Divorce Parties: The Next Inevitable Step

ABC News: Many Throw Parties to Toast Divorces

Apparently a growing trend among women is throwing a party to celebrate the end of a marriage and the start of a "new life." This seems different from taking a recently divorced friend to dinner or golfing to console them. The parties are for the purpose of celebrating-feeling joy and happiness at the end of a marriage.

Putting aside all the situations in which reasonable people would see possible merit in divorce, I think this reality exemplifies well the next inevitable step in our shameless culture. Instead of allowing an appropriate measure of shame and guilt to do its moral work in our lives, we strive effortlessly to make the shameful acceptable and the guilty asuaged and vindicated. An appropriate moral reaction to divorce (even divorce in extreme and horrible situations) should contain a great deal of remorse.

Replacing remorse with glee dulls our moral senses, our ability to reason morally, and thus the ethical shapes of our lives. We become more reprobate and feel better about it all the time.