Fundamental rights are not those created by man

'It is definitely against natural law that a man abandons his wife and children to start another family. Whatever hurts somebody else cannot be a fundamental right.'

what about the wife? after being abandoned doesn't she has the right to remarry and have someone to love her anew and foster her children?

@ Tony C. Cutajar - You are so wrong in your presumptious way of claiming that fundamental rights are not those created by man.

So wrong, that in actual fact, these rights evolve over time. As time passes by, man evolves and society evolves and we become more enlightened and aware as to what our rights should be. Not only OUR RIGHTS but also the rights of animals, for instance.

Many years ago, fundamental rights did not exist - hence, it was part of God's plan to have fellow human-beings slave away under the power of the white man. Even the Establishment, the Church accepted and approved slavery.

Time passed and society evolved and fundamental rights were recognised in this sphere as well and today, society simply cannot understand how slavery was acceptable to society.

This shows how wrong and thwarted the writer of this letter is.

taking up your logic you state: Whatever hurts somebody else cannot be a fundamental right.

Exactly. So if a man beats his wife, he has no fundamental right to hold on to her. She has a fundamental right to Divorce him.

"It is being said that divorce is a fundamental right."

No it isn't. Divorce is a civil, not a fundamental right.

As for the last line in this letter, I think it perfectly encapsulates the root of the entire liberal/conservative axis. Some of us out here believe the government's business and obligation is to guarantee that the the individual's fundamental and civil rights are respected.

You say tomato, I say tomAto, etc.

/cont...... The rest as we say is history. You can quote that Jesus made the sacrament of marriage all you like. The fact is He did not and this lovely story of Him turning water into exquisite wine at Cana is no more than a bit of fantasy that gives the lie to the claim. As I have
said elsewhere, 'Nature (or whatever you like to call it) is messy but it is all we have' - Let us deal with this harsh reality with our feet on the ground and not with our sense of responsibility invested somewhere up there on cloud nine. I really believe this and it works for me. God, if He really exists, gave us the intellect and would expect to show gratitude by using it.

'Fundamental rights are not those created by man' the implication being they were created by Nature > God, whatever. This is the problem with bringing 'Jesus said this' and 'God decreed that' - it blocks any further discussion which sinks deeper and deeper into the mire. I believe that in primitive times, men went about their business (hunting and so on), women bore and raised children who were raised collectively. Marriage as we know it today today was not invented yet. This was the 'hunter/gatherer' stage of Man's evolution when he was in awe of everything including the discovery of fire and the strange phenomena in the firmament.The fact that the human race survives today is proof that the system worked albeit as a basic primitive state of affairs as we see it today. Populations grew and people settled and abandoned their nomadic ways. They had to be managed and sometimes controlled. Thought processes became more 'sophisticated' and extended family groups were channelled into smaller more restricted nucleur families, more manageable and more tractable. The old beliefs were formalised and saw the 'creation' of religion which piled on the concept of sexual guilt to keep people in check. /cont

@Ramon Casha

"Marriage by definition requires divorce."

It is divorce that requires marriage, not the other way round. How can one divorce without first getting married?

Cont...

Furthermore, the claim that "Whatever hurts somebody else cannot be a fundamental right" is too simplistic a claim. For instance, I have a fundamental right to defend myself, even if to defend myself involves hurting my aggressor (or even killing him/her in some cases).

The right to form a family does include the right to divorce when a marriage fails, particularly (but not exclusively) when one is a victim of abandonment by one's spouse.

Divorce becomes a right only when there is a situation (as happens in all modern civilised countries) where the state (by consent of the spouses) binds people to live as married people. Since in the case of civil marriage this binding is nothing but a contract, it should be an option to dissolve it by mutual consent.

Regarding bringing up "natural law" as an argument against divorce, one should perhaps define natural law. If it simply means what's natural, one would find that most animal species (including humans), are by nature polygamous, and the abandoning of "wife" and "children" is found among many animal species. Of course, what is natural is not necessarily just, and we should avoid extrapolating morality from "nature". Arguments in favour or against divorce should avoid falling into the trap of claiming what's natural or not, since nature is amoral (neither moral nor immoral).

Cont....

No, it is NOT "accepted as fact" that man's fundamental rights were never created by man. I for one reject that claim. Of course they're created by man! There's nobody else to create them.

Marriage by definition requires divorce. Neither can exist without the other. Without divorce, marriage is reduced to a worthless piece of paper that declares people to be married when they're not.