‘Family Ties’ Ending for the Birneys, After 15 Years

--One of Hollywood’s longer and more beloved marriages, that of “Family Ties” star Meredith Baxter Birney and actor David Birney, is in “tough days” and the couple announced they have filed for divorce in Los Angeles. The Birneys, who live in Santa Monica, filed a joint statement saying: “We have been married for 15 years. In that time we’ve worked together, cared about one another’s well-being and raised five children together. In those regards, nothing has changed.” The children are Ted, 21, and Eva, 20, Meredith Baxter Birney’s children from her first marriage, and their own three: Kate, 14, and twins Peter and Mollie, 4. Meredith Baxter Birney, who is 41, plays an architect and mother to a brood of four on the long-running series that launched actor Michael J. Fox. David Birney, 49, is currently working on a CBS Movie of the Week with Stefanie Powers.

--Republican Party chief Lee Atwater will be able to stay neck and neck with his favorite blues musicians now that he has a replica of the famous Lucille--the guitar that has gently wept at the hands of B.B. King for decades. Atwater jammed with King at a Washington concert, at which the blues master presented Atwater with the guitar. Atwater’s love of the uniquely American music became well-known after he organized a blues all-star concert as part of President Bush’s inauguration.

--There’ll be no parting of church and state in Finland on the novel idea of sex holidays, proposed by the government as a way for people suffering from stress to put their worries behind them. At least one top church official is all for the idea of the government-organized holidays from work. “People’s sex lives can be really troubled by the fact they can’t get time off from their jobs, there is too much going on,” said Liisa Tuovinen, secretary of the Lutheran Church’s board of family affairs. “I think it is good (government officials) recognize that people’s difficulties in marriage are due to the stresses in their lives and not because they are married to the wrong person or because there is something wrong with them,” she said. The Health Ministry report apparently grew partly out of fear that the population of Finland is on the decline. Riitta Auvinen, research director at the Population Research Center, said the current population of 4.9 million could rise to 5 million by 2000 but was likely to fall to 3.7 million 50 years later because of the age profile. Prime Minister Harri Holkeri joked in a speech last year that experts had calculated there would be just two Finns left in the year 3000.