"The vast majority of those seeking a 'sealing cancellation,' previously known as “temple divorce,” are women who wanted to save their marriages, but couldn’t overcome the challenges in the end."
He seems clueless about why it's mostly the women seeking the cancellations. DUH! Most LDS men do not want to marry a woman already sealed to another man because all of his children technically will be sealed in the celestial kingdom to the first husband. In such a sick system, who can blame the women for trying to re-market themselves as temple virgins?
If they got rid of D&C section 32 and officially renounced eternal polygyny, then those requests would likely drop off.
Of course men don't ask for sealing cancellations; they can have all the eternal concubines they want. Wasnt there some early doctrine about the more wives a god has, the greater his exaltation?
More black-and-white, overly simplistic, linear thinking by the leadership. I find his claim that "most women wanted to save their marriage but couldn't" to be disingenuous in the extreme. Divorce is generally the result of numerous factors over many years. He overlooks many of the other problems with Mormon marriages such as:
1. Marrying too young
2. Marrying when people barely know each other
3. The financial pressures caused by having too many children, too soon, while the husband tries to finish school in many cases, and the wife does not work
4. The encouragement for wives to have children early and often frequently results in an educational imbalance between the husband and wife. This can contribute to a growing gap between the husband and wife.
5. The financial and power imbalance caused by the wife being completely dependent for her support on the husband.
6. The financial stress caused by asking a one income family to donate ten percent of their income.
7. The scheduling challenges caused by church callings and the time that the church callings take away from the family.
8. The magical thinking processes that lead Mormons to turn to prayer, fasting, church service, and scripture study for solutions to marital problems.
9. Seeking marital advice from bishops untrained in counseling. Bishops thinking that they are magically given powers of discernment. All parties to this amateur counseling believing that some divine source is providing infallible direction.
Every single one of those points is exactly why I'm a divorced woman It wasn't the "challenges in the end," it was the challenges from following a really really bad plan from the very beginning.