To those that claim divorce is always unacceptable and condemn me as one who has participated in bringing down Christianity, please explain Matthew 19:9. I fall under the exception Jesus spoke of there.
Since you do not explain how you fall under the exception, it is only possible to provide some qualification. Jesus’ and Paul’s constant and forceful teaching about the permanence of sacramental marriage as recorded elsewhere in Scripture makes it clear that Jesus was not making an exception in the case of valid, sacramental marriages. The constant teaching of the Catholic Church attests to this as well.
t is important to note that in Jesus’ teaching about marriage and divorce, his concern was with the presumption that divorce actually ends a sacramental marriage and enables the spouses to remarry. He said to his disciples, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery" (Mark 10:11–12). But divorce that does not presume to end a sacramental marriage (e.g., divorce intended only to legally separate the spouses) is not necessarily evil.
Paul’s teaching agrees with this: "To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)—and that the husband should not divorce his wife" (1 Cor. 7:10–11). Paul understood that divorce is a terrible thing, yet it is sometimes a reality. Even so, divorce does not end a sacramental marriage.
“To those that claim divorce is always unacceptable and condemn me as one who has participated in bringing down Christianity, please explain Matthew 19:9” . . . . . You raise a good point.
Looking back to the Old Testament, with which Jesus was familiar and from which he quoted(The New Testament had not been complied during Jesus’ life), one finds Jewish law allowed divorce, but for astute and sagely reasoned goals.
The de facto reality was that divorce was available, but you couldn’t/didn’t want to pay the price. Jewish divorce was so finely tuned a social tool that one could be granted a divorce for a spouse’s bad breath. Why should a marriage continue when one party was deliberately loathsome?
Talmudic Law recognized that any bad breath problem could be dealt with cheaply for the short time needed for sex. To be deliberately offensive to one’s spouse was not acceptable, and the expense of a divorce was an effective way to prevent such spousal abuses from occurring.
Turns out the Mosaic/Talmudic system was very sophisticated, after all.
I, and the publican, pray the same prayer...