Is Divorce Too Easy - Tony Abbott's Proposal

The Divorce - Jan Hendrink van der Laar

Australian Liberal MP, Tony Abbott, has proposed a system whereby couples that are marrying can choose to opt out of the no-fault based divorce that is now in place. Instead, they agree to only allow divorce if someone can be shown to be at fault.

A number of criticisms have been made of his proposal, including the possibility that it will leave people in harmful or meaningless marriages, or that it will lead to a situation where everyone is playing the blame game.

I think these criticisms have merit. Some marriages just are not healthy and the best thing is simply to end it, rather than continuing on with a marriage that may be damaging to a person’s emotions or even physical wellbeing. And I certainly don’t want to see a situation where people are just trying to blame the other partner for their bad marriage. When a marriage ends, particularly when children are involved, it is best to try and forgive the other person, and put the bad things behind you. This would be very difficult to do for people who are trying to show the other person is at fault.

However, divorce is too easy. Way too easy.

I think far too many marriages end when they shouldn’t. Because divorce is too easy, as soon as the first difficult time comes along, it’s simple just to opt for a divorce. Sometimes even friends may suggest a divorce or ask why a couple stays together, when the marriage obviously isn’t working. What could just be a temporary problem ends up being a permanent break. Marriages grow stronger as couples go through difficult times and work through problems. I fear that less and less people will be willing to do that nowadays.

Also, no matter how much a couple may tell themselves they will stay together after they are married, the fact is they know they don’t have to. And there is a difference between making a commitment for life and a commitment for – until we hit our first speed bump and need a divorce. A lifelong commitment requires a lot of thought before making a decision. A short-term commitment doesn’t. And the very relationship is different. How we act and live with someone who we have to be with for the rest of our lives is going to be different to the way we act with someone who we are married to for the moment.

But I say all this as a divorced person. I know how difficult some marriages can be. Not just difficult. Let’s face it. Some marriages can be – well, actually. I’m going to leave it there. Because I don’t like to talk about my marriage. I avoid the subject whenever I can. And I almost left this topic alone, because I knew it would mean thinking about it.

Let’s just put it this way. Some marriages are very bad. To create a situation where people have to stay in those types of marriages is not a good idea.

But it’s hard to know what the solution is. I think there has to be some way of getting out of a marriage, without playing the blame game, dredging up emotions and saying who is at fault. But I also think that divorce should be a lot harder than it now is.

And I don’t think Tony Abbott’s proposal will really help. It does goes back to the blame game, which isn’t nice. As an opt in system, it’s not going to make divorce anymore difficult for the people who are sure they will be together for life and don’t need it, or the ones who don’t want to be tied to someone for life and are not going to sign any contract that ties them down.

However, even though I don’t think Tony Abbott’s idea would work, I don’t think he deserves to be criticised. Divorce is too easy. And something should be done to make it harder for people. I don’t want to live in a world where a marriage contract is easier to get out of than a mortgage repayment. And I think Abbott should be praised for at least trying to find solutions.

Keep the Faith

On 1 July 2009, The Australian published an article by Giles Auty, called ‘The Left is Killing Religion’. The original article can be found HERE. In this article, Auty discussed a talk he gave for the annual St Edmund Campion lecture, which was titled ‘Are we truly evolving? Reflections of the life of an Elizabethan saint’.

He starts off by saying that in Elizabeth England, Catholic priests struggled to keep the faith alive. And then makes this comparison:

“Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left.”

Although he says this has not happened yet in Australia, he worries that it may not be far away. He also makes the point that Christianity is being ‘treated with increasing contempt’.

It is an interesting comparison. We like to think of ourselves as progressing. Well, some of us do. I personally have a problem with the word ‘progress’, but I’ll leave that for another day. We are getting better and better all the time – supposedly. We are getting smarter and learning more and throwing away the superstitions of the past.

But this has all been done before. Some people may find it hard to see the similarities between Elizabethan England and today’s postmodern world. I mean, Elizabethan England was completely different, wasn’t it? They were still holding onto old religious superstitions. Today’s world wants to get rid of them.

But see, the Protestants in Elizabethan England also thought they were getting rid of old superstitions. They might still have believed in God. But they thought they were doing something new, something that go rid of the useless traditional religion, something that was more progressive. And Catholicism, so they thought, was just a religion that had passed its used by date.

And now we have the postmodernists who are trying to make a secular society. They say this is in the name of progress. They’re not progressive. They’re in fact, regressive. They’ve gone back to a time when people tried to remove all traces of a religion they disagreed with. It failed then. And it will fail again. Because people of faith aren’t that progressive either. They’ll go back to doing what they have done many times before.

Because just as the world continues to bring forth people who want to suppress religion (in either one or all forms), so too does the world continue to bring forth people who are willing to fight and even to die for it. People are not just going to sit back and let faith quietly slip away from the world. Even if all traces of religion were removed from public life, people will still be there, behind the scenes, hiding if they must, risking their life if they must, fighting to keep the faith alive.