Defending marriage

'Defending marriage' has been a hot topic of late...and not just because of the gay marriage debate either.

[Note: I've covered gay marriage more than enough recently, so let's declare this post 'gay marriage-free' and discuss only regular marriages for today]

Divorce rates are rising, so is infidelity--and along with them the wide variety of serious social problems they cause.  What can be done (if anything) from a social policy perspective (that is laws and social programs) to alleviate the problem of divorce?  Let's perform a thought experiment and brainstorm on the topic...

1. Make divorces harder to obtain

This is one of the more popular ideas out there right now:  why make things easier for fathers or mothers to leave their families?  Making the divorce process harder or more costly could convince some who are pondering divorce to rethink whether its really worth it, and decide to 'ride out the storm' and work out problems instead.  (I mentioned this concept briefly in my essay on...er, you-know-what)

What's the problem here?  Well, when you have two people who really, really don't want to (or shouldn't) live with each other (even in situations not involving any kind of abuse, drugs, or the like) then there's a point where it becomes counter-productive to keep them together through legal obstacles.  Staying together 'for the sake of the children' is really a crock--what children need and benefit from are two parents who stay together because they want to.  While it would be nice to have parents make the effort to work out their problems, (and stricter divorce laws may have this effect on certain couples), laws can't create the desire to change from nothing, though.  It's entirely possible that some people just shouldn't be together, in which case everyone would be better off just letting both partners move on.  (I can attest to this:  my parents are much happier apart than they ever were together.  I can't see how it would have benefitted me or my brother to have them stay together if they were still fighting all the time...  Then again, they probably could have tried harder, too...)

Let's give this a 'maybe'...  What else do we have?

What if we approach the problem from the opposite direction...

2.  Make marriages harder to obtain

Here's an interesting idea.  Right now any Tom, Dick, Harry, Britney, or Hilton sister can trot on down to a corner Las Vegas chapel and grab a quickie marriage with a $20 dollar bill and ten minutes of spare time.  (They even have drive-thru marriages!)  Bump that bill up to $2000 or $20,000, though, and you'll get most of those 'spur of the moment' couples to think twice before getting that license and then looking silly when they get it annulled a day later--cheapening the concept of marriage for the rest of us.  (Well, Britney could still afford it...)

(This would also put an end to those possibly-apocryphal-but-probably-true stories of BYU students who drive down to Las Vegas on Friday for a quickie marriage so they can have 'legal' sex over the weekend before getting it annulled Sunday on their way back to campus.)

It's a truism that the more costly something is to obtain, the more it is valued--and making couples pay or do a lot to get it would make the privilege of being married more valuable.  While the raw number of marriages would go down, the couples that do get married would be less likely to split up (and have to do it all over again with someone else...)

What's the problem here?  Well, the biggest one, of course, is that it discriminates against poor people.  Poor couples can be just as committed to creating a solid family unit as everyone else, of course, and it would be unfair to force them to come up with a four or five figure fee in order to get a marriage license.  Plus, making getting married more difficult or costly would give a lot of couples the incentive not to get married at all, and just live together instead--not what you would want from a moral  or a stable family perspective.  There's a sense of this happening already, as many couples decide going to the trouble of getting married isn't worth it, or think 'we'd probably get divorced anyway--why bother?'

Let's say: 'not workable' for this one...

3.  Limit the number of times a person can get married
I linked some weeks ago to a man in Thailand who's been married 52 times.  It's easy to consider divorce when there seems to be an unlimited number of other opportunities out there. When things start to go bad, just go out and find someone else.  But what if once you get married the law says, 'You can get divorced if you want--but we're not giving you another marriage license, so decide between staying married to spouse #1, or having no spouse at all'  (Compare this to serving in the army, where you can leave if you really want to, but you're probably not getting a second chance,  ever...)

There would be exceptions, of course (how could there not?), but for the most part having only one shot at marriage would make people consider their marriage partners more seriously, and valuing it more after the vows have been made, since this is their only shot.  Wouldn't the divorce rate go down if people knew divorce was a point of no return?  Most likely...

What's the problem here?  Well, if you're afraid of committment now...let me tell you, knowing that you have one shot and one shot only is only going to make the fear of committment worse.  A law like this, same as #2, would have the side-effect of scaring a significant number of couples away from getting married at all, even if they, in actuality, had the means and the skills to form a happy marriage had they gone through with it.  This means more couple living together and marriages becoming rarer--even if the ones who do get married divorce less frequently.

Let's call this: 'Interesting...but, no'

And so, where are we?  From the ideas I could come up with, we can see that there is no panacea--no secret formula to magically making families stronger through legal means.  The success of marriages and family units resides--as it always has--with the members of that family themselves and there's very little you or I or the government can do to make any marriage stronger other than our own.

One last note:  a while back I was discussing the LDS principle of eternal marriage with my (non-LDS) mom.  She argued that these so-called 'eternal' marriages aren't really 'eternal' at all, since there is such a thing as a temple divorce--thereby making a marriage quite finite in length.  She's correct in that temple marriages aren't 'eternal' in the same way that God is 'eternal', for example--only that there's the possibility of existing eternally--if both parties want it to.  The principles of free agency dictate that the option of divorce always be available, even with temple sealings (and by the same principle, you would have to assume that there will still be divorces in the next life as well, right?  Otherwise, same problem...)  As in all things, the secrets to family success lie within ourselves, if we're willing to do what it takes to achieve it...

[Any other interesting ideas for laws or social programs to strengthen the family?  Write in and lets discuss...]