The marriage vows may say “for better or for worse” and “in sickness and in health,” but Rev. Pat Robertson told his “700 Club” viewers that divorcing a spouse with Alzheimer’s is just fine. Robertson says that the vows say “until death do us part” and Alzheimer’s should be viewed as a type of death.
Robertson was asked on this television program for advice for a friend whose wife has started suffering from Alzheimer’s and has started to see another woman. Robertson responded “I know it sounds cruel, but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her.”
When he was reminded of that vows concerning “for better or for worse” and “until death do us part,” Robertson explained “If you respect that vow, you say ’til death do us part.’ This is a kind of death.”
I have always been fascinating by these programs with Muslim or Jewish or Christian figures dispensing advise to the faithful. No one ever asks, “are you just making this stuff up as you go along?” This seems a pretty massive change in the plain meaning of those vows. I hate to lawyer the language, but what is the basis for this new interpretation that the term “death” extends beyond the obvious meaning of the end of life and can include constructive death. It brings a new meaning to the phrase “you are dead to me.”
Source: Yahoo
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Robert,
Where’s your evidence that I deprecated Germaine Greer? You cite Germaine Greer as an advocate of divorce and that is supposed to prove that progressives think it’s okay for people to divorce for almost no reason. Sheesh! You argue a lot like someone who hasn’t been around in a while. Something about your arguments seems oh so familiar.
BTW, are you in the habit of reading articles written by feminazis?
😉
Elaine,
You asked for evidence that progressives think it’s okay to divorce people for almost no reason.
I present one of the top progressives making exactly this suggestion within the past 18 months. Germaine Greer is at the top of the feminist pyramid. And the statement I quoted from is recent, from 2010.
It is not surprising to me that you find you have to dismiss and deprecate her. Once again I observe that Intellectual honesty is not one of your core competencies.
Robert,
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I guess that would mean Schiavo should not be stoned.
Raffi, I’m a little rusty here, so can you tell me, according to your priest, do we have to stone Schiavo?
anon,
I leave out the word “almost” and I misrepresent what you said–but it’s perfectly okay for you to use Germaine Greer as a stand-in for all progressives? Get real!
RP,
The issue is Robertson, not Schiavo.
RP,
You are either married or not. There is no grey area. I do recall a line that the priest told us, “until death do us part” and “in sickness and health”.
Well I refuse to excoriate or excommunicate Michael Schivavo over his scandalous affair. I am genuinely sorry to hear that you felt different.
RP,
You are either married or not. There is no grey area. I do recall a line that the priest told us, “until death do us part” and “in sickness and health”.
Bro. Jeremy:
“Pat Robertson is not a valid spokesman for Christiany.”
***********************
Nor a true Scotsman either it would seem.
“and that’s basically sexism in action.”
should be
“and that’s basically cultural misandry in action.”
I definitely agree that Robertson is a pious fraud.
And I heartily applaud and sadly have reason to be envious to all of you that have been able to make your marriages work through thick and thin.
I do think, that if we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that when we hear of a woman who has divorced late in life, we often say, or are encouraged to say, “You go girl”, and that’s basically sexism in action.
Lottakatz, I never considered divorce or murder. But a self-described feminist progressive woman did. (And then the blood-sucking lawyers latched on like a vampire bat at a milk farm.)
Regarding Alzheimer’s it difficult, and I will not judge anyone in that position. But would we be so upset if the person being divorced or cheated on didn’t have Alzheimer’s but was in a long term coma? Would we be equally as upset if the person in that coma was a male, or a female?
While it’s somewhat different, were we upset that Michael Schiavo had a relationship with someone else while his wife was on a feeding tube? Most progressives, like myself, wished Schiavo the best in his fight to have that feeding tube removed, and understood why he was in a new relationship and wished that well too.
I don’t know the answers to this — at an early age I saw an older close relative in this situation and I was always troubled by how that was resolved(@LK, it did not involve murder.)
So if you want to kick Robertson for being a hypocrite and fraud I’ll lend my (non-steel toe) boots. But I don’t think we can complain that his position is much different from any position we might take.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2011/09/15/pat-robertsons-comments-threaten-to-undermine-alzheimers-advocates-goals/
“The media tend to think that the fantasies they peddle are realer than real. But in the real world, women have changed; bit by bit, they are growing stronger and braver, ready to begin the actual feminist revolution. The feminist revolution hasn’t failed, you see. It has only just begun.”
Anon,
You’ve clarified your comments and with that clarification I find there are many areas where we agree. The media does like slogans and sound bites and many in the Woman’s Movement loved media attention so gave them the outrageous quotes being sought. However, as you lightly touched on this was in the context of an belief system, fostered by religion, that divorce is a sin. How many Catholic women for instance were urged not to leave their husbands in the face of abuse, alcoholism or unfaithfulness? The knife cut both ways and neither way works because try as pontificators might each relationship is unique unto itself.
My mother had 7 heart attacks and three strokes during the 20 year duration of her marriage to my father. He cared for and doted on her through all those times. This was a man who was devastatingly attractive to women. He felt committed. When she died he was offered marriage by two very wealthy women who he dated and he turned them down. Twelve months after my mother’s death this large, strong man died of a heart attack, at age 54. My brother and I believe to this day it was from a broken heart. In the two months before he died he had stopped going out with women.
I believe that divorce is and should be a viable option for people. However, I also believe to the depths of my soul that I am committed to the women I’m with, whatever comes to pass. I wouldn’t force my belief on others. What I find rancid in Robertson is that this man obviously has already moved on, he has a new woman and Pat’s answer was rather unexpected from the pious fraud who talks so easily of family values.
Anon, “But let’s face it, we as progressives are having our poutrage with Pat because what he said is hypocritical, not because we ourselves, as self-identified, smug progressives actually believe in till death do us part.”
Speak for yourself, from many personal stories told here that statement is false and insulting. Like a comedian once said: I’ve never considered divorce. Murder, but never divorce.
erykah @ at 2:59 pm, excellent statement regarding the redefinition of ‘living’. That’s a whole ‘nother slippery slope I’d rather not have people like Robertson weighing in on. He called the removal Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube “judicial murder,” but she was also already as dead in light of his current statement. Why keep Ms. Schiavo alive? Or grandma with Alzheimer’s I’m thinking that it’s Mr. Robertson that needs to be worried about the onset of Alzheimer’s, hope his wife or kids stick around to take care of him.
Here’s the situation for a number of people though and it has little to do with spiritual nature of the debate: Alzheimer’s is one of many diseases that force a couple to contemplate divorce for purely financial reasons and Alzheimer’s is probably one of the diseases that force that choice most often because it can render an adult completely dependant at an age that doesn’t involve other life-threatening illness. The spouse can be dependant for a long, long time.
In the state where I live if a person needs to be sent to a skilled nursing facility for skilled nursing services it can cost up to 8K a month depending on the facility. I have done this research personally. I also have personal experience with facilities at the low end of the cost spectrum and liken them to the local city dog pound.
If a couple runs through their savings (which they do quickly since insurance companies don’t cover custodial care) and needs Medicaid there is a max amount of assets and income allowed for the couple. The amount of income and assets are state determined, some states allow more and some allow less. This is to protect the spouse in the community from being impoverished by the illness of the partner.
If the amount of income allowed is such that the community spouse can’t cover their needs, then divorce, early on in the illness, is the most viable option to maintain both spouses at an acceptable level of self and custodial care. The community spouse can maintain the bulk of the assets, choose and pay the nursing home the difference between Mediaid and the actual cost and still live at a reduced but decent level in the community. There are other ins and outs to make that work but suffice it to say, sometimes divorce is the best that a loving couple can do for each other.
I would hope to think that this kind of situation was what weighed on Robertson’s mind but he needs to spell it out, otherwise he’s just a hypocrite.
“Dad, Mom doesn’t know you at all. Why do you still visit her?” “Because I still know who SHE is,” he replied, “and as long as I still know who SHE is, I will continue to visit her.”
LB,
Thank you. That is the essence of what commitment to a relationship means.
“Pat Robertson is not a valid spokesman for Christiany.”
Br. Jeremy,
Quite true, nor for humanity either.
Elaine, most of my comments are getting filtered out, so I’ll just say that yes, leaving out “almost” substantially changes what I wrote. And I think the Germaine Greer article helps demonstrate my point that progressives encourage divorce for almost no reason and that it’s a feminist meme.
You wrote:
@Elaine,
What I said: “Mike, I recognize that that is true, but that doesn’t mean that we still don’t give and get lots of advice from so called progressives that it’s okay to divorce for almost no reason. … It’s almost a feminist meme.”
How you misrepresented it:
“Really? Progressives think it’s okay to divorce someone for no reason?”
*****
You wrote that “so called progressives” give advice that it’s okay to divorce for almost no reason. Did I misrepresent what you said because I didn’t include the world “almost” in my question?
If so, I’ll correct it. Here you go: Progressives think it’s okay to divorce someone for almost no reason?
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_15345438
Women getting feet under them after “gray divorce”
If any couple had long- term relationships figured out, it was Al and Tipper Gore. At least that’s what we thought.
People were shocked and disappointed to learn that the former vice president and his wife were getting divorced after 40 years of marriage and raising four kids. What could cause a seemingly solid couple to crumble after making it work for so long?
Divorce experts say baby boomers such as the Gores (Al is 62 and Tipper is 61) are the first generation of older people who aren’t going to be sticking it out no matter what.
Census data from 2004 show fewer marriages standing the test of time. For people who wed between 1955 and 1984, those reaching their 20th anniversary dropped 20 percent.
Most people who divorce do so early in their marriage. Census data from 2001 shows first marriages that end in divorce last about eight years. Even though there has been a slight decline in the overall divorce rate, there has been a rise in late-life “gray divorce” — split-ups of people between 50 and 59 — to about 40 percent for men and women, according to Erica Manfred, a New York boomer-divorce expert and author of “He’s History, You’re Not: Surviving Divorce After 40.”
Unhappiness, emotional estrangement and drifting apart are among the reasons more boomers are single than any previous cohort of 40- to 60-somethings, according to Manfred,
“I think their marriage is very instructive in that people need to realize if the Gores can drift apart, so can you if you don’t do anything about it,” says Manfred, whose 18-year marriage ended in divorce when she was 58.
…
Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Phyllis Goldberg, who specializes in women after divorce, finds when boomer women aren’t happy in a relationship, they seek change for fulfillment. “They want their husbands to come in and get marital counseling,” Goldberg said. “And if the men don’t come, the women will stay at it and reach a decision” — namely, separation or divorce.
More so than men, women begin to look back on their lives and think about what their interests and passions were before marriage, says Rosemary Lichtman, who with Goldberg developed HerMentorCenter.com, an online community that coaches women through midlife health, relationship and career issues.
“The biggest thing was knowing I was approaching 50 and thinking I didn’t want to live the rest of my life married to someone I no longer loved,” says Mandy Walker, a 52-year-old Niwot resident who divorced her husband in 2007 after 17 years of marriage.
“Over the years, you give up a part of your life for your children, a part for your husband and a part for your work,” she says. “You are left wondering, ‘Where is the part that’s left for me?’ ”
When the financial-services company Walker had worked at for more than 20 years closed its Colorado office, a generous severance package became an opportunity for a second career. Walker decided to get her master’s degree in journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
On her website, sincemydivorce sincemydivorce.com, Walker interviews women about their life after divorce. She also shares her experiences — from having to get rid of the dead mouse in the trap to dealing with Internet outages.
“I realized I would be OK once I could manage routine stuff around the house on my own,” says Walker
…
Robertson’s words run counter to everything my parents taught me about the relationship of one family member to another.
Back before Alzheimer’s was known as Alzheimer’s my father’s aunt (his deceased mother’s sister) came to live with us. After 10 years of sharing our home, dinnertable, and family vacations, she started acting “weird”. She would wonder off and get lost. She’d forget that the burner was on and start kitchen fires. Eventually, for her own safety, my parents found a lovely “senior home” and we moved her in.
She lived there for the next 15 years and for the last 7 of those years had no lucid moments. My parents visited with her every week and my three teenaged brothers and I were expected to visit her twice a month. She was part of our family and, having had no children of her own, we were her family. Occasionally my brothers would complain for she no longer recognized any of us but my father was adamant as to our responsibility as her family.
I named my youngest daughter after my great aunt.
I truly do not understand people like Robertson at all.
@Elaine,
What I said: “Mike, I recognize that that is true, but that doesn’t mean that we still don’t give and get lots of advice from so called progressives that it’s okay to divorce for almost no reason. … It’s almost a feminist meme.”
How you misrepresented it:
“Really? Progressives think it’s okay to divorce someone for no reason?”
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7070174.ece
Germaine Greer: ‘I admire women who divorce’
Feminism hasn’t failed. In the workplace and the family, it’s only just getting started, writes The Female Eunuch author
Surely feminism has failed. Look about you. Semi-clad ladettes lying drunk in the gutters, little girls dressed in sugar pink from head to foot, padded bras for four-year-olds, WAGs and supermodels bumping British casualties in Afghanistan off the headlines. Obviously, feminism has fallen flat on its face. And I, as high priestess of that minority cult, must be deeply disappointed.
Who am I to sit in judgment? An old woman who wrote a book 40 years ago? It wasn’t a very good book. I’ve written better ones since, but it was the best book I could write at the time. It wasn’t the book that made history; it was history that made the book. If women’s restlessness hadn’t been growing, if so many women hadn’t been sniffing the air for the scent of freedom, The Female Eunuch would have sunk without trace.
It nearly did. The publishers had so little faith in it that they printed only 5,000 copies, and bound only 2,500 of them. They were sold out on the day of issue; the next 2,500 were bound and in bookstores three weeks later, and the same thing happened again.
Why were the women of 1970 so dissatisfied? Their mothers had been perfectly happy with home duties, two and a half children, and what was left out of the pay packet after they had given the old man his beer and cigarette money, hadn’t they?
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They probably hadn’t, but in those days divorce was a disgraceful admission of failure, and it was only for the rich. The underlying fact is that the breadwinner’s wages would no longer cover the rising cost of living. Homes had to be modernised. Indoor loos, fitted carpets, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, all kinds of new consumer goods were now indispensable. The housewife’s workload didn’t diminish. She still did all the same things; she just did them more often.
More and more married women were having to find some kind of work simply to finance the family debt. The work they found was mostly underpaid drudgery, with no possibility of promotion and no way of negotiating better pay or conditions.
Most of the housewives of the Sixties had worked before they were married; they had got used to managing their own money, and having space and time and friends of their own. Marriage, too, often meant a steep drop in their quality of life. They told their daughters not to be in too much of a hurry to settle down. Have some fun first, because there’s not much fun after. Women workers didn’t often rebel against their employers. When they did, the labour unions ignored them. The women who worked for the labour unions suffered the same discrimination in pay levels and conditions as other women workers.
A nonsensical notion, that women were entitled to “equal pay for work of equal value” led to the institutionalisation of inequality in the workplace — women’s work was classified as of lesser value, simply because it was women’s work. The unionists should have known that work has no intrinsic value; it is worth what you can force the employer to pay for it. Not a penny more, not a penny less. They could have unionised women, taught them the techniques of collective bargaining, but they didn’t.
At exactly the same time as automation was threatening their own elite status, the unions allowed a vast pool of female non-union labour to come into existence. These were women who were hungry for crumbs. They would work twice as hard as men for half the pay. Nowadays we are apt to hear voices raised in lamentation for the demise of the proud labouring man. He has nobody to blame but himself.
In the Sixties people worried about what might happen if women workers brought home more bacon than their men. It didn’t often happen, but more and more working women were becoming aware that they were giving more value for less money.
They were still massively economically disadvantaged because they had no access to credit. A single woman couldn’t borrow enough money to start a business or buy a house and a married woman was still to all intents and purposes femme couverte, able to operate only as half of her husband’s.
Banks were slow to wake up to the fact that women’s credit performance is much better than men’s, but they got there in the end. Now we have a worldwide system of microcredit, based on giving small loans to women, who won’t spend the money on prostitutes, booze, gambling and cigarettes.
The growth of women’s economic independence might have felt gradual but in historic terms it was sudden. The results were and continue to be staggering. They could be summed up as the continuing collapse of the patriarchal family.
In the bad old days the father was head of the family; what he said went. The kids were fed and out of the way before he got home. If punishment was needed, he administered it. His word was law.
When I was doing a Granada TV show called Nice Time with Kenny Everett in the late Sixties, we’d ask silly questions of families, on the beach at Blackpool, say — nothing challenging just simple sums and stuff. If the old man wasn’t there, the women would answer; if he was sitting in the next deckchair they’d simper and pass the question on to him. Unbelievable? We got it on film.
As women’s economic independence increased, their tolerance of marital infidelity, and of emotional and physical abuse, diminished. If you ever doubted that family stability depended on the oppression of women, you now have the proof. The proportion of divorces rises so inexorably that my figures are probably already out of date. In the developed world 40 per cent or more of marriages end in divorce, typically after seven or eight years, with a year or two to establish separation and then the actual divorce. Most of these divorces are initiated by wives. This is proper change. There’s no going back from here.
A woman who walks away from a marriage in which she has invested all her emotional energy for years is doing something heroic. She knows that the status of her family will slide down two notches as soon as it becomes a single- parent family. She knows that though she might work all the hours that God sends, she will struggle. She will be unable to afford a good haircut, nice clothes, a late-model car or holidays. She will find it harder to find a job and even harder to keep it.
Her ex-husband’s prospects of remarriage are nearly twice as good as hers, and — this is truly shocking — he will be wealthier after his divorce than he would have been if he had stayed married. If her children do well, she will get no praise. If they screw up, she will get all the blame. And yet she does it.
She chooses an honourable life of hardship against servile acquiescence in a marriage that is rotten. I admire such women more than I can easily say.
Disappointed? As if. Reality is what counts. Not Page Three, not the exploding world of pornography in cyberspace, not Katie Price.
The media tend to think that the fantasies they peddle are realer than real. But in the real world, women have changed; bit by bit, they are growing stronger and braver, ready to begin the actual feminist revolution. The feminist revolution hasn’t failed, you see. It has only just begun.