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Covenant Marriage Seven Years Later: Its as Yet Unfulfilled Promise

Jules F. & Frances L. Landry Professor of Law, Paul M. Hebert Law Center. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my colleague, John Randall Trahan, who helped locate all of the world's Civil Code references for the provisions of La. Acts 2004, No. 490. Well done, mon fils.

My dear friend, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard Law School sent me the following prayer by Oscar Romero and it expresses so accurately my own convictions about covenant marriage:

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, An opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen

I. Introduction

Almost seven years have passed since the first covenant marriage legislation was enacted in Louisiana,1 followed by the enactment of similar legislation in Arizona in 19982 and Arkansas in 2001.3 During the intervening years between its enactment in Louisiana and the present, covenant marriage legislation has been introduced in approximately thirty other states but the bills containing the legislation have failed to pass. Remarkably, the failure of covenant marriage bills to pass has occurred even though the legislation simply offers a couple an alternative to the prevailing legal regime of "no-fault divorce" marriage.

During the same time period, Steve Nock, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, and his research colleagues have studied the proposition, "Can Louisiana's Covenant Marriage Law Solve America's Divorce Problem?" The wealth of information mined from that on-going study offers a glimpse of the effect of cultural changes on the understanding of marriage, as well as the self-selection effects of this experiment4 and the sanctification of marriage created by the choice of a more committed form of marriage.5 By virtue of the same study, results from a Gallup poll conducted in 1998 also revealed the attitudes of a random sample of citizens towards covenant marriage legislation in Louisiana, Arizona, and Minnesota.6 Thereafter, the research team received another grant to consider the implementation of a change in policy through the use of state civil servants; in the case of covenant marriage, the state civil servants would consist of the staff of the local Clerk of Court's office. But the bulk of information gathered by the research team concerns the couples themselves-300 covenant couples, 300 standard couples.

With the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas7 followed by the Massachusetts case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health,8 the air and the vigor has been "sucked out" of the nascent national discussion of marriage. Rather than the broader polity discussing the far more pervasive problems of harm done by divorce, the rescue of at-risk marriages by marriage education, and the promotion of "healthy" marriages by the federal government, national attention is currently focused almost entirely on same-sex sexual expression. Same-sex couples marrying in Massachusetts and a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman9 have literally consumed all of the media attention.

II. Same-Sex Marriage and "Marriage-Lite": Controversial Results of European Experiments

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