c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Before last weekend, Shannon Mitchell, a 24-year-old bride to be, had never heard of state Rep. Tony Perkins. With the altar beckoning and the planning tempo for her September wedding quickening, she barely noticed a few newspaper stories detailing the state legislature’s workman-like construction of something called”covenant marriage.” Not to fault her, for the stories recorded little debate.

But for Mitchell and thousands of others, the light is dawning.

In ways only now becoming apparent, the legislature last week reached deep into the personal lives of tens of thousands of Louisianians by creating a new kind of marriage.

The new marriage bond, the first of its kind in the country, requires a couple to undergo counseling before an exchange of vows, and still more counseling before a breakup. Divorce is still available, but it becomes more difficult and expensive.

Covenant marriage is voluntary. Indeed, couples applying for a marriage license after Aug. 15 would have to ask for it. They will still have the option of applying for a traditional marriage license which will continue to allow no-fault divorces.

But it suddenly took on real heft for Mitchell and others this week when the Catholic and Episcopal churches said they will consider offering church weddings only to those who approach the altar with the new covenant marriage license, a requirement Mitchell and fiance Byron Kives say they would meet without second thoughts.

Among Southern Baptists, the state’s largest Protestant denomination, policy decisions on which weddings to bless are made on a church-by-church basis. But conservative Baptist congregations clearly prefer the idea of covenant marriage, said the Rev. Michael Claunch of First Baptist Church of Slidell, president of the state Southern Baptist Convention.

And Bishop Paul Morton Sr. of Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church, the state’s largest, said his church will definitely require couples to get a covenant marriage license.

Among major religious leaders announcing their positions, only United Methodist Bishop Dan Solomon took the contrary view. Because marriage in the church “is and always will be clearly focused on lifelong commitment,”different levels of state licensing are essentially irrelevant and equally acceptable, he told the state’s 125,000 Methodists and their clergy.

In the immediate sense, covenant marriage is the handiwork of two people: Louisiana State University family law professor Katherine Spaht, a disillusioned former champion of easy, no-fault divorce, and Perkins, a conservative first-term Republican.

A former Marine and father of two who found his own 11-year marriage in counseling in its early years, Perkins said he bemoans what he called society’s easy-in, easy-out approach to marriage that he believes ultimately subverts family life.

Spaht and Perkins’ concern stems from growing research that divorce produces long-lasting and previously unidentified damage in children, for which society ultimately pays.

“That’s why things always seem one step ahead of us, because we’re just dealing with symptoms,” Perkins said. “What we’re finding is that divorce is the cause of many of the problems we’re faced with.

“If you’re going to enter into a contract to raise kids, we’re going to hold you to that because all the rest of us are going to be affected by your ability to hold to that commitment.”

More particularly, Perkins and other sponsors argue that rising divorce rates stem in large part from the emergence of easy, no-fault divorce laws that swept the country in the past 30 years.

Thus in its earliest form, Perkins’ covenant marriage _ in addition to its counseling requirements _ would have prohibited immediate divorce except in cases of adultery, abandonment or imprisonment. It would have granted divorces after a separation of 12 to 18 months on other grounds, including physical abuse. And it would have foreclosed access to the state’s current no-fault divorce system, under which either party can declare a marriage over after a six-month separation.

After some dilution, covenant marriage is not nearly so stringent. Physical or sexual abuse now becomes grounds for immediate divorce; “habitual excess” becomes grounds for legal separation. And now either spouse can file for a no-fault divorce after living apart for two years.

Conservatives in other states have tried and failed to repeal or rewrite no-fault divorce laws. But what made the Louisiana approach difficult to attack was its status as a freely chosen option and its attention to counseling.

“Our opponents have been screaming about choice,” Perkins said. “So we’re giving people the opportunity to choose this contract.”

“What makes this interesting to me is that for the first time people are looking at the real issue, which is thinking about what marriage is in deciding how to apply it to divorce,” said Ira Lurvey, a Los Angeles lawyer who is head of the American Bar Association’s family law section.

“Here at least we’re looking at what makes a good marriage, and there’s at least some attempt ahead of time to understand what’s expected of you.”

But Lurvey and other critics disagree with Perkins’ assessment that no-fault divorce laws are a major cause of the high divorce rate.

“That’s not a function of no-fault. That’s a function of living in a society that has changed its sexual mores 180 degrees in the last few years,” Lurvey said. “We’re in an era of tremendous turmoil. To separate one strand out as a cause for divorce is impossible.”

Other critics, such as Terry O’Neill, president of the Louisiana chapter of the National Organization for Women and a law professor at Tulane University, assert that the “option” of covenant marriage is not much of an option, given the context of romance, or youth _ or both _ in which the decision is made.

“I don’t think any man or woman gets married with the view that a spouse will engage in destructive behavior,” she said.

She believes covenant marriage is a “trap,” meant to entice women into conservatives’ ideal: a Scripture-based “patriarchal family” in which women are relegated to subservience.

Even observers with profoundly different philosophies, such as O’Neill and Richard McCord, a family and marriage specialist with the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C., agreed the divorce rate will probably start to drop only when families get help from many quarters: flex-time at work,affordable care for aging parents, and sympathetic tax policies.

Meanwhile, Mitchell and Kives embark Sept. 6 on the same road taken by millions of others. The portents are mixed, but they said they do not find the prospect of covenant marriage daunting.

“Byron said he’s willing. I am, too, if it comes to that.”

MJP END NOLAN