The pro-divorce lobby has conducted the debate rather exclusively on the question of rights without considering other, equally important, issues, like the ability to practise that right. I should think that a divorced husband will have to give alimony to the ex-wife as happens in cases of legal separation. The whole purpose of divorce, however, is to give the estranged husband – and wife – the opportunity to remarry. So, the husband who marries a second time will have to pay alimony to support children from the first marriage and also provide for any offspring from a subsequent marriage. And if the second marriage fails I presume that the husband will be allowed a third chance, and a fourth and fifth, presumably ad infinitum, because there can surely be no limit to how many times someone can divorce and remarry if, as the pro-divorce lobby contend, remarriage is a right.

This right to remarry cannot be restricted to a particular class of people, because, being a right it pertains to everybody, each and every one of us will have it. Most will not intend to use it for religious or moral reasons. In their case this is a question of choice. Others, however, will be restricted from using it for financial reasons. And, can one, in all conscience, introduce a right which the majority of those who would want to use it find they cannot do so because the financial burden involved will bankrupt them? Some people I know who lobby for the introduction of divorce also complain quite vociferously about the hardships young married couples have to face with regard to loans etc. I wonder how they can square this concern with the added financial burden that divorce and remarriage will entail.

I think one has to be very careful about this question of rights. One has a right to education; so if one cannot provide it for oneself the state will provide it for him. One has a right to health care; so if one cannot provide it for oneself the state will provide it for him. One has a right (we are told) to divorce and remarry. Will it follow, therefore, that if one cannot support a second or a third family the state has automatically to do it for him? Because a right without the means to exercise it is no right at all. I’m sure there are quite a few who could manage to bear the burden of two or even more families.

But what about the others – I’m sure the majority – who will either find themselves unable to face the financial burden of a second family (and so cannot make use of their right to remarry) or who, going into a second marriage, find that they cannot cope? What then? Will the social services step in? And who, in the last resort, will pay the bill for the exercise of this right?

I think this has become, in many countries, a vicious circle. The more the state provides for everything the less people feel responsible for their actions and the more rights we have the less we bother with duties. Will the right to remarry (for that, after all, is divorce) make us forget, as has happened in so many European and other countries, that we have a duty to make our marriages work?