February 15th Doomsday for Many Marriages

More divorces are filed for on February 15th than on any other day of the year. I heard this mentioned on “Fox and Friends” this morning only in passing and I’m not sure what their source was, but feel free to snoop around their website.

Divorce is a national epidemic and the number that’s commonly thrown around is that 50% of all marriages end in one. I need to look no further than my immediate family to see identical results.

Even with such a high rate of failure (yes, 50% is a failing grade), people still want to be married. Men want to marry women. Women want to marry men. Men want to marry men. Women want to marry women. Some Mormon men want to marry lots of women. And recently, I read about a woman who married a dolphin!

This whole debate about whom the state should allow to be married has really worn me out. In my opinion, the state should have no say in the matter. In the Catholic Church, marriage is a Sacrament, one of seven! You don’t see the U.S. government licensing civil Eucharist or civil baptism, but they have taken it upon themselves to intercede here and say, “We can marry you, regardless of faith.”

Unlike other government licenses, a civil marriage license cannot simply be revoked. I mean, think about it: If you want to drive, the state issues you a driver’s license. You have to take a test and once you pass it, you have to continually have it renewed and always run the risk of having your license revoked if you break the binding laws of the license. (And on the other side, you don’t see churches issuing driver’s licenses.)

If you wonder why the “sanctity of marriage” has deteriorated to such depths, it’s because there is little “sanctity” left to it. You begin to see the truth behind the argument that marriage is “just a piece of paper”. It’s a rubber stamp issued so the government can collect money from you. If you screw up, there’s nobody there from the government to rescind your license. Nope. There are two ways to get out of a civil marriage: death and divorce.* Infidelity, spousal abuse, imprisonment…these are the D.U.I.s of the marriage license, but none will get yours revoked without divorce.

So when the question of whether the government should permit gay marriage is posed to me, I answer a stern “no”. The government shouldn't be sactioning marriages, period! It’s right there in the first amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”. And for the record, I don’t believe the Constitution should be amended to define marriage as “between a man and a woman”. Leave marriage to the faithful and keep the government’s rubber stamps away from my Sacraments!

*I’m not counting annulment because that officially means the marriage never happened. Therefore, there’s nothing to get out of.