I do like the idea of providing incentives for doing so, but as a mandatory requirement? Nah.
Also, not sure why civil unions would be exempted.
Reshared post from +The Denver Post
As if getting married wasn't complicated enough, a proposed ballot initiative would require mandatory pre-wedding education before couples could say "I do." The proposed Colorado Marriage Education Act calls for 10 hours of pre-wedding marriage education for first-timers, 20 hours for those marrying a second time and 30 hours for those going for their third try. The law would not apply to civil unions.
Colorado ballot measure proposes education classes to marry
As if getting married wasn’t complicated enough, a proposed ballot initiative would require mandatory pre-wedding education before couples could say “I do.
It will never pass.
I don't think I've met the person, yet, who was qualified to teach a class on marriage or being married.
+Mark Means Well, that's a worthwhile point — what makes for a successful, positive, constructive, long-lasting marriage — or what a marriage should actually look like — is not something that you could find even a decent-sized plurality agreeing upon, except in the vaguest generalities that wouldn't be possible to teach.
That said, there are some things you could do. I think you could teach a class about communication, about some questions to be discussed before you get hitched (sex, kids, money, careers), things like that. A lot of churches, for example, require some sort of teaching/discussion (and not just of a religious nature) before the pastor will officiate or allow a marriage to take place at the church. That could certainly be a model to use.
But a taxpayer mandated course implies some sort of standards, and those would be controversial no matter what they said. I think the best they could do would be to teach people how to engage in mutually beneficial negotiation — and even that would torque off folks who think The Man Should Rule The Roost.
Marriage is not a one size fits all proposition. The idea that anyone can teach someone how to have a good marriage is a joke. So is the idea that they can teach communication. Even if people talk about things like sex, careers, children, there is no guarantee that their opinions on such things will not change over time. What a waste of taxpayer money. And the joke of penalizing those married more than once… WTF
The civil union exemption is weird. It's either discriminating against people who choose that route by saying "yours isn't a 'proper' marriage" or it's discriminating against people who don't take that route by saying "you're too dumb to figure this out by yourself." Either way: shaky ground.
+Jamie Jordan I don't think anyone's offering a guarantee, but it might increase the odds.
Or, put another way, encouraging people to talk about sex, careers, children, etc. before they get married is no guarantee of success, but lack of such conversation is a guarantee of some problems (not necessarily fatal ones) later on.
And I can understand the idea of increasing the coursework for subsequent marriages. I still don't think it's a good idea to mandate, but I understand.
Marriage is a fundamental social bond. We often hear people decrying high divorce rates and their impact on society, the economy, the children, etc. Taking steps to provide some support and education before marriages get started is not a bad idea in and of itself, I just wouldn't make it mandatory.
I would assume that the reason that Civil Unions are exempt is because this is being sponsored by a christianist organization. Things like this come up every couple of years for the past 15 years or so. Some of the other proposals mandate classes and tests, or have voluntary classes and tests but ban divorcing for those that take such classes and tests.
@bd – I’ve run against the no-divorce, or “covenant marriage,” sort of thing before. I hadn’t run into a classroom regime previously.
+Dave Hill such things are already available… Couples councilling. Available through faith based or secular. Not funded through tax dollars or mandatory. Also, based on individual couples, their own expectations and personalities, goals and lifestyles taken into consideration.
I have to say that I'm REALLY impressed by somebody conceiving of a piece of legislation that is SO poorly thought out, that it will unite people in hating on it.
On the Right, you're making it harder for people to stop having sex/babies out of wedlock, creating an unfunded mandate, and promoting a war on Christianity, by limiting it to marriages within a church, but not civil unions.
And then on the left it's infringing on civil rights and putting a disproportionate burden on the poor.
And of course, the libertarians are going to be apoplectic about it…as a GROSS overreach by the government, plus points from both of the above.
For me, my "favorite" part of this is the escalating training requirements based upon the number of marriages that you've had. I'm sure that the backers have given extensive thought to what the additional ten hours of education for a second marriage would entail, and can provide extensive support regarding why a second marriage requires twenty hours of education, rather than fifteen or five or two hundred.
Does the bill include a Burton-Taylor exemption, where if you're marrying someone for a second time, you only have to meet the educational requirements that you met the first time you married each other?
I will, however, grant one thing. If the movement to de-emphasize a liberal arts education and to emphasize a "practical" education takes hold, this would be an ideal high school course.
I had a supposedly rigorous financial unit while in high school, but my spouse and I both said that we'd be lawyers, so we didn't have any financial issues. (Neither of us realized that you have to pay for law school.) However, I never had the course where you have to carry a fake baby around for a few days and take care of him/her.
This quote from the article illustrates how this proposition won't necessarily solve anything.
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Reese-Giles "did everything right" leading up to her second marriage in the late 1990s.
"We did six months of counseling through our church, and it lasted one month and 25 days," she said.
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+Greg Stockton To be fair, marriages held at city hall would also be covered, just church weddings. But, overall, yeah.
I found the website for the proposition sponsors. http://kidsagainstdivorce.org/ Their basic attitude is that divorce harms families, and should only be practiced in cases of domestic violence.
But while they obviously don't care for divorce, I'm not sure how they feel on marriage.
For example, they quote these statistics http://kidsagainstdivorce.org/didyouknow/
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•Since 1970, the marriage rate has declined by almost 60%. 1
•Since 1970, cohabitation, couples living together outside of marriage, has risen over 1,000%.
•Of the 8 million co-habitating couples, only 20% go on to get married.2
•At the existing rate of decline, it is projected that by 2034 (only 20 years from now!) the U.S. marriage rate will reach ZERO.3
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and
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•Co-habitating couples living together before marriage are 61% more likely to get divorced.2
75% of children born to co-habitating parents will see their parents split up before they reach age 16 – effectively moving the number of ” children of divorce ” higher!8
= = =
So if I follow their arguments correctly, cohabiting couples with kids are more likely to get divorced than never-cohabiting couples with kids.
So the solution is to make marriage more difficult?
However, this statistic explains why the proponents want more education hours for re-marriers:
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•Today, the divorce rate across the nation is about 50%.4
•2nd marriages divorce at a rate of about 65% – 3rd marriages divorce at a rate of about 73%.5
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If the sponsors' true worry is that kids born to marriages that split up, then perhaps instead of requiring 10-30 hours of marriage counseling, the proposition should require any household with two or more adults (married, cohabiting, whatever) to attend birth control classes (with a "rhythm method" exception for those opposed to birth control)…or, to really "solve" the issue, forced sterilization of all Colorado adults to ensure no kid endures a broken home.
Hey, it makes more "sense" than the proposition that was proposed.