In France, Civil Unions Gain Favor Over Marriage · January 21, 2011
“Some are divorced and disenchanted with marriage; others are young couples ideologically opposed to marriage, but eager to lighten their tax burdens. Many are lovers not quite ready for old-fashioned matrimony.
“Whatever their reasons, and they vary widely, French couples are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages.”
As traditional marriage declines in France, civil unions are on the increase. In 1999 France created the system of civil unions, apparently to accommodate gay and lesbian couples. But the surprise is that a huge number of heterosexual couples also use the same law especially for tax benefits and legal protections, which are almost the same as those for marriage. Today 95 percent of civil unions in France are between heterosexual couples, not same-sex couples. Now there are two civil unions for every three marriages. “If current trends continue in France, new civil unions could soon outnumber marriages.” A civil union is easy to enter and exit. “It can be dissolved with just a registered letter.”
“Even the Roman Catholic Church, which initially condemned the partnerships as a threat to the institution of marriage, has relented; the National Confederation of Catholic Family Associations now says civil unions do not pose “a real threat.”
French views of marriage are edging closer to the ideas of the French Revolution.
“Though French marriages are officially concluded in civil ceremonies held in town halls, not in churches, marriage is still viewed… as a ‘heavy and invasive’ institution with deep ties to Christianity, said Wilfried Rault, a sociologist at the National Institute for Demographic Studies. ‘Marriage bears the traces of a religious imprint,’ he said…”
“During the [French] Revolution there was manifest a state of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought destruction upon the cities of [Sodom and Gomorrah]. And the historian presents together the atheism [or secularism as it is called today] and the licentiousness of France, as given in the prophecy: ‘Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which reduced the union of marriage—the most sacred engagement which human beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most strongly to the consolidation of society—to the state of a mere civil contract of a transitory character, which any two persons might engage in and cast loose at pleasure… If fiends had set themselves to work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same time an assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have invented a more effectual plan [than] the degradation of marriage…” Sir Walter Scott, vol. 1, ch. 17. Great Controversy, page 270.
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