Marriage, Family Law, and the Temple | Bruce C. Hafen

In a world where family ideals consistently gravitate toward convenience, Elder Hafen reminds us of the order of marriage taught in the Lord's temples.

This talk was given on January 31, 2014.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-c-hafen_marriage-family-law-and-the-temple/

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Partial Transcription:
I am honored to be here tonight with all of you. I understand that the J. Reuben Clark Law Society now has more than 10,000 members in more than 100 chapters—plus 135 student ­chapters—and that a third of the chapters are located outside the United States.

That international dimension reminds me of a young man I met recently in the St. George Temple. He was about to leave on a mission to Argentina.

I asked him, “Do you speak any Spanish yet?”

With utmost sincerity he replied, “I only know one word in Spanish: aloha!”

Well, even though aloha isn’t a Spanish word, it works tonight, because it somehow says “hello” and “welcome” in most any tongue.

I have two related purposes tonight. First, I’d like to tell you how I got into the once-boring but now almost too-dramatic field of family law and what I found there. In this first part I’ll be talking as one lawyer to another, but I hope my footnotes will also suggest some more-general perspectives.

Second, against that background I’d like to talk about marriage—including our own marriages and marriage as taught in the temple. I realize that many devoted people do not now live in the kind of family situation they either desire or deserve. Of course Church doctrine encourages marriage and discourages divorce, but marrying is not always under our control, and there are times when divorce is the better choice. Our Church leaders have long taught that despite divorce or being single, no eternal blessing, even celestial glory, will be denied to those who are true and faithful.

Let me take you back to the Law School’s early years and to the conversation that launched me into family law. Rex E. Lee and I were meeting to discuss something he was writing. Rex was then the founding dean of BYU Law School and would later become solicitor general of the United States. He would also later become president of BYU, but for Rex, university administration would never be as interesting as constitutional law.

As we talked about recent constitutional developments, we both cheered that the powerful idea of individual rights had energized the civil rights movement, which was helping the United States overcome its embarrassing history of racial discrimination. We also applauded how those same ideas had begun to help the country eradicate discrimination against women.

At one point I said to Rex, “The liberation and equality movements are gaining such a head of steam. Do you think the very idea of individual rights will ever develop so much momentum that it could overpower the principles that should be balanced against it?”

His brow furrowed. “What do you mean? Give me an example.”

I shrugged spontaneously. “What about children? The law ‘discriminates’ against children on the basis of age—they can’t vote, drive a car, or sign a binding contract. But is that discrimination bad for children or is it good for them?” Then I wondered aloud if a children’s rights movement might follow the civil rights and women’s movements. Spurred by that question, I did some research and found that a sometimes-reckless children’s rights movement was indeed ­underway—illustrated then by a state court decision that, in effect, let a teenager divorce her parents.

I soon found other examples of excessive individualism. For instance, one law professor argued for a constitutional “right of intimate association,” urging that the law give the same legal rights to people in any intimate relationship that it then gave to those in relationships based on marriage and kinship. Some scholars also attacked marriage as a source of oppression against women. Advocates of sexual privacy argued that unmarried cohabitation should be constitutionally equated with marriage. Allowing me to respond to such issues, in 1983 the Michigan Law Review published my article “The Constitutional Status of Marriage, Kinship, and Sexual Privacy—Balancing the Individual and Social Interests.”

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