Kern Co-Sponsors Covenant Marriage Bill
December 15, 2008

By Wayne Fuller

Rep. Sally Kern continues her personal crusade to control the private lives of Oklahomans and, according to foes, force old-style Puritan punishment on citizens. She along with a few other legislators have reintroduced the “Covenant Marriage Bill” into the next legislative session.

If passed, House Bill 1026, the law would allow couples to select a “covenant marriage” when applying for a license to wed. That would then require the couple to enter pre-marital counseling, force them into counseling prior to applying for a divorce, and vow to each other they’re entering a life time commitment. Advocates claim the bill, which restricts methods on how couples can dissolve their marriage, will reduce the state’s growing divorce rate.

Critics of the bill believe it will have no impact on reducing the rampant divorce rate in Oklahoma and will instead only serve to enrich divorce lawyers, who will represent parties in expensive and prolonged hearings, and to allow religious leaders to force anyone wanting to be married in church to agree to the state’s covenant pact.

Attorney Lori Roybal-Martin said, “Generally, incompatibility is used for amicable divorces where both parties want to avoid a messy divorce and avoid disclosing the details of their private lives to a public courtroom. The law would force couples into courtroom battles that often destroy any relationship left and ends up harming any children involved. There are other grounds for divorce, like adultery, but many couples choose to avoid contentious hearings that reveal private matters and want to quietly dissolve their marriage and move on with their lives.”

She added, “Public embarrassment over moral activities harken back to early American Puritan religious history where people were placed in stockades in public, so passersby could mock and admonish them. This bill takes private family matters and puts them out in public and the end effect is the same.” 

“No good can come of this. It will not reduce divorce. It only forces amicable divorces to become expensive and embarrassing ones. The authors of this bill should find better ways to control the skyrocketing divorce rate than turning to archaic embarrassment techniques. The trend with Sally Kern and her like-minded legislators has been to deceptively introduce church thought and outdated church punishment into Oklahoma state law. This is not Iran. If they want to live under religious rule then the easiest way would be for them to move to a church state and not try to force the State of Oklahoma to change for them,” the attorney concluded.

The current bill was introduced and passed the state house 93 – 7 in February 2007, but then languished in a state senate rules committee. In 2002, Rep. Ray Vaughn, now an Oklahoma County Commissioner, with the support of Michael Jestes, executive director of the Oklahoma Family Policy Council authored a first attempt at covenant marriage. The bill was killed in committee by one vote. Sen. Richard Lerblance, who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time said, “It is not the state’s role to force a couple to stay married against their will.”

As county commissioner Vaughn is de facto head of the Metro Library Commission. He and Jestes are both deeply involved together in making LGBT literature inaccessible in city libraries.   

Kern’s legislative efforts this session have been geared towards bringing back measures that have already failed, been vetoed by the governor, or been overturned in court.