Oh, for a few of those.
But instead, we have to make do with Kim Davis.
I am sensitive to the danger of casting the first stone. But the facts are that Davis's fourth and current husband was also her second husband, in which capacity he adopted her twins, who were born five months after her divorce from her first husband, but whose biological father went on to become her third husband.
She became an active member of the Apostolic Church in middle age, but she was a lifelong, if relatively inactive, Baptist before that. Either affiliation renders her theory of Church-State relations not only inaccurate in an American context, but downright bizarre anywhere. Her current denomination is a product of the Welsh Revival. If you need to, then look it up.
Her constitutional theories would be bad enough in a county clerk. They are downright pernicious in a former governor with Presidential ambitions. And does Mike Huckabee know that Davis is an elected Democrat? Does the Republican Party care? He appears not to know that Jesus told us to expect a certain level of conflict with the powers of this world, and even experienced a degree of it Himself.
Davis took over the position in which she had deputed for her mother from a very early age, and she now employs her own very young son as her deputy. She owes nothing to the education that she so conspicuously lacks.
But she is utterly sincere, and she exemplifies the Holy Father's point that it is no longer possible in the West to assume that the prevailing culture will have provided people with a basic understanding of marriage as, among other things, ordinarily dissoluble only by the death of one or other party.
As to the principle of annulment, would many people dispute that a marital breakdown was at least usually because there had been something wrong from the start?
(The Church has never absolutely forbidden recourse to civil divorce, and does even encourage it under certain very limited circumstances, when nothing else will secure the rights of abandoned or abused persons and of their dependants, usually women and their children.)
In this new cultural and societal context, the case needs to be made that any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted should be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.
Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses.
There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.
Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.
Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.
That would be a start, anyway.
Am I trying to go back to the 1950s? To which features of the 1950s, exactly? Full employment? Public ownership? The Welfare State? Council housing? Municipal services? Apprenticeships? Free undergraduate tuition?
All of those things were bound up with things like this. That they have all been eroded or destroyed together has not been a coincidence. It is not called neoliberalism for nothing.
As to the principle of annulment, would many people dispute that a marital breakdown was at least usually because there had been something wrong from the start?
(The Church has never absolutely forbidden recourse to civil divorce, and does even encourage it under certain very limited circumstances, when nothing else will secure the rights of abandoned or abused persons and of their dependants, usually women and their children.)
In this new cultural and societal context, the case needs to be made that any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted should be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.
Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses.
There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.
Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.
Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.
That would be a start, anyway.
Am I trying to go back to the 1950s? To which features of the 1950s, exactly? Full employment? Public ownership? The Welfare State? Council housing? Municipal services? Apprenticeships? Free undergraduate tuition?
All of those things were bound up with things like this. That they have all been eroded or destroyed together has not been a coincidence. It is not called neoliberalism for nothing.
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