NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) — If leaders of Mexico City’s socialist democrat Party of the Democratic Revolution have their way, the city’s 2009 law legalizing gay “marriage” will be followed this year with temporary marriage licenses.

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple is happy, the bill’s co-author, Leonel Luna, told the Guardian newspaper. The licenses would include a pre-divorce agreement on the disposition of children and property if the couple decides to terminate the marriage.

“The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends,” Luna told the Guardian. “You wouldn’t have to go through the tortuous process of divorce.”

I wonder if one could write a dystopian/utopian novel about a society in which this kind of contract was the norm. What would a practice of moving every two years or so from one relationship to the next, always in search of that elusive “happiness”, do to people and families and societal stability? Would it be so very different from the society we’re living in now?

Why young Christians aren’t waiting anymore by Joe Blake.

“The article in Relevant magazine, entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It,” cited several studies examining the sexual activity of single Christians. One of the biggest surprises was a December 2009 study, conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which included information on sexual activity.

While the study’s primary report did not explore religion, some additional analysis focusing on sexual activity and religious identification yielded this result: 80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) said that they have had sex – slightly less than 88 percent of unmarried adults, according to the teen pregnancy prevention organization.”

So how is our culture very different from the Mexican socialist proposal that we legitimize short-term relationships and go on from there?

I still believe in marriage, life-long and for one man and one woman. However, if our culture has reached the point that this ideal is no longer practiced, even among a majority of professing Christians, what can we do to get the culture moving in a different direction?

Sociologically speaking, the one big difference – and it’s monstrous – between the biblical teaching and our culture is the arranged marriages of very young people. If you get married when you’re 13, you don’t have 15 years of temptation. ~Scott McKnight

I’m not suggesting, and neither is Mr. McKnight, that 13 year olds should be marrying. But what about seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year olds? Why is it that eighteen year olds are old enough to join the army and old enough to vote, old enough to have sex, but not old enough to marry, according to cultural expectations?

We need stories, historical fiction, dystopian fiction and others, that explore the ramifications of these and other questions about marriage. If you are a writer, you have the power to move the conversation in our nation, not in a propagandistic way, but as a powerful by-product of the stories you choose to tell.