Sophrosyne at Nova Townhall has said something sensible about marriage:
I couldn’t agree more that we should have more mandatory education prior to getting a marriage license as well as some form of waiting period.
See, that’s the threat to marriage: A culture that encourages young people to make a lifetime commitment without having a clue about what they’re getting into. The result seems to be a very large number of people who discover that they have married the wrong person, which makes it very difficult to have a happy and healthy marriage. The solution is not to make it harder to get divorced, and uphold unhealthy marriages as the model for any children caught in the middle, but to make it harder to get married, and prevent those bad marriages from happening in the first place. I’ve been shouting this into the void for some time: Healthy marriages are more likely when people are free to marry the person of one’s choice.
The place to begin is with comprehensive sexuality education. Given her recognition that domestic abuse is a reality that must be addressed, I am curious to know whether Sophrosyne disagrees with the 14 delegates, Bob Marshall among them, who voted against adding information about the characteristics of abusive relationships to the Family Life Education curriculum (discussed further here, here and here).
Set aside for the moment the most important reason for the bill – that it will save lives. How would our failure to provide young people with such vital information improve the marriage situation? Delegate Marshall? Sophrosyne? Anyone?
It seems to me that those that voted against adding information are just sticking their heads in the sand as far as they could push. (Beleive me, I can think of a stronger word than sand…
This is a fairly intellegent approach to the problems of martial abuse, abadonment, neglect, and divorce. It doesn’t matter the gender of either spouse in question, and when it comes down to brass tacks, it has nothing to do with that issue, period. Just some curmudgeonly buerocrats, hard at work protecting an irrational view.