Do “social conservative” Christians really hate divorce and lies?

There were a couple of interesting articles in The Federalist about marriage and divorce, so I wanted to blog about them. The first one is about the no-fault divorce law in Texas. The second one is about temporary restraining orders. And then finally I wanted to talk about whether Christian social conservatives really are as socially conservative as they claim.

So there is the first article from The Federalist, and it’s about the Texas Christian man who has had a divorce initiated against him, and he is fighting it, because he doesn’t think it’s Biblical.

The article says:

Jeff Morgan was blindsided when his wife of 11 years recently filed for divorce in Dallas County, Texas. On Aug. 8, he filed a 31-page motion to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming the Texas no-fault divorce law is unconstitutional for 11 distinct reasons. Although Morgan isn’t an attorney and represents himself, his papers are packed with case law.

In a no-fault divorce, one party can dissolve the marriage – even if there are young children! They just say that the marriage is over because of “discord or conflict of personalities”. They don’t need to prove abuse or adultery or abandonment or addiction. Divorces are automatic just because one spouse is not getting along with the other.

Remember, 69% of the time divorces are initiated by women. Before you blame the husband for that, remember that lesbian couples have the highest rates of divorce. So it’s not men who are responsible for the majority of these cases. When men make a commitment, they really mean to keep it. Feeling “conflict of personalities” doesn’t make them break the marriage covenant.

So what happens in the divorce court? There’s no judge who listens to two sides in a divorce case – the person who files is heard, and the divorce is automatic. Morgan doesn’t get to make a case for why the marriage should stay intact, and how it will harm the children. No one listens and no one cares. Even in red states, supposedly conservative Christian lawmakers don’t want marriage laws to be conservative or Christian.

Why do people want no-fault divorce? Well, they want to make the decision about who to marry recklessly. They don’t want to feel any kind of constraint or responsibility to vet the other person for marriage abilities. Many of them get into marriages based on Disney stories about “soul mates”. And then when they find out how much work marriage really is – responsibilities, expectations, obligations – they want to get out of it. Doesn’t matter if it hurts the kids.

Here’s another article from The Federalist, this one is about “temporary restraining orders”. These orders are routinely used in divorce hearings in order to get men separated from their children and kicked out of their own houses. All the woman has to do is say “I’m scared” and the judge grants it immediately. No police report, no investigation of facts, no jury trial.

Note that Protection from Abuse Order (PFA) is the same as Temporary Restraining Order (TRO). It’s called different things in different states.

The article says:

In family court, PFAs are colloquially known as “silver bullets.” They instantly shift custody, restrict communication, and tilt the playing field in favor of the accuser. Even if dropped, the damage lingers.

[…]Take the case of Harry Stewart, a lay minister from Weymouth, Massachusetts. Stewart was arrested and jailed simply for walking to the door of his ex-wife’s apartment building and opening it. Why? He had violated a restraining order “that prohibited him from exiting his car near his ex-wife’s home.” The system treated this routine act of fatherhood as a criminal offense. Writing about the case in Salon, Cathy Young observed, “While his former wife told reporters that Stewart was dangerously unstable, her examples — that he had watched ‘prison movies’ with his 8- and 6-year-old sons and promised to send them some live caterpillars to grow into butterflies — seem shocking only in their innocuousness.”

As Stephen Baskerville noted in Taken Into Custody, “Stewart had already been jailed for six months not for committing any crime but because he refused to confess to one.” The real offense was not violence, but noncompliance with a legal fiction.

The consequences didn’t end with jail time. As Young wrote, “The client could have only supervised visitation for the next two years, until the social worker who monitored the visits finally gave him a clean bill of health.”

A lot of socially conservative Christians today are complaining about men. They are asking “why don’t men approach women?” and “why don’t men take women out on dates?”. They don’t know that men are very much aware of laws and policies like no-fault divorce, false accusations PFAs / TROs, paternity fraud, and biased policing of domestic violence. Men know, and men count the cost.

Have you ever heard a sermon that was critical of divorce or false accusations? Is there any popular music, like from Taylor Swift, that condemns such things? Are there movies, like The Notebook and Titanic, that argue against these things? We are not a culture that really values marriage. And Christians today are not battling against these threats to marriage and family, either.

Here is what I would do in order to make marriage more attractive to men, and better for children (stability):

• person who initiates divorce leaves with clothes on back, no access to kids except by permission of remaining spouse
• abolish single mother welfare, and all other welfare that rewards bad decisions about divorce and reckless sex
• no special category for domestic violence, just have regular criminal law apply to violence in the home
• false accusations to be punished by giving the accuser the sentence that the accused would have gotten
• mandatory paternity tests for all children after birth
• ban IVF in all cases
• remove abortion coverage from all medical insurance policies, and have them be a separate policy, like life insurance or home insurance
• abolish all government-provided, government-guaranteed student loans. (Only banks give loans, based on the likelihood of being paid back)

I mention student loans, because men see a woman’s student loans as a deterrent to marriage, and a predictor of financial irresponsibility that can lead to divorce.

Have you ever heard a Christian social conservative advocate for solutions like this? They would certainly solve the problem. So why don’t we hear anything about these solutions?