The Scandal of "Unilateral Divorce"
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

America's experiment with no-fault divorce -- an experiment that could well mean the virtual abolition of marriage as an institution -- has produced a massive toll of cultural destruction and personal pain. Millions of marriages have been terminated, homes have been broken, and lives have been destroyed in the wake of easy divorce.

Jennifer Roback Morse, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has been tracing the effects of no-fault divorce throughout the culture. In "Why Unilateral Divorce Has No Place in a Free Society," she argues that the nation's high divorce rate is the direct cause or a major contributor to a vast array of social problems. Furthermore, she argues that "divorce is in the background of the same-sex marriage debate because same-sex marriage is the end of the trend that no-fault divorce began." As she makes clear, "The legal innovation of unilateral divorce began to reduce marriage to nothing but a temporary association of individuals. If marriage is merely a free association of individuals, there is no principled reason to exclude same-sex couples, or even larger groupings of sexual partners. The permanence of marriage was one of the key features that distinguished it from an ordinary contract." the rest