AMP: What marriage should be to the Secular World

I'm reading and listening with fascination about Dr. Mohlers concerns about marriage. His last article in his blog summons his point of view extremely well. I would like to give to this debate a viewpoint from a secular perspective.

In former times marriage had a great role in the public but it is declining every year. Article 6 of the German Basic Law (The German constitution) clearly states for example: "Marriage and the family shall enjoy the special protection of the state".
This Article also shows where the decline of the role of marriage comes from. The German law states Marriage and family almost as an unity, both inseparable from each other. The birth control pill has done away with that. While in earlier times children were expected to be born soon after a marriage was entered by two persons, today more and more couples stay childless. If there weren't children in a marriage than this wouldn't have normally been because of the choice of the spouses, but because of infertility. Marriage was a certain and the normal way to set children into this world.
That's no more today. Most couples delay childbearing or doesn't have children at all. Also very few unwed men feel obligated to marry their girlfriend anymore once they are informed that she is pregnant.

That marrying couples were soon expected to have and raise children, was the best secular reason to give some kind of special protection to this partnership. Now that no one can really expect a married couple to take on such responsibilities it's hard to justify those special treatments anymore. The only way out of it is a secular redefinition of marriage.
In my view marriage is the covenant between two partners who raise common children or where on partner is expecting to bear a common child, while family are the relationships between those two partners to their children and vice versa.

Just in this definition you could argue a special public interest in keeping the both partners together. It's hard to find any scientific or sociological study, that wouldn't show that children are best raised by their parents. Coming from that point it's quite easy to argue that the public has an interest in ensuring that such a partnership isn't broken easily.
If in a partnership without children one partner leaves the other that's maybe tragic for the partner whose left, but the public has no good interest in keeping both together. What else should others assume than that the partner who left had good reasons to do so? I don't see any good if we let both partners wash their dirty linen in public.
The whole issue becomes very different at the moment children are involved. The well-being of those children is a public interest and it's also in the best interest of the children if the public gets concerned about them. It's hard to grasp what some parents are able to do to their children in the process of a divorce and I seriously doubt the parenting skills of anyone who is able to use his/her children to blackmail the other spouse or to humiliate that person even more. To avoid that I would change the process of divorce radically.
The first step for a couple with children who wants a divorce should be into marriage counseling. Whether those partners want to get counseled by a church or a secular institution should be up to them. Some married partners simply lost the ability to talk to each after years of marriage. Forcing them into such a counseling to get a divorce also forces them to think again about their reasons for a divorce and will prevent marriages from being ended easily. Counseling also has the advantage over a court trial that it isn't about the question whose guilt it is that the marriage failed. I've never heard about a conflict that was solved by finding out who caused it. Maybe in some cases it can help to know the guild but viewing the problems like they are right now and solving them from there is often the best way. Having a court trial on whose fault the end of a marriage is would rather accelerate the process of the breaking apart of that covenant.
If after counseling one or both partners still want to divorce they should be obligated to go into a second counseling. This time not about their marriage but about their children. Even after their divorce both still stay parent to their children and both have to accept that the other partner also stays parent to the child. Just look at the example on what divorced parents do to their children to punish the other partner and you will clearly see that some serious education on how to go through this situation as adults  is needed.

I would like to live in a world in which every expressed will is thoughtful and informed, because in this world we wouldn't need either of the counsellings.

Those measurements would in my opinion be much better for the children than the systems that the United States and Germany (in a milder way) have.
But what about the role of God in a marriage that Dr. Mohler sees?
I couldn't care less. If there is a God, and if this God is concerned about those marriages than he should take measurements against those spouses on his own. If there really is a God than it would be an insolent overbearing of the state to believe that he (the state) has to punish or to act on God's behalf.
When it comes to the Church that might be involved in this divorce: That's also not the concern of the state. If this Church throws everyone out who gets divorced: That's their choice. Whether those partners had children or not. You could even have anyone who gets married in your churches sign that he/she has to pay a penalty of X dollars in case of a divorce to the church.

There are marriages from all kinds of worldview perspectives. The state in a pluralistic society should be a neutral agent. Instead of deciding that the Judeo-Christian perception of marriage is the right one and impose it on others, the state should weight legitimate interests of the persons (especially the children involved) against the freedoms of the persons who want the divorce.
The state also shouldn't privilege partnerships between a man and a woman over partnerships of two persons of the same gender. Both forms have the same kind of benefit to the state (happier citizens than if those people would live alone) and it hard to argue that a man shouldn't be allowed to visit his same sex partner in hospital if another man would be allowed to visit his female partner in hospital.

The dividing line between a civil union and a marriage should therefor be common children.

And as long as medical progress doesn't create those challenges or as long as we don't allow same sex couples to adopt children (which is a different debate), we won't need to talk about gay marriage.