A Double Standard Mark 10:2-6

I was a freshly minted M.Div. grad and was serving my first parish. I received a call on a Friday afternoon from a woman who asked if I would perform her wedding. She admitted that she had been on the phone all afternoon, being turned down by every pastor with whom she spoke, because she was divorced. Since there was divorce in my family, it was not something that I had ever thought should be a barrier to re-marriage. Even then, as a young man, I knew to ask questions as to whether or not the pain of that split had healed enough to give a second marriage a fair start and whether or not the divorced individual had become jaded about the whole idea of marriage in general. I have been surprised at how many couples have been so grateful that I would perform a wedding for them, since one or the other had been divorced. These days, most of the couples who come to me for premarital counseling have been living together for some time, and that is something that the church has also looked at with discomfort over the years. But many of us have come to the conclusion that we are happy that a couple wants to make a public commitment of faith and fidelity to one another, and we want to encourage that.
Jesus' comments about divorce are troubling. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” If that be so, there are quite a few adulterers out there, and some of them are clergy!
We would do well to remember that Jesus was responding to a trap set for him by the Pharisees. If he said that divorce was wrong, he would have gotten himself into the same hot water that John the Baptizer had when he criticized Herod for breaking up his brother's marriage in order to secure his wife. If he said that there is nothing wrong with divorce, he would have been guilty of a blasphemy. So, what he did was to remind all present that men and women were created one for another, for companionship and happiness. As usual, he was looking at the big picture, and that transcended laws about marriage and divorce. He wanted folks to enter into marriage very seriously, with the intention of spending the rest of their lives together. And who better than Jesus, and God, for that matter, understands when unforeseen problems may cause a union to split? When a dissolution of the covenant occurs, are we to believe that one has no right ever to fall in love again? Is that the kind of God we claim to love, and who claims to love us?
I don't think pastors are as likely to refuse to perform marriages because of divorce as they were thirty years ago. I think we look at this scripture passage as a cautionary tale; couples should enter into marriage for life, not simply for convenience or as a filler for a temporary loneliness.
Having said that, why are many of us able to look at these verses with a larger view in mind of what Jesus might have met, but many cannot look beyond some much less specific verses concerning same-sex behavior and use those as absolute bans on same-sex unions? Shame on us for our double standard!