The Christofacist War on Divorce

It's not just gays who need to be fearful of the agenda of the Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party.  Heterosexuals in failed marriages need also worry as do women who want control over their own bodies and straight couples who want to use birth control.  Divorce and contraception are prime targets of those who believe that women are to be subordinate to men and ought to be required to stay in marriage no matter how horrible they might be.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at this often overlooked aspect of the Christofascist/GOP war on women and modernity.  Here are excerpts:

For years, social conservatives have been fighting to prevent certain people from getting married. But they’re waging a parallel battle, too: Trying to keep married couples together.

In cooperation with the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, socially conservative politicians have been quietly trying to make it harder for couples to get divorced. In recent years, lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced bills imposing longer waiting periods before a divorce is granted, mandating counseling courses or limiting the reasons a couple can formally split. States such as Arizona, Louisiana and Utah have already passed such laws, while others such as Oklahoma and Alabama are moving to do so.

If divorces are tougher to obtain, social conservatives argue, fewer marriages will end. And having more married couples is not just desirable in its own right but is a social good, they say. During his presidential campaign, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) emphasized finishing high school and getting married as cures for poverty. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically,” he declared at a 2011 event in Iowa.

A legislative movement against divorce may seem like a non-starter in a country where half of married couples avail themselves of this right, but as with legal challenges to Obamacare and the rise of the tea party movement, today’s fringe idea can quickly become tomorrow’s mainstream conservatism.

Divorce has long been a cultural touchstone in America. Social conservatives regularly advocate a return to a more traditional system of divorce — namely that it be extraordinarily difficult to get.
No-fault divorce has been a success. A 2003 Stanford University study detailed the benefits in states that had legalized such divorces: Domestic violence dropped by a third in just 10 years, the number of husbands convicted of murdering their wives fell by 10 percent, and the number of women committing suicide declined between 11 and 19 percent. A recent report from Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress found that only 28 percent of divorced women said they wished they’d stayed married.

Yet the conservative push for “divorce reform” is finding sympathetic ears in statehouses, where Republican lawmakers have regularly introduced bills to restrict the practice. Their rationales range from the biblical (God bemoans divorce in Malachi 2:14-16) to the social (divorce reduces worker productivity) to the financial (two households are more expensive to maintain than one). Leading conservatives such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have also argued that marriage is a solution to poverty.

While some studies show that children of divorced parents do experience worse life outcomes — including diminished math and social skills, a higher chance of dropping out of school, poorer health, and a greater likelihood of divorce themselves — Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld points out that there is no way to test definitively whether children of divorced parents were already more likely to experience such outcomes. And as Stephanie Coontz, a historian and the author of “Marriage, a History,” explains, what’s most critical is the high-conflict environment that kids grew up in before their parents separated. 

[I]nherent in that argument is an unfortunate and unavoidable reality: Making divorce less accessible harms women most. The right to divorce was a victory women fought for in the culture wars of the 1970s, and women today are twice as likely as men to ask for a divorce, according to Rosenfeld.

Would making divorce less accessible encourage partners to stay together, as conservatives hope? Probably not. Waiting periods and mandatory classes “add a new frustration to already frustrated lives,” Rosenfeld notes. In other words, a cooling-off period isn’t cooling anybody off.

More problematic, these roadblocks “could easily exacerbate the situation and harm kids,” Coontz says, noting that divorcees are “more likely to parent amicably if they haven’t been locked into a long separation process.”

The push to restrict divorce is a form of paternalism — expanding government in pursuit of socially conservative ends. Marriage is a conservative institution, the thinking goes, and married straight couples provide a backstop against the creep of government. Any public policy that encourages the creation and persistence of married straight couples therefore merits support; any policy that deviates, including same-sex marriage or no-fault divorce, is hostile to the institution.

The irony is, of course that evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rate of anyone.  Moreover, if one truly cares about children, you don't leave them in homes wracked by strife and discord.   Like so much else the "godly folk" bloviate about, they actually do not give a damn about children after they leave the womb.  The Christofascists need to stay out of other peoples' lives and, if they want to remain in their own miserable marriages, they are welcome to do so.  Just leave the rest of us alone.