Some conservatives want to make it a lot harder to dissolve a marriage.

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.

  • rab
    514·
    6 months ago

    I don’t even understand why people get married when all the data shows that marriages fail

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      18·
      6 months ago

      What do you mean? Divorce is at a 50 year low, and the average couple getting married today has more like a 75 percent chance of staying married. Your odds are especially good if it’s your first marriage.

      The famous 50% figure doesn’t take into account that getting a divorce is correlated with getting another one, and the emerging generations are much more selective in who they marry.

    • Fades@lemmy.worldEnglish
      82·
      6 months ago

      No point in living either, everyone dies eventually so what’s the point right?

      That’s essentially your take.

      • rab
        74·
        6 months ago

        What does marriage do?

        I have a gf of 10 years, we are happy now, why would we get married?

        I’m honestly curious the reasoning

        • Snowclone@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 months ago

          I’ve been married 14 years, and I have no idea. It makes it REALLY hard to break up. No one can grasp that you changed your last name. At all. Every gov offical just BAFFLED. ‘‘I’ve worked in the county clerks office for 30 years and this is the FIRST I’ve heard of people changing their last name for marriage’’. Every. Fucking. Time. If you have kids that aren’t even close to 18, and you break up, You get to be EXACTLY the same as married, but now you don’t have sex or trust eachother. But literally nothing else changes. Also if you get married in your 20s, then by 40 you get to find out in excruciating detail that ‘inner child’, ‘mid-life crisis’, and ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, aren’t just dumb things people say, they are also why you dread being around someone you stupidly legally bound yourself too in the custom of a religion nether of you is still childish enough to buy into.

          I mean… it was pretty fun when we were having kids, going on trips, casually abusing Rx drugs, and having a sexual awakening after getting to 25 being painfully sexually repressed through religious abuse, but FUCK if I’m not aware of how little rope is left.