounds for divorce, (3) exclusion of marital misconduct constitutes a violation of due process over property rights, (4) the double-standard that connects the Respondent’s compelled assent to the existence of “irreconcilable differences” to the procedural protection of her property rights constitutes a violation of constitutional equal protection guarantees, (5) “irreconcilable differences” grounds deprives spouses of their vested interest in their marital status without due process.

As in all subsequent cases, the Article 1, Sec. 10 argument that the marriage contract should be protected in the same way as a commercial partnership contract from impairment by legislative changes was defeated by the U.S. Supreme Court case Maynard v. Hill, which was almost 200 years old at the time of this appeal. However, if that is a fixed and unchangeable precedent, then one of the chief rationales for the exclusion of marital misconduct as a factor in determining property division, on the theory that the marriage is an equal “economic partnership”, should also be constitutionally invalid on the same consistent basis.

I highlight an egregious statement made by the court because there was no heightened scrutiny protection afforded to this wife as one of the first members of a politically disfavored class from whom fundamental rights were being stripped, while the appeals court majority claimed she did not suffer this fundamental rights deprivation without due process of law:

“The state’s inherent sovereign power includes the so called “police power” right to interfere with vested property rights whenever reasonably necessary to the protection of the health, safety, morals, and general well being of the people. The constitutional question, on principle, therefore, would seem to be, not whether a vested right is impaired by a marital law change, but whether such a change reasonably could be believed to be sufficiently necessary to the public welfare as to justify the impairment.”

Standerinfamilycourt believes that use of the term “interfere” in this opinion severely trivialized the impact to this wife and to their shared family, and deflected attention from the fact that a fundamental right was being violated in a way that merited heightened scrutiny. The court should have required the state to prove the necessity of the law as the least impairing and restrictive means of protecting the health, safety, “morals” (a heinously subjective term) and wellbeing of the people. However, the court did not have the empirical evidence we have today that the law has accomplished exactly the opposite of what this court described as a “compelling” state interest ( a legal term, the use of which would have in later years required the state to carry the burden of proving, nevertheless). Case law that would set a precedent for applying the correct level of judicial review to properly address the stripping of fundamental rights from a disenfranchised class on a basis other than race, gender, nationality, etc. would not start developing for another 5 years after this ruling.

There was no dissenting opinion in this proceeding.

2. Ryan v Ryan, Florida (1973) 277 So.2d 269 State Supreme Ct

Another very early case in a state that replaced all previous grounds definition with “irreconcilable differences” which was left to the discretionary judgment of the court and not further defined in the statute. The effect was that the petitioning spouse needed only to make the allegation and prove residency, and their non-offending spouse was effectively precluded from defending against it. There was chatter in the opinion to the effect that the finding of “irreconcilable differences” did require some evidence of “irretrievable breakdown”, but at the same time admitted that the evidence could be uncorroborated, and that the decision relied entirely on the court’s discretion.

Unlike the previously mentioned Florida Brumbaugh case from the 1980’s that follows, this case was entirely secular, raising all of the same issues as the Walton case did in California the prior year, and substantially the same points made in the appellate ruling.

The copy I pulled down without a legal subscription lists only the arguments and the findings without citing any facts from the case. One point is raised, however, that probably also impacted the Walton case but was only alluded to and not explicitly addressed in that case. I find the point interesting because it provides quite a contrast with our case, given how society its economic structure has changed in the intervening 40 years. In both the Walton and Ryan cases, the wife was economically dependent on the husband who was unilaterally divorcing her. They had both been homemakers in a day when women had far fewer opportunities to carry on a self-sustaining economic life. While there were provisions in the “no-fault” law for dividing retirement assets to a financially dependent spouse, and providing for economic maintenance, both wives were appealing constitutionally because they were being deprived of vested property rights in their husbands’ future accumulation when they had committed no offense against the marriage, hence being deprived of constitutional due process. (I can’t say that I disagree with Mrs. Ryan in her situation as a non-offending spouse, because I believe it is inherently unconstitutional to grant a contested divorce without proof of harm to the marriage, but the appeals courts disagreed). The ruling cited the following assertion previously made by the same court:

“During the life of the husband, the right [to inherited property or appreciation in the full marital estate] is a mere expectancy or possibility. In that condition of things, the lawmaking power may deal with it as may be deemed proper. It is not a natural right. It is wholly given by law, and the power that gave it may increase, diminish or otherwise alter it or otherwise take it away.” They went on to say the same principle applies to every other type of named or potential heir to a person’s estate.

(SIFC commentary: Contrast that bygone era with the more contemporary situation where a self-supporting, financially independent offending spouse can use a divorce petition and an unconscionable law to leverage a sizable portion of the non-offending spouse’s assets because a U.S. Supreme Court decision that preceded enactment of the unilateral divorce law by 200 years declined to uphold the marriage contract in the same fashion as other contracts, yet the law itself equates the two for property divisions purposes only.)

The court further stated that “due process” was met upon a provision of notice and an opportunity to be heard. This limited the discussion to procedural due process, ignoring substantive due process rights, and did not take into account the judicial stifling of the “opportunity to be heard” imposed by typical court operating rules that give the favored Petitioner far more latitude to present evidence than the disfavored Respondent.

Highlights of Dissenting Opinion (SIFC could not do this justice by paraphrasing, so here’s the conclusion, verbatim):

R ROBERTS, Justice (dissenting).

A large body of case law extending over a long period of years, written by many eminent and distinguished jurists has repeatedly reiterated that the “clean hands” doctrine does most assuredly apply to divorce suits.

To hold otherwise would impute to the lawmakers a total lack of interest in the faithful spouse who over a long period of years has suffered abuses and indignities, but who is forced to accept a divorce not because of his or her own wrongdoing, but because the offending spouse has mutilated the marriage. The innocent party’s objection to the divorce may well be for good reason, and it seems to me after having been a member of the Bar for 44 years, and a member of this Court for 23 years, to be an odd legal pronouncement to say that an offending spouse could profit by his own misconduct and obtain the sought for divorce because of his or her own wrongdoing and abuses.

Under the majority view a wrongdoing husband can come home every Saturday night for five years, drunk and penniless because of skirt-chasing, gambling, or some other misdeeds; then, he may beat, bruise and abuse his wife because he is unhappy with himself, and then he will be permitted to go down and get a divorce on printed forms purchased at a department store and tell the trial judge that the marriage is “irretrievably broken”. Or, the offending wife, after jumping from bed to bed with her new found paramours, chronically drunk, and when at home nagging, brawling and quarreling, all against the wishes of a faithful husband who remains at home nurturing the children, is permitted to divorce her husband who does not desire a divorce, but rather, has one forced upon him, not because of anything he has done, but because the offending wife tells the trial court that her marriage is “irretrievably broken”.

In my opinion, the offending spouse should not have standing to obtain a divorce if the innocent one invokes the doctrine that,

“He who comes into equity must come with clean hands.”

It is the duty of this Court to seek a construction of a statute which would support its constitutionality. By merely retaining the “clean hands” doctrine, I could agree that the “no-fault” divorce statute is constitutional, but absent this,

I must respectfully dissent.

(SIFC commentary: Justice Roberts was here precisely echoing the words transcribed 4 years earlier of Fred T. Hanson, the head of the NCCUSL Commission that authored UMDA, in his dissent with the majority on that uniform state law advisory commission. He is essentially saying that granting a unilateral petition to an offending spouse against the consent of a non-offending spouse denies equal protection under the law. Had these gentlemen been heeded, our nation would be in a very different place today.)

3. MVR v TMR, New York (1982) 115 Misc 2d 674

This was a fault-based case alleging mental cruelty and abandonment brought by the wife of a homosexual. New York would not adopt unilateral divorce until 2010, and at the time of the case, had not adopted the exclusion of marital misconduct as a factor in property division. The judge still interpreted the existing statute as prohibiting the consideration of marital misconduct after comparing with the practices of the other states that had adopted variations of UMDA. He stated that did so for the purpose of giving special protection to the homosexual Respondent.

There was no discussion of financial misconduct in the case, and it’s unclear why the wife Petitioner wanted marital misconduct considered in the settlement. Presumably the reason why the abandoning / offending Respondent, who did not appear to be committed to the marriage, was not the Petitioner was that there was no “irreconcilable differences” ground available to him at the time.

The ruling pontificated upon the difficulty of apportioning mutual marital fault (as if family law is the only setting where this unbearable burden is foisted on the beleaguered judiciary), and asserted the following discussion of the “economic partnership” marriage constitutes:

“As in commercial partnership law, from which this model is drawn, fault is irrelevant in the distribution of partnership assets upon dissolution of the partnership. “ The discussion goes on to claim that the “partners” are merely getting back what they contributed.

(SIFC commentary: fair enough in this limited instance where the divorce itself is not without due secular cause and not unilaterally imposed. However, this Certified Public Accountant would be remiss not to point out that nothing precludes additional civil action for financial malfeasance by commercial partners that would not be available to spouses. Therein the popular UMDA-inspired false analogy breaks down. Further, as our case demonstrates, unenforced and defeated dissipation curbs allow some “partners” to “get back” far more than they contributed to the marriage estate. )

4. Brumbaugh v Brumbaugh, Florida (1983-1987) FL5^th District C.A. & U.S. Supreme Court

I was not able to download a free copy of this case, so I base my description on author Judith Brumbaugh’s compelling book, Judge, Please Don’t Strike That Gavel On My Marriage! From the beginning, Florida had one of the harshest laws in the nation because like California, it adopted the advisory Uniform Marriage and Dissolution Act (UMDA) without significant modification. Ten years after enactment, marriages were being flushed away with vending machine-like “efficiency”, and courts were thuggishly punishing anyone who dared stand in front of the steamroller. Then along came one of those annoying religious objectors, hauling her bible into court and thumping it as if it were a higher law than the Florida Statute.

Mr. Brumbaugh had brought his unilateral petition as a result of his own adultery, having once professed to being an evangelical Christian for the entire period of their 20 year marriage. Like Mrs. Walton and Mrs. Ryan, Mrs. Brumbaugh had been a homemaker for the duration of her marriage, including home-schooling her children, and was financially dependent on her husband. Her resistance to assenting to the “irreconcilable differences” grounds caused the judge not only to punish her financially, but also to ensure that she could not pay legal fees, and even to tamper with her court transcript, as she discovered during her appeals process. For the majority of her legal journey she was forced to educate and represent herself. Though she was the non-offending spouse, she was stripped of all property rights and custody of her children. Many parents’ rights advocates say this is what commonly happens as a result of contesting a divorce on moral grounds, so parents feel compelled to violate their moral convictions in order not to lose parental rights. Since SIFC is not conversant in Parents Rights issues, we refer the reader to advocate Stephen Baskerville.

Mrs. Brumbaugh asserted that she was being punished by the court for exercising her First Amendment right to free exercise of religious conscience in contesting her case, since she believed, as I do, that the bible strictly prohibits and God does not recognize divorce between covenant spouses, and that subsequent remarriage while a covenant spouse is still living constitutes adultery, as Jesus clearly stated. There was not a dissipation of assets claim involved, but parental rights and religious rights to the continuation of the children’s upbringing were very much at issue.

Had she succeeded in being heard on appeal, she may potentially have prevailed on a First Amendment free exercise-based challenge because the landmark 1990 decision, Oregon v Smith had not yet set the precedent that diluted religious protections against broadly applicable state laws like the marriage dissolution law which violated her deeply held convictions. Since that time, effective religious conscience protections have come to depend heavily on state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts which were developed at the Federal level and in several states in response to the attempted curtailment of original constitutional protections. Like standerinfamilycourt, Mrs. Brumbaugh was financially punished by a hostile judge for contesting her husband’s petition on moral and biblical grounds based on the dictates of her conscience, and according to her biblical responsibility before God for her family’s spiritual wellbeing.

This lady’s strong persistence through several years of wrangling with state courts, her desire to become educated out of a motivation to help others, and her string of losses in the state courts eventually led to her case being docketed at the U.S. Supreme Court, but ultimately it was dismissed without hearing. At the end of her 4 year legal journey, Mrs. Brumbaugh was still self-represented due to lack of funds for legal counsel.

(SIFC commentary: At that time, the various legal ministries devoted to defending religious liberties were just getting started, and though they all have mission statements that promote the defense of the traditional family, most still do not construe that mission to include defending against forced divorce cases that violate religious conscience, and several told us they do not readily accept that religious discrimination is a core issue in such cases. The reasons seem to have mostly to do with fundraising and not wanting to politically offend certain constituencies. However, as these same ministries have in 2014 been representing various states’ efforts to preserve the one man, one woman legal definition of marriage, they have been met with judicial chastisement over the apparent hypocrisy of this stance in failing to recognize the most dangerous form of marriage redefinition that actually enabled unilateral divorce. SIFC prays that these ministries will penitently hear this as the voice of the Holy Spirit, even though the words are coming from the lips and pens of liberal judges determined to deconstruct traditional marriage. SIFC believes that any victory against demonic spiritual enemies requires absolute integrity and total obedience to all of God’s word, fearing God above all men, and this could very well be a “core issue” in the lack of God’s blessing on their cases in the constitutional arena of homosexual and plural marriage redefinition.) 1M1W4L !

5. Semmler v Semmler, Illinois (1985) 107 Ill.2d 130

In another case following shortly after enactment of a provision of the unilateral divorce law, specifically, the two year separation provision which in Illinois triggers unilateral dissolution if proven. The wife asserted unconstitutionality due to retroactive application (essentially the ex post facto, Article 1 Sec. 10 argument). The trial court agreed with her and denied the divorce.

The husband appealed and the trial court decision was overturned based on earlier precedents the trial court failed to apply, including Maynard v Hill from the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is unfortunate that an issue around the constitutionality of marital misconduct being excluded as a consideration in the division of property or determining child custody wasn’t raised in this case. The appellate court did not have an opportunity to observe the double-standard in singling out the marriage contract as not being subject to constitutional protection while the Illinois statute nevertheless demands to treat the marital estate as a contractual “economic partnership”. An opportunity was missed to reverse the perverse economic incentive created by the statute (to walk out on one’s family with no economic consequences) that no doubt tugged at the conscience of that Kane County trial judge who was overruled in this appeal.

(SIFC commentary: This appears to be the only substantive challenge brought to the constitutionality of Illinois’ unilateral divorce law. Another 1978 case Kujawinski v. Kujawinski 376 N.E.2d 1382 was brought on several counts of technical issues where the trial court ruled the law unconstitutional, and was also fully overturned.)

6. Johari v Johari, Minnesota (1997) Court of Appeals, CO-97-69

The husband brought a pro-se appeal of his wife’s no-fault judgment on equal protection grounds, and asserted that where there are minor children of the marriage, “irretrievable breakdown” as a standard for dissolution of the marriage does not meet the purpose of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, an issue not taken up in the trial court, thus dismissed. In his role as Appellant, Mr. Johari failed to give required notice to the State Attorney General of his constitutional challenge which substantially damaged his case. Mr. Johari did not raise a religious objection to the statute.

The appeals court ruled that Mr. Johari failed to make a legal argument on appeal, and cited no legal authority in support of his argument. The court further ruled that newspaper and magazine articles he brought in support of his position were not adequate to establish error by the trial court. Finally, the court ruled that the relief Mr. Johari sought in ordering the Minnesota Legislature to reverse the unilateral divorce statute to require a findng of cause, and set aside the divorce judgment pending this action was outside the court’s authority. The trial court decision was affirmed.

(SIFC commentary: It is unfortunate that Mr. Johari was not able to be represented by trained counsel. He certainly had the right idea.

Part 2 will cover cases brought since 2000, including some very interesting religious freedom cases.

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Spiritual Warfare

Our Story (7 Times Around the Jericho Wall) – Part 3

October 21, 2014 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt.com

“For though we walk (live) in the flesh, we are not carrying on our warfare according to the flesh and using mere human weapons.

For the weapons of our warfare are not physical [weapons of flesh and blood], but they are mighty before God for the overthrow and destruction of strongholds,

[Inasmuch as we] refute arguments and theories and reasonings and every proud and lofty thing that sets itself up against the [true] knowledge of God; and we lead every thought and purpose away captive into the obedience of Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One)”

– 2 Corinthians 10: 3-5 (Amplified)

Part 3: PREPARATION FOR APPEAL CONTINUES….

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.

Only God could bring down the fortified wall of Jericho that had stood for 3,000 years, and was the most formidable wall in the history of the world at that time. In the same way, this appeal won’t be what pulls the tyrannical unilateral divorce law down, but the prayers and the honor of God’s glory behind this appeal (and hopefully more appeals to come in more states) that will pull the law down. The principle of Federalism in our American tradition requires that this be a state-by-state process, as we’ve seen with those who wish to complete the destruction of marriage by further redefinition. Only a mighty act of God (and uncharacteristic acts of human courage and leadership) could ever result in the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to take up the unilateral divorce issue, even if there’s constitutional victory for us at the state level. I’m still praying for this, for nothing will be too hard for El Elyon, God Most High.

I mentioned in my first post that our constitutional law attorneys advised us that we will have to lose all of the technical points in our appeal before any constitutional arguments will be ruled on. Now that’s discouraging- like peering up a fortified wall!

From my simple-minded layperson perspective, it’s pretty hard to separate the technical from the constitutional on several of the key points, and it hasn’t gotten any easier with all the research I’ve done since that summer day in downtown Chicago. It seems that “abuse of discretion” and denial of equal protection or violation of my right of free religious exercise intertwine symbiotically – are cross-motivated, if you will. I know I’ve had at least one wrestling conversation with my attorney debating whether we argue that the law itself is unconstitutional, or the law as applied to the facts of my case is unconstitutional…”arguments and theories and reasonings and and lofty things that set themselves up against the knowledge of God” (Hopefully I’ll get a chance to understand a lot more than I do now about that distinction.)

The religious freedom case will, unfortunately, be too narrow to help anyone besides me, but if we are successful, I’m told it will set a precedent that will be binding in the future and hopefully reform boorish behavior on the bench. That is, if angry leftists don’t take legislative steps in response to any court victory of ours to change the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act, perhaps to gut it, or to once again single out marriage law as an exclusion. The Hobby Lobby decision this past summer thrilled us, but really riled up the liberal forces because they realize what upholding strong conscience protections will do to curb both the pro-abortion and the LGBT political agendas. Just wait til they get their wake-up call that the City of No-Fault is also under serious RFRA attack! A couple of my previous posts discuss RFRA and its implications for our cause of restoring balanced constitutional protections to marriage law.

For these reasons (narrowness of impact and the political vulnerability of RFRA in our liberal-dominated state), my strong preference is to “swing for the fences”, to supplement the religious freedom portion of our case with a simultaneous effort to persuade the court to look at Respondents as a “suspect class”, disfavored and treated with animus by the entrenched powerful interests against whom we are politically weak and are therefore stripped of a host of fundamental rights when we’ve done nothing to harm our marriages. I believe this would greatly bolster our 14th Amendment equal protection and due process arguments, and make any motivation to gut Illinois RFRA moot, with regard to our particular cause, at least.

Why does all this matter? In the case of religious freedom, New Mexico also had a RFRA, but unfortunately because their law excludes “laws of general applicability” from RFRA protections, it was self-defeating (not exactly sure what it actually purported to accomplish other than window-dressing). As a result, Elane Photography was told by a pompous, arrogant judge that checking her Christian convictions at the door was the price she had to pay as a citizen for the “privilege of being in business”. Hence, she would apply her unique artistic talent to the dignification of homosexual marriage ceremonies to which she is morally opposed, a form of forced speech which in other circumstances has been found to violate the 1st Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately, concurred with New Mexico by declining to review, since a 1993 prior ruling set a precedent that made it much harder to apply the bare 1st Amendment religious freedom protections without an effective RFRA. It probably didn’t take liberal interests too long to figure out that a RFRA which excludes “laws of general applicability” works a heck of a lot better for them than one that is verbatim the Federal version, since this New Mexico decision came in approximately the same time frame as the Hobby Lobby decision.

With regard to equal protection and due process under the 14th Amendment, all of the prior constitutional challenges to the unilateral divorce law in various states failed because there was not yet sufficient case precedents to empower the courts to apply any higher standard than “rational basis” to the cases. Under this easy (sleazy) standard of review, all a state had to do is demonstrate that the law served a “legitimate” purpose, such as easing the cost of divorce on battered spouses, or ensuring that homemakers received a fair share of their employed spouse’s retirement if divorce was necessary. They didn’t have to prove that the law actually accomplished any particular objective, so bad laws could live on even if some disfavored group was negatively and unfairly impacted or if profound unintended consequences resulted for society as a whole.

Precedents and criteria for “heightened” review started to slowly build in 1976, but really started to escalate just in the last two years with the HHS mandate cases (such as Hobby Lobby), and with the homosexual marriage cases. Many of the latter have come over the summer of 2014 alone. I remember sitting in that downtown Chicago law office in early July and relating how I had been repeatedly denied due process in both of our trials. Both attorneys looked at me and said something to the effect of “Well, they gave you a day in court and let you present evidence, right?”

(To which I replied, “By that standard, Jesus received due process!” ) That’s what “rational basis” does to the due process rights of disfavored parties – it makes them evaporate.

Under intermediate or heightened scrutiny, it becomes possible to make the case that the law has not accomplished its purpose and that there were better options available that either were not considered or were rejected. Under heightened or strict scrutiny, we can start to argue that the state didn’t have a good enough reason to elevate the rights of one spouse over the fundamental rights of the other by excluding marital misconduct from the equation. Or that if they truly wanted, as they claimed, to stop “perjury collusion” in the case of two people who both wanted out of their marriage, it was neither rational nor necessary to impose unilateral divorce on everyone else, including contesting spouses who were morally opposed to divorce and had done absolutely nothing to harm their marriage or spouse.

It was well and good that I stood a pretty fair chance of prevailing on a religious discrimination argument. RFRA explicitly compels the application of strict scrutiny if I can prove that the law was compelling me to violate my deeply-held religious convictions. Since to preserve my dissipation claim, I was under pressure to agree that my marriage was “irretrievably broken”, was expected to have taken action to threaten divorce or actually file a divorce petition which would disobey God who only created marriage, not divorce. I was further expected to separate our finances, another violation of God’s prescribed order for the family roles. I think we can make that case of showing that the law significantly burdens my biblical convictions. That forces opposing counsel or the state of Illinois to prove that the state has a compelling interest in dismissing my dissipation claim for my failure to meet those expectations, which I doubt they can do. Whatever that compelling interest might purport to be, they then have to prove there wasn’t a less burdensome route to achieving that interest.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the U.S. Supreme Court skipped discussion of “compelling interest” and jumped straight to the obvious circumstance that there were many less restrictive means of achieving their aim of providing no-cost contraceptives and abortifacients to Hobby Lobby employees. So, I had to dig out another HHS case on a local pair of firms that had worked their way through the 7th Circuit to see a good definition of “compelling interest”. State appellate judges are influenced by but not bound by Federal court definitions, as I understand. In Korte v Sebelius, November, 2013, that Federal court described a compelling government interest as follows:

“only those interests of the highest order and those not otherwise served can overbalance legitimate claims to the free exercise of religion….only the gravest abuses endangering paramount interests give occasion for permissible limitation. The regulated conduct must pose some substantial threat to public safety, peace or order… Finally, a law cannot be regarded as protecting an interest of the highest order when it leaves appreciable damage to that supposedly vital interest unprohibited. “

It’s hard to imagine what could be said to convince the court that my conscience-based refusal to declare my marriage irretrievably broken or file for divorce or separate our finances was a “grave” abuse or that it threatened a state interest of the “paramount, highest order”, or posed a public threat of any sort. It did consume higher than average court resources, I suppose – but just whose fault is that? I neither asked to be in court, nor harmed my marriage or husband. Is it not more true that the exclusion of marital misconduct provision in the the law itself creates the appreciable damage to the state’s interest in conserving court resources?

As I said before, all of that was well and good, but as Kingdom-builder and as a taxpayer, I am still not satisfied! I believe the law discriminates just as badly against a disfavored and powerless class of people who may not hold any religious convictions at all, but hold moral convictions around the wholeness and integrity of their families. The contribution of unilateral divorce to the poverty rates is well enough documented that the National Organization of Women stood in formal opposition to the 2010 New York legislation that enacted unilateral divorce in the 50th U.S. state because of the proven harsh economic impacts on women and children. In other words, NOW recognized that UMDA (Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act) was not meeting its stated objectives after more than a 40 year run.

While many of the cases I’d been studying on equal protection and due process can be googled for free, as I became more serious about studying this myself, I learned that I could use a nearby university law library for free, much the way pioneer Judith Brumbaugh did 30 years ago in her fight against Florida’s unilateral divorce law. Attorney funds are low after spending almost $100,000 in trials, and I could get by well for myself by narrowly focusing the attorneys on my religious freedom relief valve, but as more Federal courts weighed in over the summer on fundamental rights, “suspect” classes, and levels of scrutiny, I was determined to learn more and try to do as much damage to this immoral law as one woman, who has been given a providential opportunity, can do. I realized I have the opportunity right now to inspire and empower people in other states, and expand the benefit of my efforts in my own state. As the power and move of God would have it, the summer drew to a close while some Federal judges were chastising folks I truly admire at various religious freedom legal ministries because their state government clients seem fine with unilateral divorce despite its proven toxicity to society and its corrosiveness to marriage as an institution. Amen!

I’m looking forward excitedly to working with as many religious freedom ministries as I can, though this particular cause is not politically popular with them. Not realizing they prefer to be contacted through attorneys, I contacted five of them on my own initiative several months ago when it looked apparent that the court was going to brutalize me over my strong religious objections to divorce, and an appeal, one that I might not have enough money to see through, was going to be unavoidable. I had a sense back then where God was taking this and why. Yet they all told me pretty much the same thing, that they “didn’t do family law” (- unless, of course, there happened to be homosexuality involved.) Never mind that I explained I already had a family law attorney and was merely looking for a constitutional specialist. They didn’t think my case was a true religious freedom case at its core. Any burden on my free exercise of religion was “only incidental”. I was so relieved that I was able to engage a constitutional religious freedom attorney with my own resources, and one whom these ministries regularly work with. Because this battle is the Lord’s, and the true weapons of our warfare must be spiritual weapons, I was so pleased to see the following clauses in their representation agreement:

Priority of Building the Kingdom: This representation is undertaken by Client and the Firm to build the Kingdom of God according to the teachings of Jesus and the Bible. Consequently, it shall be interpreted and performed with that objective.

(This blogger believes it’s not worth doing for any other goal or in any other spirit!)

Prayer: The parties shall pray for each other frequently. The Firm as a whole shall pray for Client monthly.

(Blogger is grateful beyond words.)

The next few weeks will have us going over trial transcripts and agreeing an approach to the appeal while meeting the various submission deadlines set by the appeals court. I related earlier how the Lord providentially supplied the funds I needed years in advance of the need, but actually as the attack on our marriage was starting. I’m now down to the “loaves and fishes”, but confident that God will continue to provide all our needs. That may include people as importantly as funds if my efforts are to benefit others. What if the Lord moves my prodigal husband to repentance before the appeal runs its course? Our case if not pursued with others as a class would become immediately moot, yet my highest priority would have to be my husband’s restoration to that Kingdom. His soul is on the line here! I covet the prayers of the saints that the Lord will have His way in everything.

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you;
therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
Blessed are all who wait for him!

– Isaiah 30: 18

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

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

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

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

www. standerinfamilycourt.com

Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Marriage Restoration, Religious freedom

Our Story (7 Times Around the Jericho Wall) – Part 2

October 19, 2014 standerinfamilycourt

by Standerinfamilycourt.com

“So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding,excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” Ephesians 4:17-24

“But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.” 1 Corinthians 11:3

Part 2: FROM DECREE TO PREPARATION FOR APPEAL

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.

In my earlier post I described what it’s like to be an unwilling “Respondent”, a conscientious objector, as some 80% of us are, in state government’s 45-year war on the traditional family.

My husband was seeking to be awarded over $200,000 of my retirement assets after spending some $500,000 or more on a 9-year adulterous overseas relationship, using his corporate position, foreign bank accounts, expense accounts and credit cards that I did not gain visibility of until property division discovery began, in the aftermath of our bifurcated grounds trial. (Bifurcation is where the judge rules that there will be a separate trial for grounds and for issues with the division of property. The trials can occur many months apart in a financially complex case such as ours. )

A very dirty secret of the government divorce regime is that the combination of case law and enacted law applies a double-standard to the marriage contract in a very unique way compared with any other legal contract. For purposes of dividing property, the body of binding case law, and the legislative history behind the statute, holds that marital misconduct cannot be applied because the marriage must be treated as an equal “economic partnership”. However, this is a spurious false analogy because most non-marital financial partnerships have far greater protections from partner malfeasance. Unlike the marriage contact, they are legally binding without due cause, and cannot be interfered with by subsequent legislation that would impair them (per Article 1 Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution) – and they cannot be broken without mutual consent and just compensation. By contrast, case law going all the way back to the late 1800’s and the U.S. Supreme Court holds that Article 1 Section 10 (and corresponding state constitution counterparts) uniquely cannot be applied to protect the marriage contract from ex post facto laws that would impair it. At the time that the husband of my youth and I repeated our marriage vows, “irreconcilable differences” was not a ground for divorce, either in our original state or the state to which we would move 26 years later. The Illinois law that would impair our marriage contract wasn’t enacted until 3 years after our wedding day, and wasn’t enacted in the state in which we actually said those vows until after our 35th wedding anniversary had passed.

How utterly shameful that as a result of applying this double standard, the essential covenant building block of our society that shapes the citizen character necessary to sustain our constitutional democracy into the next generation is afforded far less legal protection than the contractual “economic partnership” it is illegitimately compared to by the “no-fault” machinery!

Two hallmarks of corrosive, morally-repugnant legislation that undermines the wellbeing of society as a whole by creating special entitlements for a politically favored group: (1) pernicious use of a popular false analogy, and (2) contortions in the implementation details that result in having it both ways when it comes to a given set of facts and circumstances. Case law around dissipation claims presents a classic example when joined with the political effort to prevent marital misconduct from having a material case outcome.

Not every state has found it necessary to bar marital misconduct from consideration in the division of marital property, which by law includes retirement assets. About a dozen states expressly allow marital misconduct to be considered for this purpose. This alone calls into serious question the necessity of this heinous exclusion which heavily favors the offending spouse who brings the petition, and whether it is the least restrictive means of accomplishing a desirable, or even necessary, government aim. This is an enormously important question because, while recent statistics show that cohabitation has caused the marriage rate to decline-hence the divorce rate appears to have levelled off for couples under the age of 50, the widely-reported claim that the overall divorce rate is declining is false. By contrast, the divorce rate has been very rapidly increasing for couples past the age of 50. This government policy seems to do very serious harm to non-offending spouses who are nearing retirement age, particularly if they contest the divorce action on a moral, family-based objection and they have been the more responsible party financially (reflecting the high correlation between financial stewardship and staying out of adultery).

The legal community in our state wrings its hands over the prevalence of dissipation claims and has passed several recent measures to curb them, even though the inherent flaw in the philosophy of the law itself makes them the only available avenue to economic justice for many innocent Respondents on whom divorce was unwillingly imposed. Our judge displayed a particular contempt toward our well-founded and carefully documented dissipation claim, which consumed some 8 trial days to fully present, due to the extent of the financial abuse. As we shall see with the further details of our case, certain aspects of the “no-fault” law are only enforceable against a contesting, non-offending spouse by the liberal application of double-standards and by having a certain set of facts interpreted “both ways”, depending on the phase of the bifurcated trial (grounds versus property).

In order to avoid a grounds trial once a petition for dissolution of marriage is filed, a non-offending “Respondent” must affirm or at least not dispute any of the (effective) civil charges that have been levelled against them and against the marriage. They must, in effect, “plead guilty” in their filed response to the petition, affirming each of the following allegations which constitute the legal basis for a finding of “irreconcilable differences” (in many other states, Respondents are not actually afforded this opportunity) :

– that husband and wife have lived separately and apart continuously for at least 2 years (unless a cohabiting “reconciliation attempt” has occupied a portion of that time)

– that dissolving the marriage is in the family’s best interest

– that all attempts to reconcile have failed

– that further attempts to reconcile would be impracticable

– that the marriage has undergone an “irretrievable breakdown”

No bible-believing follower of Christ could ever conscionably sign off on the majority of these allegations without dishonoring God who is an active Party in the marriage covenant, unless theirs was a non-covenant remarriage of the kind that Jesus would call adultery per Luke 16:18 and Matthew 5:32. Moreover, once forced to civil trial, my Christian attorney and I attempted to bring significant evidence to individually refute each of these points because they simply were not true.

My husband, on the other hand, defended against what limited evidence of ours the judge would allow with outright perjury, both in his deposition and on the witness stand. Due to court rules of evidence, it was far from a level playing field to begin with, Plaintiff vs. Defendant, “Petitioner” vs. “Respondent”. My husband was openly permitted by the judge to reach far back into our decades-long marriage and drag out his version of isolated incidents some 20 years prior to buttress his allegations, but I and my attorney were restricted to bringing evidence of events that occurred only in the two years prior to the petition filing. Procedural Due Process and Equal Protection violation #1.

The judge deemed my husband “the more credible witness” for purposes of ruling on the truthfulness of the grounds, although there was never a shred of evidence brought in the case to support the judge’s bias against my personal credibility. After all, we couldn’t both be telling the truth. On the other hand, the judge had every opportunity to observe that my husband’s testimony conflicted not only with mine but with the testimony of both of our adult children in sworn depositions which the judge specifically asked to read before he ruled. At times my husband’s testimony on the witness stand conflicted with testimony in his sworn deposition. Perjury is very hard to keep track of, but someone who is telling the truth has no such conflicts – all of this escaped the judge’s notice (or regard). Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s adultery, there’s inevitably perjury, yet it was I, the “Respondent” who was presumed not a credible witness. In his official ruling of “irreconcilable differences”, the judge is on record as stating he believed I was “punishing” my husband’s good behavior in coming home (from his overseas job) for virtually every holiday, and for sleeping with me every time during the two years of “separation”; I was punishing my husband with my decision to contest the grounds for divorce, and because I sought to bring evidence to refute the civil allegations against me and against our decades-long marriage. Love for my husband and reverence for the clear instructions of God could not, in the judge’s biased eyes, have plausibly motivated my behavior. Substantive Due Process violation #1, based on my exercise of moral conscience and religious expression.

In two of the recent marriage redefinition cases, Robichaux v Caldwell (Louisiana), and Bishop v Smith (Oklahoma), Federal judges discuss the role of animus against a “suspect” class of people in denying them their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law. According to these Federal precedents, animus can be shown to exist if “some structural aberration in the law is 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.” Is it possible that the ruling cohort of the legal community, in enforcing a blanket legislative preference for Petitioners, has developed just such an animus against contesting Respondents as a class such that boorish courtroom treatment of Respondents is a clear and consistent symptom? What would it take to prove this? Certainly the trend in recent legislation in our state has become progressively harsher to the rights of Respondents, who lack sufficient numbers, organization or economic clout to defend themselves as a class from unjust legislation, and from oppressive court rules designed to systematically suppress evidence that might be unfavorable to the Petitioner.

Since my attorney and I made the Christ-honoring choice not to start financial discovery during the grounds phase of the trial, we were not aware of the massive financial abuse at the time the judge made his finding of “irreconcilable differences”. Learning through family members that the circumstances which triggered my husband to suddenly file his petition after 7 years of status quo were of a superficial nature (his girlfriend was barred from his work country earlier that year for violating immigration laws under my husband’s management accountability), we wanted to emphasize counseling and reconciliation, which in reality is what remains to be in the true best interest of our children and grandchildren. However, the system is grossly biased against any genuine reconciliation attempts, and actually throws up perverse incentives against reconciliation.

Under our state’s statute and relevant case law, dissipation is defined as the misuse of marital funds and assets for a purpose not supportive of the marriage after the marriage has begun an “irretrievable breakdown” (crossing a specific threshold). My husband had used his senior position in the consulting firm where he worked to install his girlfriend as an employee and she also became the approver of his travel expense reports. There was significant global travel involved with his work. It was therefore necessary to include my husband’s company expense reports in the discovery requests, and to hire forensic accountants to adequately document our complex case, given the time constraints in my own fulltime employment. My husband’s attorney brought several expensive but successful motions aimed at barring both the work and the expert testimony of the accountants, also at limiting the time frame allowed for the dissipation claim, and barring the claim itself.

Even after many adverse rulings, our evidence still represented air-tight documentation that my husband and his girlfriend had established a pattern of taking lavish pleasure trips at least monthly that were not reimbursed as business travel. Despite substantial precedent in case law that should have precluded the judge from limiting the time frame of our claim, or rejecting the graphic category summaries of our evidence, or dismissing our expert witness accountants in the face of a very complex and employment-entangled international case, the judge ruled against us on all of these, changing his mind twice in ruling on the length of the dissipation period over which he would allow discovery and entertain evidence. He also disregarded our evidence that my husband continued to spend abusively in contempt of court after a protective stay was issued in October, 2013. He additionally allowed my husband’s substantial, willful noncompliance with discovery deadlines on multiple occasions and refused motions for continuance in relief of this. Procedural Due Process and Equal Protection violations #2, 3, 4 and 5.

Then outrageously, and despite the admitted continuous presence of my rival, my husband’s attorney filed a motion in the closing days of the property trial asserting that marriage reconciliation “could have occurred at any point up to the date the petition was filed“, asking that the judge deem the petition filing date as the date of “irretrievable breakdown of the marriage” and further asking that the many years of dissipation occurring prior to late 2012 be dismissed. Despite the aforementioned case law that should have precluded this, the judge was only too happy to comply, saying it was justified because I contested the grounds and because, the judge said, I still do not believe as a matter of conscience or on a biblical basis that our marriage is irretrievable (true enough, not that the law cares what my opinion or the opinion of our adult children is).

The judge had thereby found a way to punish me financially for my convictions, believing those convictions had unduly “punished” my husband. Clearly, he was making a political example of me. What should have been a provable $500,000 to $600,000 claim was thereby reduced to only $35,000. The result was that he ordered a 50/50 split of our assets instead of the 60/40 split that would have preserved my retirement assets intact, and he arbitrarily ordered both our main residence and nearby vacation home sold, disregarding our reasonable recommendations to award the higher value property to my husband for (his) sale, and award the lower-value property to me for an ongoing residence that I could afford to maintain into my approaching retirement. Substantive Due Process violation #2, based on my exercise of moral conscience and religious expression.

That judicial move, however, transformed our technical appeal into a constitutional appeal, one that caught the empathy of an experienced religious freedom law firm who agreed to take our appeals case.

At least one of the recent marriage redefinition case rulings, Bostic v Shaefer (Virginia) goes into an interesting discussion of the precedents defining a fundamental right. Citing a 1943 Supreme Court case, West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, fundamental rights are those which are “deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if [they were] sacrificed.” I believe there are numerous fundamental rights stripped from Respondents by the enforcement of the unilateral divorce system, all of which rights had been deeply rooted in the nation’s tradition and history until the enactment of state-by-state unilateral divorce laws commenced 45 years ago. One does not have to read very far into a piece by Fathers’ Rights advocate Stephen Baskerville to see how basic liberty is routinely stripped without cause from some Respondents. My own liberty to live in a home I currently own and could well afford with my future finances has been punitively stripped from me by this judge. My fundamental right to reasonably defend my retirement was arbitrarily stripped from me simply for the crime of showing up in court to defend the sanctity of my marriage, as is my basic constitutional right. If homosexuals as a class sharing a chosen, non-immutable shared emotional characteristic may claim a fundamental right to get married to the person of their choice (as has been recently ruled in numerous states across the land and allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court to stand due to lack of review), then contesting Respondents as a morally-defined and politically disfavored class have a fundamental right to stay married to the person of their choice, absent some just cause proven against them. This is before even touching my 1st Amendment right to freedom of conscience and religious exercise toward my God-given marriage.

Once handed down, appellate rulings in divorce cases are readily retrievable online these days from a simple Google or Bing search without a legal subscription service. Because by 2013, several innocent family members now worked for my husband’s firm, which was likely to be explicitly named in the eventual published case, we filed a motion to proceed with our appeal under a fictitious name, “Jane and John Doe” and “XYZ Company.” I love my husband and want to do everything I can to leave the door open for his return to fellowship with the Lord and to reconciliation with our family. I feel a moral responsibility to pursue this important appeal for the good of society if that’s the Lord’s assignment for me, but I also don’t want to deliberately make myself the direct instrument of retribution.
I believe my role is to stay out of the way of correcting natural consequences God brings to my husband as a result of his own actions, but not to step into that role myself if it can be avoided.
The court made its bias plain that I should have spared my husband of any consequences altogether by readily consenting to what God’s word forbids. To accomplish this, I should have modeled the principle of disposable covenants for the edification of my watching children and their spouses, grandchildren and their future spouses.

Whether we win or lose on appeal, public details of my husband’s breach of fiduciary responsibility to his firm is likely to harm his firm’s existing and potential client relationships, given the nature of that business. Incredibly, my husband’s attorney filed a response actively opposing our motion, even though it was in my husband’s very obvious best interest for the judge to grant the anonymity.

Proverbs 12: 4 – A capable wife is her husband’s crown, but a wife who causes shame is rottenness in his bones.

Proverbs 31: 12 – The heart of her husband trusts in her. She brings him good and not harm all the days of her life.

I should say here that my attorney did not feel it was prudent to base our filed anonymity motion on these true family concerns, so he instead filed the motion based on potential damage to my own safety and well-being should there be additional political opponents to our constitutional appeal. As a consequence, the trial judge erroneously treated our motion as though we had requested that the case be wholly impounded, and therefore denied our motion based on “the public’s right to know”, which we now have to appeal.

We have also filed several stay motions that the trial court judge denied, which are now going to the appeals court. My husband and I have each spent about $100,000 so far in legal fees, about 80% of which were incurred in the property / dissipation phase of our two trials where the main issue was my pension and his failure to provide for his own retirement due to dissipation of marital assets. Tens of thousands of dollars alone were spent on respectively combatting and defending my right as a Respondent to the sort of due process that everyone else takes for granted under the system of justice outside of Family Law Court.

In the meantime, I have taken up a bit of legal research myself in order to be a better-informed consumer of constitutional law services than I was of family law services. I have sought to record my learnings over this long journey in the hopes of being helpful to others in the future. I drew inspiration here from reading Judith Brumbaugh’s excellent book, “Judge, Please Don’t Strike that Gavel on My Marriage.” Judith is an amazing saint who has gone before, back in the 1980’s when she brought what was probably one of the nation’s first religious freedom constitutional challenges to Florida’s unilateral divorce law, which is actually harsher than Illinois’ (unless HB1452 passes in the Illinois Senate this fall). Judith was cut off early from funds to pay attorney fees, and incredibly she taught herself at the local library to represent herself after she became the victim of a judge who also was determined to make a political example of anyone who would dare contest a “no-fault” divorce based on a biblical stand for her covenant marriage.

(SIFC Update: to the praise and glory of God, the prayers of the saints in Illinois were heard and the 2013-2014 Illinois legislative session ended without passing HB1452 despite its earlier lopsided margin of victory in the state house of representatives.) This mercy defeats accelerated family destruction and increased poverty that would have otherwise devastated thousands of additional families across the state.

There are some legal environment factors today that I believe are changing by the month concerning marriage rights, equal protection and due process, and are very different now than in those earlier days of unsuccessful constitutional challenge of “no-fault” divorce, which I will cover (attorney advice permitting) in my next post.

Malachi 3:5 –

“I will come to put you on trial [state family law courts ,who trample My Covenant]. I will be quick to testify against … adulterers, lying witnesses, and those who cheat workers out of their wages and oppress widows and orphans. I will also testify against those who deprive foreigners of their rights. None of them fear me,” says Yahweh Tsebaoth [ the God of Angel Armies].”

I close this post by wryly pointing out that the above promise from God started to be fulfilled in 2014 when Judge Steven Reinhardt of the 9th Federal Circuit called out state unilateral divorce laws in his ruling in Latta v Otter striking down the constitutional vote of the people of the states of Idaho and Nevada to define marriage as one man and one woman. Standerinfamilycourt is in the process of reviewing all of the 2014 marriage redefinition cases, a time-consuming undertaking!

Jesus warned that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump”. God will not be mocked!

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

Our Story: 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall- Part3

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

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

standerinfamilycourt.com

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, family law, Religious freedom

Alliance Defending Freedom: Two Ways We Should NOT Respond to the “Redefinition” of Marriage

October 18, 2014 standerinfamilycourt

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: This tireless public interest and religious freedom law ministry is revered by this Christian blogger. Nevertheless, like several of their peer ministries, ADF has the same political blind spot which was recently described by impartial observers such as Eric Metaxas and Rev. Al Mohler: for patronage reasons, they won’t publicly acknowledge the 900-lb. gorilla in the room – namely, the impact of “no-fault” divorce, on our mutual traditional marriage cause. As more marriage redefinition rulings are handed down across the country, that’s begun to cost religious freedom legal ministries like ADF! Federal 9th Circuit Judge Steven Reinhardt, in fact, called these attorneys out on it just this past week in his ruling on Idaho / Nevada case Latta v. Otter (page 36), as ADF was attempting to represent the State of Idaho’s effort to defend their constitutional definition of marriage which, except for the endorsement of unilateral divorce, mirrored God’s definition.

Matthew 19:4-6 – And [Jesus] answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 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’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore GOD has joined together, let no man separate.” ]

October 17, 2014 Blog By Alliance Defending Freedom

Same-sex marriage is now legal in Arizona. A ruling today by U.S. District Judge John Sedwick will keep state officials from enforcing a law passed in 1996 and a 2008 constitutional amendment approved by voters that protected marriage as between one man and one woman. Arizona now joins nearly half of the states in the country which have had same-sex marriage imposed upon them by the judiciary and not through the will of the people.

While this news is troubling, there are at least two ways we should NOT respond, because both wrong responses reject three important truths about marriage.

1. Woe is Us!

Don’t mistake me. This is a terrible decision – throwing out 2,000 years of history recognizing marriage as between a man and a woman, disregarding the purpose and role of marriage in society, and prioritizing the sexual desires of adults over giving children the opportunity to grow up with both mom and a dad. “Redefining” marriage will hurt society…..

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: first of all, it should never be necessary to put quote marks around the word Redefining in the same sense as one would put quote marks around Marriage when applied to the faux versions attributed to homosexuals or polygamists. Marriage redefinition (along with “prioritizing the sexual desires of adults over giving children the opportunity to grow up with both mom and dad“) has been with us for a long time: a national heterosexual tradition of some 45 years’ standing!]

….But hand-wringing, an all-is-lost attitude, pointing fingers, blame shifting, getting angry and verbally attacking those who oppose us – these responses do nothing to build up marriage.

2. Just Throw in the Towel.

Now, more than ever, the pressure is on to give up and accept the new sexual morality. Christian organizations, churches, business people, all of us face a choice – to give up or keep standing for what we know is right, even when it’s unpopular.

There are at least three reasons that both of these responses are wrong:

1. Marriage is marriage. True marriage is between a man and a woman because the two genders coming together sexually in a lifelong commitment separates it from every other relationship.

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: sadly, there hasn’t been enough legal separation between lifelong commitment coupling and “serial monogamy” coupling in our culture, due to the first wave of marriage redefinition. Treating the two forms of marriage as equivalently moral is precisely what’s opening up the door to treating other forms of sexual immorality as equal to true marriage. ]

…..Only male-female relationships can produce children, and having parents committed to each other is best for children. A woman can be a great mom, but she can never be a dad, and a great dad can never be a mom.

Dr. Russell Moore wrote recently: “We have no authority to revise what Jesus has handed down to us ….

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: Indeed! What Jesus handed down to us was LIFELONG. Too bad there was not an ADF around in the 1970’s to argue this point when UMDA – the “Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act” was undermining religious freedom and deconstructing God’s definition of marriage, on a state-by-state basis.]

…..Our vision of marriage is not the equivalent of a church constitution and by-laws, adaptable by a majority vote. Marriage is not simply a cultural or legal practice, but is instead an icon of the union between Christ and his church, embedded in the creation (Eph. 5:22-31). Without a Christian vision of marriage, we have no Christian vision of the gospel.”

2. Marriage is creative, diverse, and beautiful. Marriage is a lifelong union between husband and wife. Humanity has always been, and will always be, composed of men and women. That can’t change, and that’s why the timeless institution of marriage can’t be changed by a court. Marriage celebrates humanity’s diversity, not only because of the complementary of the sexes in marriage, but because throughout history and across cultures, different races and ethnicities have always married.

Yes, the divorce rate is high. Now, more than ever, we must commit to strengthening our own marriages, affirming the value of marriage publicly, and championing the beauty of marriage in our culture.

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: My hope is that ADF and peer legal ministries will step up to assist non-offending spouses (who “walk the talk”) to fight religious discrimination in family law court — at least at the appellate level – -and sign up to combat the unconstitutional stripping of property and parental rights from anyone who dares resist the divorce mill regime in various states….while honoring marriage as “creative, diverse and beautiful.” ]

3. This is not just about marriage.

Redefining marriage policy is about more than just creating same-sex marriage – it is about deconstructing the role and nature of marriage in our society.

It’s about marginalizing the Christian sexual ethic and enforcing a new sexual morality. Those who disagree with this new morality are first marginalized, then punished. We’re already seeing this happen with the city of Houston issuing subpoenas for pastors’ communications, the ousting of Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich, and attacks on Christian business people, like Rob and Cynthia Gifford of Liberty Ridge Farm, Jim and Mary O’Reilly of Wildflower Inn, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop, Barronelle Stutzman of Arlene’s Flowers, Blaine Adamson of Hands on Originals, Elaine and Jon Huguenin of Elane Photography, and Melissa and Aaron Klein, owners of a bakery called Sweet Cakes by Melissa.

For these people, and the many more who will risk everything for their right to live by their faith, we will continue to stand for marriage. And because we understand what marriage is, we will continue to promote the truth, value, and beauty of marriage in our culture.

[Standerinfamilycourt Blog Commentary: But, ADF, you must realize that the same marginalization has been happening for decades to those who attempted to stand up against court-sanctioned adultery (as opposed to homosexuality). Will you consider standing for those who dare to risk everything to honor their indissoluble wedding vows even when an intrusive government official issues a death certificate on a 30 or 40-yr. marriage and forcibly cleaves an extended multi-generation family for no proven cause? Will you stand for covenant spouses who are systematically being stripped of their 1st and 14th Amendment rights to freedom of conscience, equal protection, and parental / property rights for contesting an unjust government intrusion into the life of their family and future generations? ]

Credit: Alliance Defending Freedom, Scotsdale, AZ

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

citizenship, Divorce, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, morality

Suffer the Little Children: Cohabitation and the Abuse of America’s Children

October 13, 2014 standerinfamilycourt

by W. Bradford Wilcox, April 22nd, 2011 – The Witherspoon Institute / Public Discourse

Blogger’s Commentary: The direct connection between rising rates of unmarried cohabitation and the entrenched stronghold of unilateral divorce has been repeatedly chronicled in recent years. The much trumpeted “declining / levelling divorce rate” attributed by both proponents and justified critics of the “no-fault” laws to easy, unilateral divorce is unmistakable. But what is a bit more mistakable is the fact that the divorce rate decline has ALSO been shown to be directly linked to the rise in unmarried cohabitation. This is important context for the excellent, informed piece that follows about impacts of both evils on innocent, defenseless children, courtesy of the national family law system.

Jesus’ Commentary: (Amplified Bible) “Temptations (snares, traps set to entice to sin) are sure to come, but woe to him by or through whom they come!

It would be more profitable for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were hurled into the sea than that he should cause to sin or be a snare to one of these little ones [lowly in rank or influence]. Luke 17:1-3

Cohabitation does not serve the “best interest” of children, regardless of what the courts say.

In just one month last year, Tyari Smith Sr. of suburban New Orleans shot and killed his 2-year-old son, Tyari Smith Jr., and his girlfriend, Marie Chavez, because she was considering leaving him and heading back home to California. A week later, 4-month-old Aiden Caro was thrown into a couch by his mother’s boyfriend, Samuel Harris, when Harris could not get him to stop crying. Shortly thereafter, the Louisville baby stopped crying forever. The next week, in Gaston, South Carolina, 5-month-old Joshua Dial was shaken by his mother’s boyfriend “in a manner so violent that the baby immediately lost consciousness and suffered severe brain trauma,” according to local police reports. Joshua died soon thereafter.

Are these tragic cases of fatal child abuse around the nation in one month just random expressions of the dark side of the human condition? Not according to a recent federal study of child abuse and neglect, the Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect.

This new federal study indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.

But children living with their own father and mother do not fare much better if their parents are only cohabiting. The federal study of child abuse found that children living with their cohabiting parents are more than four times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than their peers living in a home headed by their married parents. And they are three times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, a child is not much safer when she is living in a home with her parents if her parents’ relationship does not enjoy the legal, social, and moral status and guidance that marriage confers on relationships.

This latest study confirms what a mounting body of social science has been telling us for some time now. The science tells us that children are not only more likely to thrive but are also more likely to simply survive when they are raised in an intact home headed by their married parents, rather than in a home headed by a cohabiting couple. For instance, a 2005 study of fatal child abuse in Missouri found that children living with their mother’s boyfriends were more than 45 times more likely to be killed than were children living with their married mother and father.

Cohabitation is also associated with other non-fatal pathologies among children. A 2002 study from the Urban Institute found that 15.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems (e.g., depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.), compared to just 3.5 percent of children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents. A 2008 study of more than 12,000 adolescents from across the United States found that teenagers living in a cohabiting household were 116 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, compared to teens living in an intact, married family. And so it goes.

One reason that children do not tend to thrive in cohabiting households, besides the abuse factor, is that these homes are much more unstable than are married households. One recent University of Michigan study found that children born to cohabiting parents were 119 percent more likely to see their parents break up than children born to married parents. And, as anyone who has children can attest, children do not do well when they are exposed to changing routines, homes, and, especially, caretakers.

This growing body of new research has been deliberately ignored by the ACLU, which has been engaged in a longstanding legal campaign to gut state laws designed to support and strengthen marriage as the preferred relationship for the bearing, rearing, and adoption of children. This month in Arkansas, for instance, the ACLU convinced the Arkansas Supreme Court, in Cole v. Arkansas, to strike down a state law that prohibits cohabiting couples from adopting or fostering children. The ACLU argued that the Arkansas law violated federal and state constitutional rights to privacy and served “no child welfare purpose at all.” The Arkansas Supreme Court bought this argument, ruling that the Arkansas law, Act 1, violated cohabitors’ “fundamental right to privacy… to engage in private, consensual, noncommercial intimacy in the privacy of their homes.”

But what about the rights of the children in Arkansas to be raised in a safe and stable home? The state of Arkansas argued, rightly, that cohabiting homes are no place for children in need of safe and stable homes. Infants, toddlers, and older children who have been given up by their parents, or who have been removed by the state from the custody of their parents, need safe and stable homes above all else. And the latest federal study provides yet more evidence that households headed by cohabiting couples are not likely to supply good homes for such children. Apparently, none of this mattered to an Arkansas Supreme Court keen to put adults’ desires ahead of children’s needs.

Thankfully, the family news from the states has not been all bad this month. On Monday, Arizona governor Jan Brewer approved a law that gives married parents preference in the adoption process in her state. Arizona thereby joins a number of other states—such as Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia—that privilege married couples in the adoption process.

Let’s just hope that the courts in Arizona and these other states do not fall prey to the ACLU’s ongoing campaign to disconnect parenthood from marriage. Because—as study after study tells us—children are more likely to thrive and to simply survive when they are raised in an intact, married home. This is no small social fact, given that the primary purpose of family law is not to serve the desires of adults but rather the “best interests” of children.

W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. He is also an adoptive father.

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Lets Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Spiritual Warfare

Breaking the Silence: Redefining Marriage Hurts Women Like Me – and Our Children

October 7, 2014 standerinfamilycourt 4 Comments

by Janna Darnelle on September 22nd, 2014, Witherspoon Institute / The Public Discourse

The push to present a positive image of same-sex families has hidden the devastation on which many are built. We must stand for marriage—and for the precious lives that marriage creates.

Every time a new state redefines marriage, the news is full of happy stories of gay and lesbian couples and their new families. But behind those big smiles and sunny photographs are other, more painful stories. These are left to secret, dark places. They are suppressed, and those who would tell them are silenced in the name of “marriage equality.”

But I refuse to be silent.

I represent one of those real life stories that are kept in the shadows. I have personally felt the pain and devastation wrought by the propaganda that destroys natural families.

The Divorce

In the fall of 2007, my husband of almost ten years told me that he was gay and that he wanted a divorce. In an instant, the world that I had known and loved—the life we had built together—was shattered.

I tried to convince him to stay, to stick it out and fight to save our marriage. But my voice, my desires, my needs—and those of our two young children—no longer mattered to him. We had become disposable, because he had embraced one tiny word that had become his entire identity. Being gay trumped commitment, vows, responsibility, faith, fatherhood, marriage, friendships, and community. All of this was thrown away for the sake of his new identity.

Try as I might to save our marriage, there was no stopping my husband. Our divorce was not settled in mediation or with lawyers. No, it went all the way to trial. My husband wanted primary custody of our children. His entire case can be summed up in one sentence: “I am gay, and I deserve my rights.” It worked: the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”

I truly believe that judge was legislating from the bench, disregarding the facts of our particular case and simply using us—using our children— to help influence future cases. In our society, LGBT citizens are seen as marginalized victims who must be protected at all costs, even if it means stripping rights from others. By ignoring the injustice committed against me and my children, the judge seemed to think that he was correcting a larger injustice.

My husband had left us for his gay lover. They make more money than I do. There are two of them and only one of me. Even so, the judge believed that they were the victims. No matter what I said or did, I didn’t have a chance of saving our children from being bounced around like so many pieces of luggage.

A New Same-Sex Family—Built On the Ruins of Mine

My ex-husband and his partner went on to marry. Their first ceremony took place before our state redefined marriage. After it created same-sex marriage, they chose to have a repeat performance. In both cases, my children were forced—against my will and theirs—to participate. At the second ceremony, which included more than twenty couples, local news stations and papers were there to document the first gay weddings officiated in our state. USA Today did a photo journal shoot on my ex and his partner, my children, and even the grandparents. I was not notified that this was taking place, nor was I given a voice to object to our children being used as props to promote same-sex marriage in the media.

At the time of the first ceremony, the marriage was not recognized by our state, our nation, or our church. And my ex-husband’s new marriage, like the majority of male-male relationships, is an “open,” non-exclusive relationship. This sends a clear message to our children: what you feel trumps all laws, promises, and higher authorities. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want—and it doesn’t matter who you hurt along the way.

After our children’s pictures were publicized, a flood of comments and posts appeared. Commenters exclaimed at how beautiful this gay family was and congratulated my ex-husband and his new partner on the family that they “created.” But there is a significant person missing from those pictures: the mother and abandoned wife. That “gay family” could not exist without me.

There is not one gay family that exists in this world that was created naturally.

Every same-sex family can only exist by manipulating nature. Behind the happy façade of many families headed by same-sex couples, we see relationships that are built from brokenness. They represent covenants broken, love abandoned, and responsibilities crushed. They are built on betrayal, lies, and deep wounds.

This is also true of same-sex couples who use assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy or sperm donation to have children. Such processes exploit men and women for their reproductive potential, treat children as products to be bought and sold, and purposely deny children a relationship with one or both of their biological parents. Wholeness and balance cannot be found in such families, because something is always missing. I am missing. But I am real, and I represent hundreds upon thousands of spouses who have been betrayed and rejected.

If my husband had chosen to stay, I know that things wouldn’t have been easy. But that is what marriage is about: making a vow and choosing to live it out, day after day. In sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, spouses must choose to put the other person first, loving them even when it’s hard.

A good marriage doesn’t only depend on sexual desire, which can come and go and is often out of our control. It depends on choosing to love, honor, and be faithful to one person, forsaking all others. It is common for spouses to be attracted to other people—usually of the opposite sex, but sometimes of the same sex. Spouses who value their marriage do not act on those impulses. For those who find themselves attracted to people of the same sex, staying faithful to their opposite-sex spouse isn’t a betrayal of their true identity. Rather, it’s a decision not to let themselves be ruled by their passions. It shows depth and strength of character when such people remain true to their vows, consciously striving to remember, honor, and revive the love they had for their spouses when they first married.

My Children Deserve Better

Our two young children were willfully and intentionally thrust into a world of strife and combative beliefs, lifestyles, and values, all in the name of “gay rights.” Their father moved into his new partner’s condo, which is in a complex inhabited by sixteen gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old male prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late sixties and has a boyfriend in his twenties. My children are brought to gay parties where they are the only children and where only alcoholic beverages are served. They are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers, and LGBT film festivals.

Both of my children face identity issues, just like other children. Yet there are certain deep and unique problems that they will face as a direct result of my former husband’s actions. My son is now a maturing teen, and he is very interested in girls. But how will he learn how to deal with that interest when he is surrounded by men who seek sexual gratification from other men? How will he learn to treat girls with care and respect when his father has rejected them and devalues them? How will he embrace his developing masculinity without seeing his father live out authentic manhood by treating his wife and family with love, honoring his marriage vows even when it’s hard?

My daughter suffers too. She needs a dad who will encourage her to embrace her femininity and beauty, but these qualities are parodied and distorted in her father’s world. Her dad wears make-up and sex bondage straps for Halloween. She is often exposed to men dressing as women. The walls in his condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative positions. What is my little girl to believe about her own femininity and beauty? Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead, he is warping it.

Without the guidance of both their mother and their father, how can my children navigate their developing identities and sexuality? I ache to see my children struggle, desperately trying to make sense of their world.

My children and I have suffered great losses because of my former husband’s decision to identify as a gay man and throw away his life with us. Time is revealing the depth of those wounds, but I will not allow them to destroy me and my children. I refuse to lose my faith and hope. I believe so much more passionately in the power of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman today than when I was married. There is another way for those with same-sex attractions. Destruction is not the only option—it cannot be. Our children deserve far better from us.

This type of devastation should never happen to another spouse or child. Please, I plead with you: defend marriage as being between one man and one woman. We must stand for marriage—and for the precious lives that marriage creates.

Janna Darnelle is a mother, writer, and an advocate for upholding marriage between one man and one woman. She mentors others whose families have been impacted by homosexuality

Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Religious freedom

Our Story (7 Times Around the Jericho Wall) – Part 1

August 23, 2014 standerinfamilycourt 1 Comment

by Standerinfamilycourt.com

Part 1: FROM PETITION TO DECREE

In one of the “collar counties” of the Chicagoland area, there sits the massive new 3^rd floor north wing of the county courthouse. The spacious hallway is lined with eight or so family law courtrooms, each with a hanging electronic agenda (docket) where dozens of sets of names per day scroll by, hundreds per day altogether. Against everything in my deepest biblical convictions, this profound disgrace had not escaped us, of having our family name scrolling across that docket for a dozen or more days over the past 18 months. My born-again husband decided 10 years ago that God had someone “better” for him, and when I found the evidence, I chose what I believe is the only biblical course of action. I chose to stand, pray and fast for our covenant marriage, staring down Satan who was devouring the once-strong husband of my youth in order to bring spiritual death to him. For seven years it was a back and forth spiritual battle as my husband went to work overseas and installed the other woman in his firm with the consent of his employers. He came home often and stayed long, clearly not committed to that other relationship. We tangled over the issue only once or twice, on occasions when he asked me to initiate divorce and I told him it wouldn’t change anything except to make me disobedient to God, too. I’d still have a husband for life who was running from God, whether or not we were divorced in men’s eyes (only).

You see, I disagree with my Pentecostal denomination’s position on divorce and remarriage, and I do not agree with the oft-heard doctrine of “biblical grounds” for divorce based on the 2 or 3 scriptures that most Protestant denominations have long taken out of context in order to give betrayed Christian spouses two “exceptions” that allow them to remarry with the Churches’ blessing (these misapplied scriptures are Matthew 5:32, Matthew 19:8-9 and 1 Cor. 7:15). My denomination’s official position paper on this topic was revised in 1973, in the wake of many states passing the “no-fault” law that created unilateral divorce, because that legislation meant there was no longer any effective way to legally defend the marriage covenant about which the Most High commanded, “Let no man separate”. Based on my understanding of all the New and Old Testament scriptures as a whole, I can only conclude that God created permanent lifelong marriage and stopped there – done. Man sinfully created divorce at Satan’s behest, the first ancient attempt to redefine marriage to humanly, rather than divinely, cope with adultery and abandonment.

Jesus stated God’s position in this matter very succinctly: “from the beginning it was NOT SO [i.e. Moses unilaterally allowing divorces due to necessity created by evil circumstances]….I tell you, whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

In November, 2012 my unrepentant husband broke the stalemate and filed a petition citing “irreconcilable differences”. About 6 months later, I found out the woman who was trying to supplant me had suddenly been barred in April, 2012 from my husband’s work country because she had been living there illegally and she got caught after 5 or 6 years. (I had prayed persistently that, as in the book of Hosea, God would put thorn bushes in their path and wall them off so they could not find each other, and it seems He had granted my prayer.) Since the only existing “irreconcilable difference” was the adultery under my husband’s control, but not mine, my husband’s “evidence” involved a certain amount of perjury and slander which I bore up under as the papers piled up. I hired a Christian attorney after obtaining a list of referrals from the Christian Law Association and doing some probing interviews. There are plenty of Christian attorneys out there who are biblically illiterate and don’t see any biblical conflict with divorce in general or unilateral divorce (“no fault”) in particular. My husband, in fact, hired just such a person to represent him. Since the Lord had supernaturally given us a large sudden cash blessing years ago as the affair was starting, and this cash had remained idle in our bank account for several years, I was afforded the rare privilege of being able to challenge and contest the truth of the grounds in a court trial. Most other families have little financial choice other than to allow their God-sealed covenant marriages to be bulldozed by the amoral legal system and voluntarily split up the assets that God gave, for Kingdom purposes, to a one-flesh entity.

I didn’t realistically expect to win against the grounds charges in that trial because the law precludes that. However, I did expect to have equal protection in court to bring the testimony and facts in my case to the same degree as my husband, and to state God’s point of view from the witness stand. To God’s glory, I was able to do the latter, but to my utter shock, I found all of my constitutional protections tossed to the side by court rules designed to assure only one outcome in every case. Still, God showed up with many miracles getting around some of those court rules, and to everyone’s surprise, we walked out still married on numerous occasions. That phase of the trial cost me just over $18,000 in legal fees, and it gave me space I would not have had otherwise, to make the truly shocking discovery that my husband had been spending $50,000-60,000 per year on this affair from business and foreign bank accounts and charge cards I had no visibility of.

Soon after the judge ruled that we had undergone “irreconcilable differences” and gave us a deadline to “agree” on the division of our property to avoid a second, even more expensive trial, another piece of bad news showed up in my attorney’s office. My husband’s retirement assets were only about 40% of what mine were, due to the extent of his financial misconduct, therefore he was going after my retirement assets in his settlement request, as the amoral law of our state egregiously permits. I am now 58-1/2 years old. I do not believe in remarriage while my covenant husband remains alive, and would have insufficient time to make up the $200,000 this provision would confiscate from my account before I would need to retire. Outrageously, our state divorce law specifically states that marital misconduct cannot be considered by the court in dividing assets.

I was reluctantly forced to gather bank and credit card statement evidence, along with my husband’s expense reports to prove the extent of the financial dissipation, and would be forced to bring scandalous public testimony about my husband and the smarmy details of his adultery into the courtroom, in order to protect my retirement funds from the unilateral divorce law. It literally made me sick to my stomach.

In other words, the law in all but a dozen states allows guilty petitioners to financially profit from their own gross misconduct by bringing a divorce petition, if their spouse does not do so first, which may be against the non-offending spouse’s conscience biblically. Not only that, but the courts go out of their way to protect those guilty petitioners against any fault-based consequences, regardless of the economic harm that it does to the innocent spouse. Bow to the Baal of disposable marriage covenants, or suffer the consequences! I will defer the long, tedious details of how that played out in our case to a future post, because I want to close by getting back to the Jericho Wall….

On several of my occasions to sit in court awaiting the start of our proceedings, I watched heartbroken as several horrible post-divorce disputes over children burst into the courtroom on an emergency basis. Each violent and abusive, heart-rending occasion gave me an opportunity to pray in the spirit for each of these families, for the salvation of each husband and wife, for the protection of the children, for the salvation of adulterous and abusive boyfriends or girlfriends with whom one or the other of the parents had taken up cohabitation. I don’t think I observed a single case where remarriage stability had risen from the ashes of those dissolved marriages. I sat in tears of intense gratitude to the Lord for shielding our children from all this, and giving my husband and me 31 years of happy marriage before He permitted Satan to attack, time enough for them to be on their own and in solid marriages of their own. I wondered if anyone would be praying for these families, had I not happened to be in the courtroom, sitting in my own pool of tears. I observed one embattled young father in whom I saw the obvious marks of seeking to be a good father, but beyond exasperated in his response to the court barring him his God-ordained role, and barely containing his seething rage. I believe God is going to hold judges and governments accountable for this some day! I prayed outside with one young mother and encouraged her about what she could accomplish on her knees to help her estranged husband become a better man, and become the dad her kids deserved. I was growing to hate this destructive law more with every case I witnessed, crying out to God each day.

After one hearing which my husband did not attend, my attorney and my husband’s attorney stood in the broad hall outside the courtrooms and argued for some 30 minutes over whether or not my husband obtained and used a certain credit card (hard evidence literally in my attorney’s hand that he did have this card; opposing counsel’s insistence that he did not). The spirit of the Lord came over me and inspired me to circle the hall seven times, praying in the spirit for the heaven-initiated demise of this immoral unilateral (“no-fault”) divorce law, passing under each of those scrolling electronic dockets with the names of hundreds of local families Satan was attacking through this evil system. It was a big hall, and I wondered if I’d really make the full seven circuits before the attorneys finished arguing with each other. I trusted God that since the Holy Spirit was telling me to do it, He would stop time until it could be completed, and indeed He did! I asked the Lord for this to be the start in the heavenly realms of the restoration of our nation and the turning back of His wrath on our nation since the mid-1970’s when our government decided it was OK to desecrate God-owned marriage, and to legalize the murder of unborn babies. A generation later, the latter abomination is clearly changing from coast to coast as God is bringing mercy and grace through technology as well as through favorable court rulings. I built the faith that day in the hall of the county courthouse to believe He intends to do the same with the lifelong marriage covenant which He ordained and with which governments destructively interfere.

Our individual story is still unfolding. Closing arguments in the property division trial have been submitted in writing after a series of bench rulings punishing me for my Christian stand taken in the courtroom. I will publish more details as they unfold and as further decisions or rulings occur. I am writing this account after later reading in a reliable publication that 80% of the divorces under U.S. “no-fault” proceedings or petitions occur over the moral objection of one of the spouses. That immediately tells me that only 20% of our outrageously high incidences of family destruction at the hands of local government is even potentially necessary. I’d say that the bulk of this mutually consenting 20% likely entails mostly adulterous, non-covenant second, third, and fourth marriages in which God was never a part.

In the Old Testament book of Joshua, chapter 6 gives the detailed account of how the Lord gave His seemingly nonsensical instructions for bringing this formidable wall around the city down so that the rest of the Promised Land could be taken and the nation of Israel could be born. These walls were reputedly 45 feet wide at the base and up to 40 feet tall, counting the 12-15 foot base. http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/06/the-walls-of-jericho.aspx#Article Jericho was the oldest fortified city in the world, where these walls had been established and stood for at least 3,000 years before God ordained that they come down. Clearly, only an act of God could ever bring them down. Clearly those walls stood in the way of what God wanted to do to build a nation, and it had to come down for that reason. The seven-circuit march, the trumpet blast and the shout were symbolic of what God was going to do by His supernatural power through ordinary, obedient human vessels. We learn from the Bible that the reputation of God’s people preceded them from earlier victories and caused the Jericho inhabitants’ hearts to “melt like wax”. Similarly, judges are afraid of what would happen if they ruled fairly in contested unilateral divorce cases, so they are seeking legislation to make existing laws even more unfair to the party morally opposed to the divorce or victimized by it, and they are seeking to unlawfully apply recent changes in the law retroactively to cases filed before the statutory effective date of the law, hoping to deter future contesters, especially religious objectors, and hoping there won’t be an appeal.

In our case, we are already preparing for the likelihood there will be an appeal, and most likely, a constitutional appeal. In a handful of states long ago there have been prior constitutional appeals, but it doesn’t appear there’s been one attempted in Illinois so far. Two or three came in the early 1970’s and a couple more came approximately 15 years ago in distant states. My attorney and I were told by constitutional attorneys that we will need to lose on all of our many non-constitutional points before the constitutional challenges will even be addressed by an appellate court…pretty disheartening in terms of overturning the law! The state appellate and supreme court opinions in the early cases are illogically dismissive of all the constitutional arguments made, while the dissenting opinions appear to be far more developed and thoughtful. Because the state has always won so far, none have advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court, which typically declines to hear heterosexual marriage cases that lack a civil rights issue or a multi-state conflict. The states have built through case law and court operating procedures a fortified wall around unilateral divorce that insulates and exempts it from the requirement to observe constitutional protections for divorce defendants / respondents…a fortified wall of 40 years’ standing that only God can sovereignly bring down, but I firmly believe He wants to bring down. The good news is that He typically uses the powerless to do such things for His glory!

Our Story, 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall – Part 2

Our Story, 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall – Part 3

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

Equal Protection

Breakpoint.org “Yeah, We Messed Up, Too!”

Video August 23, 2014 standerinfamilycourt 3 Comments

“Yeah, We Messed Up, Too!”

John Stonestreet on the connection between unilateral divorce and homosexual marriage.

Remember the widespread Christian backlash against no-fault divorce? No? That’s because there wasn’t a backlash—at least not one on the scale we’ve seen against gay “marriage.”

Our willingness to yawn at the definition shift that fractured marriage 40 years ago—but only take up arms when homosexuals wanted recognition—has not gone unnoticed. And LGBT apologists have used the Christian blind spot for divorce to great effect.

If we want to be taken seriously when we warn that same-sex “marriage” will dissolve the foundations of society, we need to take more seriously the redefinitions that got us here…

Equal Protection, morality

They may have “style” but they certainly have no “class”

Video August 23, 2014 standerinfamilycourt

http://www.nytimes.com/video/fashion/weddings/100000003010012/vows-an-imperfect-beginning.html?smid=fb-share

Surrounded by his young children (and the smug-faced adulteress these little ones are now forced to call “mom”) the “persecuted” groom in this video gets all misty-eyed at how “incredibly difficult and painful” his divorce was. Yet he went into court with protections extending to judicial bias in his favor, while his COVENANT wife, for whom God “stands as a witness” could probably tell a tale that dwarfs his.

“..the one who hates and divorces his wife does violence against the one(s) he was called to protect”, says the Lord God Almighty, so guard your heart and do not act treacherously.. ” Malachi 2

“But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the bondwoman [non-covenant partner or concubine] and her son,
For the son of the bondwoman shall not be an heir with the son of the free woman ‘ [covenant wife of one’s youth].” Galatians 4:30

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

– by standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall

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They may have “style” but they certainly have no “class”

Let's Repeal No-Fault Divorce!