Ever since New York endorsed deviant behavior by legalizing same-sex marriage, several items have appeared defending the stabilizing influence of legitimate, monogamous marriage. Two of them are worthy of consideration.

Senior British Family Division judge Sir Paul Coleridge, who once said Britain’s family breakdown had reached epidemic proportions, recently recalled how “In about 1950 you weren’t allowed in the royal enclosure at Ascot if you were divorced. … That now would exclude half the royal family” (Telegraph,July 13).

That standard was enforced by not only Ascot, but most worthy institutions in Britain at the time. It held firm when the Queen’s sister, the late Princess Margaret, had a divorced raf officer as a suitor. Marrying him would have required her to give up her royal titles. Unlike her Uncle Edward, who abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, Margaret chose not to marry a divorcée.

In the 1950s, divorce was still stigmatized. It was shameful, as was the reproduction of children out of wedlock. Perverted human relationships were crimes on the nation’s statute books. The resultant stabilization of society is a matter of historical record—and so too is the breakdown of society that has followed the removal of penalties for such behavior.

Since the liberalization of the civil law and the Church of England’s rejection of the biblical laws of marriage, subsequent royal marriages have split up and the parties involved permitted to retain their royal positions. This example has hurt British society as a whole.

What is the upshot of the breakdown of respect for the institution of marriage by royalty, the law and the church? As Sir Paul Coleridge told bbc Radio 5 Live, about 3.8 million children from shattered families are currently estimated to be caught up in the British family justice system, with no sign of that number coming down.

In a piece published in the June 17, 2009, Telegraph, Judge Coleridge mentioned that within the Royal Courts of Justice, there were 20 or so judges beside himself engaged in such cases. On a given day he observed that “Across inner London, well over 100 family courts were dealing with family breakdown … in one guise or another. Multiply that across the rest of the country, and you get some feel for the scale of the epidemic.”

In yesterday’s item in the Telegraph, the judge observed, “Everyone in the land, from the royal family downwards, is now affected by family breakdown. It affects the lives of children themselves, it affects the lives of their parents … the wider family gets caught up in it. It then ripples out to the local community, the schools and then into the wider community.”

The Telegraph commented that “the judge blamed the problem on social changes over the last 50 years, including a shift in attitudes towards cohabitation and having children out of wedlock.” Up to mid-20th century, Sir Paul observed, “On the whole (cohabitation) was regarded as something you didn’t do, to have a child outside marriage, so that created a framework that stopped very much breakdown. … We’ve had a cultural revolution in sexual morality and sexual behavior. … Divorce is easy in the sense that obtaining a divorce is easier than getting a driving license” (ibid).

In America, similar condemnation of the destruction of the moral virtues on which stable society was built was publicized by the New American under a fitting headline: “New York Readies for Deluge of Deviant ‘Marriages’” (July 8).

The article led with: “City and town clerks across New York are preparing for a surge in same-sex (aka lgbt or glbt) nuptials, the New York Times reports. Such is the size of the coming fairy-tale wedding contingent, thanks to the state’s new law legalizing same-sex ‘marriage,’ that New York City will open its clerk’s offices on July 24, a Sunday. That is the day the law takes effect. … [A]n alleged Catholic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is not a homosexual but is living with his girlfriend, signed the bill legalizing ‘marriage’ between members of the same sex.”

Using language appropriate to the moment, the New American observed that “Immediately after Cuomo signed state-sanctioned sodomy into law, the Times reported that clerks were ‘girding’ for more weddings, given that 45,000 homosexual couples live in New York. … ‘This is a historic moment for New York,’ Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement, ‘a moment many couples have waited years and even decades to see, and we are not going to make them wait one day longer than they have to.’ … Binghamton was the first city to announce it will open on July 24. New York followed. Other cities are also extending clerks’ hours to handle the conga line of homosexuals who show up to get ‘married’” (op. cit.).

The whole social zoo of unbiblical social relationships that sees British and American society drowning in moral depravity began with marital breakdown. The facts and statistics are undeniable. They are available for all to check at their national statistician’s office.

The solution to this massive destabilization of Anglo-Saxon society is as Sir Paul Coleridge rightly maintained when, in 2008, he called for “action to achieve a ‘fundamental change’ in individual attitudes and behavior to reestablish marriage as the ‘gold standard’ for relationships” (Telegraph, op. cit.). His reference was to traditional God-ordained marriage between man and woman (Genesis 2:24).

That “gold standard” is bound up in the immutable law of God, given to mankind to guarantee a sound, stable society of human beings fulfilling the God-given reason for their very being.

Read our book The Missing Dimension in Sex for a detailed understanding of the revelation of this great truth. It will give you a firm foundation upon which to weather the rising attack on the God-given institutions of marriage and family.