It’s not enough that Republicans have turned the clock back more than 50 years on reproductive rights with the repeal of Roe v. Wade, now they’re proposing that women once again should be locked into marriages, no matter how miserable or dangerous those relationships might be.
And, it turns out, someone was listening when Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance in 2021 proposed yoking women in marriages, even violent ones:
“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,” Vance said.
Prominent conservative lawmakers and mouthpieces are proposing the end of no-fault divorce — laws that exist in all 50 states that allow someone to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.
Such a repeal, experts say, would force more women to return to an era when women often were trapped in abusive marriages.
California passed the first no-fault divorce laws under Gov. Ronald Reagan, who was divorced, and others states quickly followed. New York, in 2010, was the last state to pass similar laws.
Vance wrongly stated that domestic violence has skyrocketed since no-fault divorce laws were passed.
According to The Guardian: “Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.”
Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as Vance have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.
Sanctioning easy divorces has created “a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy,” he said.
The divorce rate in the United States increased significantly from 1960, when it was 9.2 per 1,000 married women, to 22.6 in 1980. But by 2022, the rate had fallen to 14.5, The Guardian reports.
Proponents say unilateral no-fault divorce is unconstitutional because it violates a person’s 14th amendment right to due process. But opponents say that it’s absurd to argue that women are property or that men’s liberty is restrained by not allowing them to stay in a marriage with someone who does not want to be married.
Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law in St Louis, who has a specialty in policies concerning gender, sexuality and sexual violence, says she believes “the train has left the station” on no-fault divorces.
“I mean, we have had no-fault divorce now for 50 years,” Lieberman said. But “I didn’t think the supreme court would overturn Roe v. Wade, which we had for 50 years, so I suppose we will see.”
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