Divorce: Another target on the GOP post-Dobbs agenda
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A historical fact that’s been largely lost to the mists of time is how in the Anglo-American legal world it was difficult or impossible to get a legal divorce until quite recently. For example, legal divorce essentially. didn’t exist in Britain at all between the Glorious Revolution and the Reform Act of 1852 (During this time the only way to legally dissolve a marriage was through a private act of Parliament, which resulted in an average of less than two legal divorces in Britain per year over this two-century period).
In the 19th century, most US states were almost as extreme on the matter, and legal divorces were for many people who wanted them practically unobtainable. Even through most of the 20th century, getting a divorce in America meant either going through a cumbersome and often fraudulent process, in which a couple that wanted to break up had to collude to perjure themselves in order to create valid legal grounds for divorce, i.e., adultery or extreme cruelty, or they had to flee to one of the rare jurisdictions (Nevada and Mexico being the most popular) that had relatively looser divorce laws, aka migratory divorce.
Indeed not until 1969 [!] did any US state make it legal to get divorced simply because the couple wished to end the marriage, without having to prove they had valid legal grounds for doing so. Well guess who wants to change that:
Some of the loudest anti-LGBTQ conservative voices are also the biggest critics of no-fault divorce, in both cases making an appeal to tradition and what they see as a God-given natural order while defending nakedly patriarchal power relations. Patriarchy depends on a rigid gender binary, with clearly defined roles and expectations; conservatives believe LGBTQ identities subvert this dynamic. Similarly, no-fault divorce laws upended patriarchal power, freeing women from de facto second-class status and dependence on men.
No one encapsulates this tendency more than the virulently anti-trans conservative pundit Matt Walsh. In defending Kanye West’s harassment and threatening behavior in March toward his estranged wife Kim Kardashian, who had recently filed for divorce, Walsh also argued that it should be more arduous to dissolve marriages. . . .
Walsh’s Daily Wire colleague Michael Knowles made the same point last year.
“We see the weakening of marriage through no-fault divorce,” Knowles said. “This is a very bad turn of events.”
“Do you think society has gotten much better since the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s? Or has it gotten a little bit worse?” Knowles asked. “Are we in a period of ascendancy or a period of decline?”
Knowles’ line is increasingly common on the right. Senior writer at National Review Online Dan McLaughlin also sees the liberation movements of the second half of the 20th century as a locus of social disintegration, recently linking gay marriage rights and no-fault divorce as twin aspects of a singular problem.
If you think no-fault divorce is the kind of legal right that couldn’t possibly be revoked in contemporary America, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, as Pvt. Hudson noted in Aliens.