What Does the Bible Say About Mitch Daniels’ Unusual Marriage?
3 min readBy David Plotz
Many Americans learned today about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ rather unusual marital history. In 1978, Daniels married Cheri Daniels. In 1994, she divorced him, married another man, and moved to California—leaving their four daughters in his care. In 1997, having divorced her second husband, she returned to Indiana and remarried Mitch Daniels.
According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which both wrote today about the Daniels’ marriage, their rocky history is a key reason—perhapsthe key reason—why Daniels can’t make up his mind whether to run for the Republican presidential nomination. Neither he nor Cheri relishes discussing their break. She apparently never talks about it to the media, and, according to the New York Times story, he has mentioned their divorce “only once publicly, tellingThe Indianapolis Star in 2004: ‘If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems.'”
Truly, you’d have to be a grinch to condemn this rescued romance, which reunited a mother and her children and repaired a broken marriage. Yet it turns out that there is one place where you’ll find nothing but savage condemnation of the Daniels’ remarriage: The Bible.
When I blogged the Bible a few years ago for Slate, I came across this passage at the beginning of Chapter 24 of Deuteronomy:
A man takes a wife and possesses her. She fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, and he writes her a bill of divorcement, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house; she leaves his household and becomes the wife of another man; then this latter man rejects her, writes her a bill of divorcement, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house; or the man who married her dies. Then the first husband who divorced her shall not take her to wife again, since she has been defiled-for that would be abhorrent to the Lord. You must not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage.
Sound familiar? In other words, according to the law of Moses, the Daniels marriage isn’t romantic—it’s “abhorrent.” (Incidentally, though this passage prescribes no punishment, acts described as “abhorrent” in the Torah are generally punishable by exile or death.) I did a little—very little—bit of research about why Moses would condemn such a remarriage. The Biblical logic seems to be that the wife, having lain with another man, has been irrevocably damaged, and so the first husband would be shamed by being with her again.
Most Americans would agree that this is a stupid, cruel, and irrelevant law. Moreover, it is a 3,000-year-old Jewish statute, and Mitch Daniels, a modern Christian, is in no way bound by it. Still, the next time someone cites the Bible to you as a rulebook for modern living, remember that with all its grand and lovely laws—and there are plenty of them—come archaic barbarities like this one.
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