Amy
I hate to correct you, but you forhot the Osbornes.

Anyone remember in their history books where it said slaves were not allowed to marry? In 100 years (probably less) the whole gay marriage issue will seem just as absurd.

Yeah, the bible says it's a sin. The bible also says greed and gluttony are sins (and says it a lot more times than it mentions homosexuality) so let's get all those rich fat-asses and tell them they are going to burn in hell too.

Something about glass houses..........

The funny thing is, Pammie babe has been with so many other guys, Kid Rock being one of them, who I just read was rushed to the hospital (haven't read the article yet, so I don't know why), that it makes me wonder who else she's been with. And how many of them now have hepatitis C. She was diagnosed with it a few years ago. She and Tommy Lee deserve each other. Let's hope they stay together so that they won't be spreading the C around so much anymore. Sheesh. Glad the kids are happy...

Or you chould choose from any of these...

http://www.hollywoodheartbreaker.com/shortest-celebrity-marriages/

I blame the gays.

This weekend the Humane Society held a mobile adoption at the local Pride Festival. That was the most fun mobile adoption I have ever attended. The gays know how to have a good time. It almost makes me wish I was one.

Amy K, if you attended a gay pride festival, then you're well on your way to honorary gay status.

You know what I think the funides biggest problem with gays is?

Envy. They are pissed at lesbians becacuse moost fundie women are too reppressed to enjoy sex, and they are pissed at the guys becuase of all the sex they get

Both.
Thank you for no fault divorce feminists. This is what you have actions have brought us. Marriage has become some kind of joke.

What do you mean, 'become' a joke. I can't see most straights taking their vows that seriously, especially the guys.

That's funny Chrissy. It has been my impression that more women stray nowdays in their marriage...

lujlp, you are totally right. Oh, gotta run - it's time to have sex again.

I'm sure it's only the presence of the lesbians next door that causes people to cheat on their spouses.

Chrissy, I mean Joke. No fault marriage has caused the current situation. That one rule allows straights to not take marriage seriously.
Amy, I doubt it. I have lived with several sets of lesbians. Good folks. More than likely it is human error that causes folks to cheat. Spouses should forgive. They have a commitment. If we are talking about a full blown affair that is one thing, a one night stand, well that is another. To error is human.

Marriage should be serious business. Not something you can declare and then dissolve at will. Look how many single house holds this attitude has created. Eliminate no fault divorce. Create a civil union for dinks, gays and everyone else that needs the legal blanket.

Answer? Neither are killing marriage.

The feminist extremists lobbied for "No-Fault" divorce (which is really unilateral divorce), draconian and gender biased child custody and domestic violence laws, and the creation of an extra-constitutional "family" court system that wield the power to are what is killing marriage in the West.

Gay marriage is just a diversion. The institution of marriage is being killed by the institutionalized promotion of the lucrative and profitable divorce industry.

Dave,
Agreed. However gay marriage is an extension of the same thing. Thank you for explaining this issue so eloquently.

I also made a joke. I didn't mean to sound bitter and male-bash! My favourite part of the vows is 'till death do you part'. Do they still make people say that?
I hope the gays hurry up and get married before they take that away from them again. Straights, consider yourself very lucky no-one is taking your right to destroy your life-I mean get married away from you.

I don't care who killed it, it's dead, may its rotting carcass fertilize the ground for the next social mutation to spring forth and captivate the gullible with promises of undying bliss.

So Chrissy/ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers, if one looks for marriage data, the Scandinavian countries are always worth looking at. If we take the last 15 years, Sweden and Norway both have had a rapid decline in marriage. (So today the majority of children are born out-of-wedlock.) Their welfare state enables single mothers to raise children while not living in poverty. Starting at age one, publicly funded daycare centers take care of their kids. So in a sense, the state begins raising future generations. Is this something that we want in America’s future? We are talking about the destruction of the family. Dose not that description sound familiar?
So it follows that the rise of out-of-wedlock births is a big concern. Single-parent families are the leading cause of poverty in the U.S. And do we really want a future where marriage is considered optional when having children?
Here is a study link; Stanley Kurtz; http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp?pg=1Since Liberalizing Divorce in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Nordic countries have been the leading edge of marital change. Drawing on the Swedish experience, Kathleen Kiernan, the British demographer, uses a four-stage model by which to gauge a country’s movement toward Swedish levels of out-of-wedlock births.
Gay marriage falls under liberalizing marriage. This is not funny, nor is it a joke. We will be a socialist country in twenty years. The middle class will vanish. Families will vanish.

> promises of undying bliss

Who, who, who told you that that was what it was for?

Besides Walt Disney, I mean.

I mean, people say things like that as if they're being incredibly cynical and sophisticated, whereas it actually sounds so childish and naive...

Did anyone ever, ever come through with a promise of undying bliss?

Don't know, Crid. But I'm taking the leap this weekend.

Rusty,

The family concept was never a fixed one. It has changed over the centuries and will continue to do so.

Personally, I can't wait for the statistics of the divorce rate among gays and the new legislation on how the courts will devise the settlements. What would be the legal standard and will it place a stronger re-examination of the traditional marital roles?

Snake- Did anyone promise you undying bliss?

Joe,
Read the link. It is very sobering.
I disagree with this; the family concept was never a fixed one. It has changed over the centuries and will continue to do so.

Rusty,

Does the link state the fact that the fathers in those Scandinavian nations were active in the raising of those out-of-wedlock kiddies???

I will be honest in not having an interest in reading a politically biased article that is using a base number without examining all the details to fulfill a particular agenda. (i.e. traditional marriage is the only foundation of civilization.)

Try reading Barbara Hobson's study "Making Men Into Fathers", which dealt with the Scandinavian out-of-wedlock births in its entirety and how the various nations' governmental policies responded to the potential social nightmare.

Heh. No, but maybe I'll try to get fiancee to slip it into her vows.

"Undying Bliss." Sounds like a racehorse.

response, instead of responded*

If they ever come out with male birth control unwanted pregnacies or "accidental" pregnacies will screeh to a grinding halt and we wont have to worry about single mothers on welfare

Yay Joe right when I need ya.

Joe is Hashmi Kajal safe for use? I've heard wonders about it, been eyeing for a while but am afraid of the lead. What's your take?

I'm tired of people knocking marriage. It is not an either/or of marrying your love or making a commitment blindly...it's both.

No one knows what they are going into in marriage. The ideal is that both parties are committed and love each other, but that gets assaulted by the realities of life. If a person is so wimpy that they are ready to leave when hardships happen, shouldn't they be a roommate instead of a spouse?

The true measure of a partnership is taking the good and the bad and working together, not so much both doing the same thing but helping each other and working for the good of the partnership.

I have been married for half my life, and 8 years ago I went to my husband and asked him for a divorce. We had been married for 17 years, and for most of them had very wonderful times together but also our separate efforts in life. And the together had stopped. We no longer supported each other...loved each other but just stopped supporting each other and actually had some contempt for each other.

He surprised me by asking for counseling, and I agreed. We went, and his first question for the therapist was about her success rate. How many people that came in for counseling actually ended up staying in their marriages. She said very few, that most people had made their minds up before they came in that they were done, and that she just helped them work out the details, but if we really wanted to work on it she could help.

And we did, and she did.

We went for a one hour session once a month for about a year. We left each time with hugs and headaches. Our therapist told us that she looked forward to seeing us because we asked questions about how to work with each other better and told her the next time what we worked on...instead of just bitching and blaming.

The best thing she helped us with was that we both wanted the same thing, but were saying it differently to each other. So, she helped us work out a way to check in with each other and not get mad or give up until we both understood what each other was saying. And we found that many times we were saying the same thing and agreed, and also found that when we disagreed that it was a much clearer and cleaner argument because we went the extra mile to figure out what we were arguing about.

And that work, that commitment to making our communication clearer and cleaner...helped us get back to the original idea of why we were attracted to each other in the first place and had so many good years before we lost it.

I think people lose that and don't know how to get it back, and give up too easily. I know that giving up seems a really good idea, but most folks I know who have given up make the same mistakes over just with a different person.

Point being, if you had to make a survey of my friends...marriage is not going to be viewed in a good way. There are very few success stories, and to a person, I applaud their exits in situations that just simply were not salvagable. But that does not diminish the idea that when the love and the will is still there, that things can be made whole and work again.

Many times our friends comment to us that we are "the lucky ones" that made it work, and we just look at each other and say...yeah, you remember that ice cream headache when we got out of counseling and found out all we both were thinking was a bunch of crap, and we still decided to work on it?

The word "marriage" just bungles some folks up. Sometimes it's not a commitment, and should be called dating, but it's legally a marriage. Sometimes it involves having kids and commitless parenting, and is still called a marriage. I think the people who have chosen to blow by the legal definitions and/or have not been able to get the legal definitions have gotten it right...a partership is a relationship where you stand by each other and are committed personally. In every day life and in the end, the personal commitment and not the legal definition is what matters.

I have been married twice. One divorce, one still going on. The divorce was a godsend. I married a con artist, literally. No way that marriage was going to be made to work because no amount of work on one side can fix things. No kids, thank goodness.

This marriage has kids. And the expectation that we will not always like each other, or even love each other. You stay, work, it gets better again. The idea that one person can fulfill all your needs (sex partner, best friend, co-parent) and that you will always be happy is such a fallacy. I am all for sexual fidelity, but you do need other people meeting some other needs. And you have to have the commitment. Because sometiems, that's all that holds you there.

I'm not a fan of no-fault divorce either. It's always someone's fault. Or boths. And for those very very few "mature" couples who very nicely agree to end the marriage, they can very nicely agree as to who's fault it is too.

"That's funny Chrissy. It has been my impression that more women stray nowdays in their marriage...

Posted by: Eric at June 17, 2008 2:07 PM"

Seriously??? Look at some stats. Our gender is moving up there, but we are not near equal with ya'll yet.

Don't know, Crid. But I'm taking the leap this weekend.

Congratulations, Snakeman!! I wish you all the best, plus undying bliss, if you can get it. And just remember this (adapted from the philosophy of Freewheelin' Franklin Freak): Sex will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no sex! Or something. Anyway, enjoy yourselves, and keep us posted! o_O

Marriage isn't dead, it's simply metamorphisizing into a more modern institution. Throughout history human society creates institutions, gets comfortable with them, and then seeks to make them permanent.

We hate change, as much as we preach about its benefits, we get into a comfort zone and fight like hell to stay there.

Slavery was introduced in the US in the 1600's. It took one hundred years before the majority of people agreed it was wrong, and nealry another 100 years - and a bloody and destructive civil war to end it. Even then, most whites were not willing to give up their superior status so black codes and Jim Crow laws were established to maintain the comfort level of the majority. It took another one hundred years to provide equal rights to blacks, and decades after the law was enacted there are still cases of discrimination and racism.

Women had to fight nearly 100 years to obtain the right to vote.

Our democracy has existed for 230 years before a woman and a black were able to put up a serious challenge for the presidency.

I point out the above because they are clearly and obviously cases where societal norms were wrong and people's lives were significantly impaired - and it took centuries to address the issues. How long will it take society to allow marriage to morph into a new inclusive institution when the wrongs of the current system are not quite so obvious as female suffrage and black equality?

Viva the no fault divorce! Was married once, damned glad the divorce was so easy to get. Of course, it was his fault.

That sounds -- and is intended to -- tongue in cheek but it's also serious. Con artist talked a good game back when I was young and naive and I fell for it. Should I pay the rest of my life (well, I am but that's a whole other story) for simply being gullible? I guess because I fell for his sweet-talking that put the ring on my finger due to just plain not knowing any better, I deserved to get beat up for the rest of my life following the marriage decree? I should have kept my daughter living in a nightmare house of horrors with someone who turned out to be a drug addict and a pedophile?

Not to sound all femi-Nazi to those of you who stupidly and naively believe that rot "what God hast put together let no man (or, gasp, even worse, woman) set asunder" --

VIVA THE NO-FAULT DIVORCE!!!

Not to be nit picky(which we all know is a passive agressive form of nit picking)

but, wouldnt fraud be considered a fault?

"I should have kept my daughter living in a nightmare house of horrors with someone who turned out to be a drug addict and a pedophile?"

Such crimes were already "winning-cards" in the previous version of "At-Fault" Divorce.

You did not need the family destroying, gender-biased travesty of a system that is "No-Fault" (aka Unilateral) divorce to get away from an addict/pedophile.

Okay, I confess I haven't read up on no-fault divorces much but all I know is because my divorce wasn't contested (my divorce was 23 years ago so the "no-fault" may not even apply) I was able to get out quickly.

Lujlp, like I said it was his fault.

Dave, don't bet on it. I got out quickly because I let him off the hook on stuff like minimal child support so he wouldn't contest. If he had contested, things like the drug addiction and hitting me would have mattered only in granting me the divorce over his objection. And it would have taken much longer to finalize. Much, much longer. My parents' divorce took two years. Mom filed on domestic violence and Dad dug in his heels and fought it. Not because he was so madly in love with her after 20 years and 8 kids but a power thing. They had a legal separation that the courts granted her but dissolving the marriage while he fought her on everything took two years.

Frankly, I didn't know at the time of the divorce the pedophile thing (think I would conceded minimal child support and given him any visitation!?) but I've news for you, knowing someone's a pedophile and proving it are two different things and since my/our daughter and I were the first to even accuse him and he had no record of that (other things, yes; that no), after months of haggling and getting his visitation supervised in the interim, the court decided in its "wisdom" to restore unsupervised visitation. Hence, jumping on a plane to Colorado with my daughter and cat. We were literally lifting into the sky above the airport as he was showing up at my apartment to pick her up.

To this day, it still bugs me that my word carried no weight against his when I had a totally clean record and he had not only a criminal record but it was a matter of family records that he had a history of drug abuse and violence. Upon the return to NY, I wrote the Attorney General. Because of cases like mine and others, New York State has enacted laws denying visitation to previously convicted pedophiles. Note this is only to those who have been convicted, served their time and got out and want to see their kids. (Shudder.) Still wouldn't have helped us since he was not in that status. I'm still glad for at least that step. But too little, too late.

Why I say viva the no-fault is sometimes there is a need to get out quick.

Things may be different and I may be misunderstanding the term but it seems to me even if you fight it and assign blame, they automatically do joint legal custody (albeit usually with primary physical custody to the mother and Dad still getting the kids on the weekend) and child support issues, they still split the marital property if any. Hmmm, let me go google this...

http://www.nolo.com/article.cfm/objectId/6191B9DC-00BF-42CA-A5ADA95C2AEC5196/catID/995EE405-21AA-4B4A-97CBABD905A37E1B/118/246/222/FAQ/

That's a pretty good description and it appears I am right, it's pretty much what we used to call an uncontested divorce. I'm shuddering at the statement that some states do have a waiting period for a no-fault, though. Meanwhile, they can contest a fault divorce and, yeah, they'd probably lose (as my father did eventually) but that's a risk especially if the innocent party isn't able to prove the abuse or other claim of fault.

So again I have to reiteriate...

VIVA THE NO-FAULT DIVORCE

Are am I missing something? Because I am amazed given most of the opinions expressed on this board that it seems to be so unpopular here.

Donna - I am commenting here to explicitly state that I support your opinion.

I feel that many of the opinions seen on this board are those of people who have really no clue what it is to have dealt with certain realities about mankind.

That's not true, of course. We all have our realities. Some of them are more devastating than others. Some have grown up in the comforts of their existence and, try as they might to imagine it, can't really "get" what it's like to face horror ... as if pragmatic thought and careful planning could possibly undo all the dementias of the world.