How’s this for creep factor?

The new Speaker of the House is in a “covenant marriage.“

This is a nifty innovation in Louisiana law — versions of it also exist in Arizona and Arkansas — that basically gets rid of no-fault divorce. If you’re in a covenant marriage, you can’t get divorced without proving to a tribunal’s satisfaction that your spouse has committed adultery, a felony (unclear if trying to overthrow the government counts), your spouse is a drug addict, and/or has physically abused you and/or your children, or you’ve lived apart for at least two years. (You may also be required by the court to go through marital counseling).

In other words, this converts marriage into the legal nightmare it was prior to women getting access to birth control and checking accounts, i.e., the horrible things that happened in the 1960s that the Mike Johnsons of the world consider the root of all evil even today.

Strikingly, less than one percent of the marriages in Louisiana have been covenant marriages in the 25 years since the law making them possible was passed. The good news is that, even in America in 2023, the supply of theocratic misogynist crazies may be fairly limited. The bad news is that these people now clearly control the Republican party, in tandem with Donald Trump, the High Priest of Marital Sanctity.