Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America.
Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or “cruelty” (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: “Even if you could prove you had been hit, that didn’t necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina.
Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, allowing people to end their marriages without proving they’d been wronged. The move was a recognition that “people were going to get out of marriages,” Zug said, and gave them a way to do that without resorting to subterfuge. Similar laws soon swept the country, and rates of domestic violence and spousal murder began to drop as people — especially women — gained more freedom to leave dangerous situations.
Today, however, a counter-revolution is brewing: Conservative commentators and lawmakers are calling for an end to no-fault divorce, arguing that it has harmed men and even destroyed the fabric of society. Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, for example, introduced a bill in January to ban his state’s version of no-fault divorce. The Texas Republican Party added a call to end the practice to its 2022 platform (the plank is preserved in the 2024 version). Federal lawmakers like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, have spoken out in favor of tightening divorce laws.
Easy fix, people will stop getting married. Give the younger generation another reason to not have kids.
If the only families pumping out kids are Christian crackpots, that’s a win for them. They want to out-breed you.
The crazy Christian families usually produce non christian kids.
Quiverfull folks are a whole bundle of crazy.
Slight non sequitur, but slightly connected (welcome to my brain). Anyone can safely ignore this long, rambling comment.
There’s a series of books called The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. It starts off as kind of an HP Lovecraft meets spy novel meets a sys admin workplace humor thing. Somewhere in there, I think it’s the 4th book, there’s one called The Apocalypse Codex that deals with a quiverful group of Christian true believers that are accidentally worshipping an otherworldly horror and using parasites to “save” folks. It even features a forced birth center. I’ve known quiverfull, prosperity gospel, literalist folks my entire life, but every time I hear about quiverfull people I still think about that novel. I can highly recommend the series if anything I wrote above sounds remotely interesting, especially if you can get the audiobooks. Here’s one of my favorite passages from that book:
“They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.”
Other than the extra-dimensional horror, I think the book pretty accurately describes the mindset of those people. The series metaphor for modern society is so good that he had to delay and rewrite the last book because the original plan, prior to the pandemic, was to have the final resolution be a highly contagious disease.
The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set.
Did we just become friends?
Yes :)
I’ll have to check it out. Every time I see some of the radical xtianist/magabrained set in action, I think about the way that America is portrayed in The Rapture of the Nerds.
Yeah we had a big quiverfull church not far from where I used to live. They were in a cycle of being in the news every few years for how they promote their flock to get on government assistance to afford more kids. People making six figure incomes were getting a variety of benefits because they had over a dozen kids, in two cases two dozen kids. This would piss people, garner calls for legal changes to stop this abuse, bring up how they are exactly the type of people who want to scare people with “welfare queen” stories, etc.
For a couple generations, the pumping out children mandate made it grow. However, around the third generation they started seeing a steep decline in parishionership. Basically the founding members’ kids weren’t nearly as willing to stay in this cult, and by their grand children’s generation, their birthrate wasn’t enough to replace their flock. By the time their great grand kids’ generation came around (current time) they were quickly dwindling in numbers. Now every time their welfare stuff hits the news they now have interviews with people who cut their families off, and left the cult, being interviewed about how insane they are.
From what I have been able to find, this seems to be the general timeline of these “super family” sects. They burn themselves out, and as time time progresses, the burnout comes more, and more, quickly. So the long term prospects of the baby factory faiths isn’t good.
I sure am feeling like a rambling old man today.
By the time the oldest kids become parents they’re already tired of being parents because mom and dad can’t possibly keep up with a dozen kids and sure aren’t paying nannies and babysitters.
By the time a couple generations go by, there’s no more help. They still get government assistance if they don’t get out but grandma and great-grandma still have school aged kids and aren’t helping (let’s face it, pappy ain’t doing it).
So who the fuck is taking care of these hundred and change kids? It’s only good for a surge unless you have multiple wives (again, you know the guys aren’t doing it), which is not happening at a rate that makes a difference, although that happens a little bit. So by that third generation you’ve got a fuck-ton of kids who definitely think it’s bullshit.
I grew up in a semi-related cult and saw that happen in real time. The one I grew up in wasn’t the “super family” welfare abuse type but did preach to have as many as you could handle while still being able to afford them. I personally know the people you’re talking about and they’re super literalists, young earth creationists, and dispensationalists who hand wave millennialism with “a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day”. Some of them believe that the war in heaven started the day the Jewish people went back to Israel and that the horsemen of the apocalypse are already here. Some referred to covid as either Plague or Death until they decided it was fake. They’re sure that every event is the harbinger of the rapture.
Hearing these people talk is fucking wild. I know they’re a minority, but if you go into some of the more insular rural communities you’ll meet them and they are fucking serious. They don’t understand why you and all of their kids can’t just see what’s happening.
I lived an hour away from a “church” that did shit like snake handling. They did not talk about their sect to strangers and were generally very wary of anyone not in their cult. Very strange people. Sorry you had to live through that.
I guess they talked to us because we were the “light” version of their church. I don’t really know how they’d treat a real outsider I guess. They always tried getting us to come to church stuff with them.
It was normal to me. My parents weren’t bad people and they didn’t make me raise my younger siblings. I didn’t get abused like a lot of the kids around me. I put up with some bullshit, but we all do to some extent.
I appreciate it, though.
Yeah lived in Appalachia, if you drove 1 or so hours out of the city, into the mountains you could find some wild shit.
(You can have kids without getting married)
but no financial state benefits at all for said kids, probably, if it depends on those same conservatives that are anti-divorce.
They’re saying that about every religion. I guess the Muslims are also having a bunch of kids. Idk, I think a war fought with pussy is a war in which everyone loses.
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Removed, ableist slur.
With no birth control or abortions, conception will become legally-binding marriage.
Women tend to flee areas like that. Ask China how it worked out with the one child policy.
“Well that’s easy to fix! We just have to prevent them from leaving without a male guardian’s permission.”
– Conservatives, probably
I guessing a spike in fathers/husbands being hammered to death in their sleep. Let me do jury duty for those cases. We’ll be home by lunch.
“Jury trial for a feeeeeemale killing a man? Don’t be ridiculous, that’s immediate capital punishment”
While I’m being facetious, there’s probably a reason why Project 2025 is specifically pushing for more and faster capital punishment
Fuck everything attached to that wish list.
It’s more than just a wish list.
Jury nullification. Prosecutors and judges hate it, but it’s not illegal!
…and admitting that you know it exists is grounds for you not being allowed on a jury.
But yeah, judges judge the law, juries judge the facts. so the judge can corral how the trial proceeds and explain to the jury what criteria they are supposed to be following and what evidence they are supposed to consider but the jury can decide what it wants and their decision cannot be challenged - which means if they decide that someone is guilty/not guilty for reasons wholly unrelated to what the law actually says then that’s what it is.
It’s why I was surprised that Trump was found guilty on all counts in the NY trial - I was expecting a mistrial due to hung jury before the trial even started because I was expecting at least one hardcore supporter/opponent of Trump who was going to vote based on that regardless of the evidence making it impossible to have a unanimous agreement.
I was expecting a mistrial due to hung jury before the trial even started because I was expecting at least one hardcore supporter/opponent of Trump who was going to vote based on that regardless of the evidence
Anyone that hardcore is easy to filter out. They would check the Facebook of any potential jurors before starting.
Looks like it’s time for Utah to share it’s Mormonism.
I’m sure they’re counting on it being rather difficult to flee from most places in the U.S.
And with child marriage looking to make a comeback, you can bet your ass that arranged marriage will also return.
Turns out the full Biblical definition of marriage is again, women and girls have no say in who they marry. Just wait. First they legalize child marriage, then they legalize arranged marriage. Got a debt to pay off? Just offer the guy you owe money to your daughter. Want to move up the social ladder at work? Have your daughter marry into a higher class. Don’t worry about what she wants. Marriage isn’t about “love”, whatever that is. It’s a tool for moving up in the world. /s
But it’s almost like they want European-style feudalism back. The CEOs and billionaires become the new nobility, and we all become serfs, and we are basically already there. But, I have a plan. I’ll join my liege lord’s army and hopefully I’ll serve honorably enough that he shall award me a fief and small parcel of land. Then y’all can move in and become my serfs!
We’re bringing back the shotgun weddings, boys!
I was married, later divorced, and am now in a position where I’ve been in a committed relationship for more than 10 years, but we aren’t married.
The benefits are clear and pushed onto us: I can’t share health care with my partner if we aren’t married. The system is rigged to make people in relationships eventually get married.
This is why my husband and I got married after 10 years together. Originally neither of us cared because we were essentially already married. But doing it officially then I could be on his insurance, and if anything happens where one of us gets incapacitated the other can make healthcare decisions. Sucks that’s how it works though.
I was in the same boat as you. However, I met my wife while working overseas. We dated and lived together for two years.
The only reason we got married was for immigration reasons. If she could have came to the US easier then we would still be “dating.”
Once she got to the US, she asked why we divorce so much. I explained for 99% of people we get married for 3 reasons; pregnant, religion, or financial. Once one of those are resolved we split.
It is due to the system pushing you into young marriage. To produce kids young and never own anything but work non stop.
Remember work 50 years for the possibility to enjoy 10, maybe.
There’s like 1200 legal benefits to marriage iirc. Things like being able to visit in the hospital outside of visiting hours, possessions going to your spouse after death if there’s no will, stuff like that.
What state do you live in if you don’t mind me asking. Many states have rules that would allow you to add them to their insurance if you live together for a length of time. A year for AZ is what popped up when I went to search because I’m here on a work trip.
I’d rather not, but I know this is a thing, albeit not for me.
The concept of the European style family is a tool of conservative control. When you create specific boundaries on what is considered kinship you create subjects of economic categories. If you get a bunch of kickbacks for playing by the rules then there are also people who are purposefully excluded from playing to create additional economic goads. Like if you are disowned from your family you can lose generational wealth and support which is designed to keep young people in line by way of fear . Welfare and social securities weakens the economic ties of the family politic control to make you reliant on the support of the people you are related to by blood and to keep people who might be your chosen family at a distance unable to help.
So called “family values” aren’t lovely dovey nice things. They are to make being an individual with different needs a failure state.
Next up: arranged marriages!
That would be crazy. The courts would have to rule that kids can be legally culpable. That would be wild shit.
Courts ruling children have legal responsibilities? What’s next, courts requiring children to give birth?
Easy fix: marriage will become mandatory. Checkmate, libtards!
Incels will be eradicated. How will the world go on?
Isn’t this the same argument as “if women can’t have abortions, they will stop having sex”?
Nobody gets married under the assumption they will get divorced. Marriage is supposed to be a gesture of a life long commitment.
On top of that, there are financial benefits to getting married.
I highly doubt this would stop anyone from getting married.
People should stop getting married because it’s a government contract based in religion - it’s gross and I don’t want either of those things being involved in my relationships.
I fully agree marriage should be simple with little to no government or religion involvement. That’s why we see less people getting married or if they do it’s later in life.
The only real reason to get married now is financial and health benefits. That’s it.
Making it harder to divorce will lead to the ones waiting to rethink if it’s even worth it.
Marriage rates have already been dropping and divorce is an available option. Removing that out isn’t going to increase people’s confidence about going into marriage.
And as the nightmare stories come out about the guys (and probably some girls, too) who change overnight once the marriage license is official (or annulment period ends or whatever becomes the “now you’re locked in as long as I don’t get caught cheating”), it’ll only go down further.
There will also be a reaction to the women who decide to just stop being loyal once they are done with a marriage but can’t get out.
Then it will be premarital sex.
Only the best.
Better fix: make life difficult for the assholes pushing for these policies instead of shrugging your shoulders and saying “guess it’s their fault when everything goes to Hell.”
Common law marriage!
Then people won’t even get into relationships.
Shit, it won’t be common if my ass is gone.
My state does not recognize it.
“It harms men.”
So does rat poison. You walk back no fault divorce get ready for a return of mysterious deaths of shitty men.
The absolute correct energy for this bullshit.
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I’m all for them getting their just desserts, but not at the cost of women suffering
This is how I felt about Roe being overturned several years ago. It would unleash hell on Republicans and make them incredibly unpopular, but it would not be worth the cost of women suffering.
And unfortunately, I was right. It has proved utterly disastrous to Republicans, but a lot of women have suffered. People have had to go through pain and experiences that no one should ever have to – except perhaps the conservative SCOTUS justices, Trump, and Republican senators.
This is what you really NEED to know about abolishing no fault divorce:
And that will cause huge problems, especially for anyone experiencing abuse. “Any barrier to divorce is a really big challenge for survivors,” said Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “What it really ends up doing is prolonging their forced entanglement with an abusive partner.”
If they abolish no fault divorce it WILL cost lives
That is the bottom fucking line. There is no argument against divorce that exists that can prevent that. Wait no there is, oh golly they will make exceptions for abuse. That sure fucking sounds familiar. Hmm like maybe it was the concession ‘pro-life’ would make for abortion.
And look how that turned out.
Before roe v wade was overturned they were all about protecting the abused, somewhat, with caveats. Kinda like they are talking about divorce here innit?
If they abolish no fault divorce it WILL cost lives
“Probably, but those are lives of women, not people.”
-Conservatives who support this shit
Stop you’re making me cry. It’s so “funny cuz it’s sad” it went past the point of being funny.
you’re not wrong.
I never said it was funny.
it WILL cost lives
Republicans only seem to be pro life until the child is born.
Democrats need to stop using these terms. Republicans are pro human-capital. They want numerous, dumb, poor workers to control and they want to own women.
“Pro human capital” is a good term, thank you for introducing me to it. I’d say numerous, dumb, poor workers who are desperate to serve for scraps because of austerity.
Interestingly, I’d assume that between home surveillance systems and cell phones, proving domestic violence shouldn’t be too tough nowadays.
I don’t think this is a safe assumption. The victim may not have free access to hardware. The police/etc may not believe them. They may be afraid of being murdered if they try to record something. Just off the top of my head.
You can read “why does he do that?” by Lundy Bancroft for fascinating and depressing information about abuse. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_That_Inside_the_Minds_of_Angry_and_Controlling_Men
The police/etc may not believe them.
There’s something about 44% of cops…
Just like how “there will be exceptions for unviable pregnancies” no amount of direct video evidence of abuse will be enough to justify for the courts to justify a divorce. If they had people’s well being and best interests in mind this wouldn’t even be proposed.
That would be utterly shameful of the justice system.
…yes?
Much like the current situation with abortions in certain states.
Are you new here?
I am.
This should require anyone working on these laws that is divorced to be retroactively married to their ex-spouse automatically.
Those women did nothing wrong, don’t punish them like that.
This is exactly why they are working on these laws: so they can treat their wives like property and the women have no recourse.
Meh, very often the women married to conservative assholes aren’t blameless. And often share their husband views.
A lot of them are raised to be that way though. One of the big pushes in a lot of Christian circles, for example, is the push to raise kids believing in complementarianism instead of egalitarianism–simply put, that god created men and women to have different roles, and that men just so happen to be in the role of leadership. Combine that with extreme purity culture (at times involving courtship instead of dating, for example) and a fervor to push for big families, and you get a bunch of grown ups looking up after 5, 10 years in a marriage going, “wait, I was promised happiness, why am I so miserable?” Divorce is a huge tool to help. We need to give people, especially women and children, a safe exit from high control spaces.
Not the ones that divorced these conservative assholes. We should be encouraging them to escape, not forcing them back.
No, because they had a valid reason to get divorced, unlike everyone else.
Just like their abortion.
I know more than one woman who fled one of these convenant marriage states. One still can’t get the divorce officialized because her toxic abusive husband keeps insisting on an endless parade of marriage counseling, via answers to the divorce court.
I don’t know if forcing her back into the marriage because that same abusive husband started working for a legislative lobbying outfit would be productive.
I have had enough of conservatives climbing into the tree house and pulling up the ladder behind them.
Some, they say, can’t get married. Now they want to say who can split up. Let’s see them live the walk they talk first.
You know for sure they will find a reason why they can’t live the walk.
And they are probably afraid that their wives will leave them because they are pieces of shit.
“In recent news Home accidents increase”
The ethos of these people is largely about enforcing the dominion of men over women.* This divorce stance is about disempowering women. Abortion is about disempowering women. The move they are about to make against contraception, about removing agency from women. Age of consent, ditto. Given the opportunity, they would absolutely remove women’s right to vote, own property, maintain credit, and on and on. This is the culture that’s dominating the Republican Party and they face very little meaningful opposition right now.
- To be fair, they are also guided by a profound desire to enforce the racial dominion of what they perceive as white.
The solution seems simple. Don’t marry and don’t have kids. Eventually America dies off and the rest of the world closes the book on the experiment that failed.
No. The batshit crazys are having lots and lots of kids. They want sane people to leave, to die off.
At this point, I’m happy to end my bloodline. People are insufferable enough already, i don’t want my kids growing up with the product of even more ridiculous nutjobs
You could think about emigrating. We’d love to brain drain the US… more.
They’ll just pivot to forced/arranged marriage then.
The solution seems simple: drive these ass backwards politicians out of office and don’t allow them to have any power over your lives because they are not interested in your health or well-being.
The solution seems simple. Don’t marry and don’t have kids.
Am I allowed to be amused that a bunch of guys looking at the state of family courts deciding the same thing were mocked as a bunch of evil misogynistic incels, and have been for years? Apparently “don’t participate in the system you are worried is going to fuck you over” is not an acceptable choice.
They are just going to make contraception behind locked doors/ only available to married partners, if at all available.
Good way to keep those marriage rates low. Can’t get divorced if one doesn’t bother getting married in the first place.
Ah, but then there’s common-law marriages that they will institute.
It’ll be a common law marriage when it comes to sharing debt and calculating income for denying SNAP, single when it comes to hospital visitation rights and bereavement.
They already calculate household income for any individual assistance.
Then don’t ever get rid of your own place, so you can prove you’ve only been dating, not living together.
Oh yeah man, just have two homes in this economy. Great idea.
Likely they will counteract by making even more things illegal, e.g. premartial sex.
I’ll be advising all of my daughters to never marry if that is the case.
Advise sons too. If marriage is going to be weaponised then it should be denormalised.
Advising my nephew will have to suffice, I feel bad enough bringing those I already have to this place. I will make sure to just advise young people in general.
One of the few times Reagan did something good
The cons have been butthurt about the 60s for as long as I can remember.
They want to Make America Great Again: When men were men and women were chattel.
It’s the sirens song of lead
If anything, I believe they wanna go back to long before the 60s. Back to the 1700s, in terms of owning slaves (including women), being able to shoot anyone who they disagree with, and getting away with killing anyone who isn’t white, claim they killed themselves, and have nobody question it.
They conservatives do love any and all kinds of oppression and slavery!
The thought The Handmaid’s Tale was a “How-to” guide.
At long last we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci fi novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus”.
I hope them publicly advocating for this backfires spectacularly.
“First they game for gay marriage, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t gay. Then they came for the abortions, and I didn’t speak up because I didn’t need an abortion. Then they came for divorce, and…fuck, that might be a real a pain in the ass. Maybe I won’t vote for these asshats.”
— some people, hopefully…
“First the came for abortions, and we made a lot of noise but got ignored. Then they came for Divorce and… fuck, maybe we should do more than just make noise.”
Torches! Torches and Pitchforks! Get your Pitchforks at the Pitchfork Emporium!
For every two Pitchforks sold you get a free torch! And not those silly tikki-torches either!
Boy I wish our government wasn’t so good at bringing their nightmare fuel fever dreams to fruition, while constantly failing to do anything to better anyone in the way almost every voter agrees with.
Sounds like a good time to get into the contract killing industry.
TW: Suicide/Death/Domestic Violence
Wolfers and Stevenson traced suicide rates before and after divorce reform and found a statistically significant reduction of nearly 6 percent in the female suicide rate following a state’s change to unilateral divorce. There was no discernible change in male suicides. Looking longer term, they found close to a 20 percent decline in female suicides 20 years after the change to no-fault divorce.
The percentage of husbands abused by their wives increased in the 11 states with unchanged laws also, yet remained the same in no-fault divorce states. For women, the change was greatest: Women victims of spousal violence declined by 1.7 percent from 12.8 percent in the reform states in the same period that spousal violence against women increased 2.5 percentage points in the non-reform states.
