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It
seems that “more than 50 pastors in a county located in a southern state
signed a County Healthy Marriage Initiative that requires their churches to
make it mandatory that couples have four months of pre-marital counseling
prior to the marriage ceremony being performed. They also require two months
of post-ceremony counseling.”
And
so Mr. Robbins begins his Commentary to the November 2008 issue of
Michigan Family Law Journal.
He
then goes on for several paragraphs following to remind readers that “The
Michigan Family Law Committee had programs on pre-marital counseling before
the formation of the section.” A number of approaches, in fact, are reviewed
and discussed here.
On
behalf of a family law bar, Norman Robbins clearly sees this as an area for
their concern, “our responsibility and interest in preserving the family and
strengthening marriages.”
But
why? How?
The
Family Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan has “sought the advice of
the leading behaviouralist in our state to explore and write about
preparation for this union,” he concludes. Surely a praiseworthy initiative,
and a generally interesting point of note to see this on the radar of his
constituency.
It
seems to me that tools for the most effective pre-marital counseling via
this association are already in place. To require that any couple
considering marriage spend forty hours in divorce court, watching cases play
out for husbands and wives who had in most circumstances started out with
much the same optimism these newly betrothed now have: It is harder to
imagine a more effective sort of counseling.
—posted by Dell Deaton @11:23 PM EST
11/18/2008
OS 2531.80
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