I don’t have a huge amount of faith that Republican legislators and Republican judges would place following the state or federal constitution ahead of doing what’s best for the Republican party.
The party platform is where you load up all the red meat for the kooks. The RPT platform also includes holding a referendum on secession. In days gone by, I would have said that these provisions have no chance of being enacted but the party has gone wild-eyed enough that I offered the caveats I did. But amending the Texas Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the Legislature and a majority in a statewide vote, which would be impossible to get on something like this.
If the Legislature tried to change how statewide offices are elected – one of the fundamental parts of any constitution – through ordinary legislation? Roll the tanks, I guess.
The Church of England takes a similar position, which is why Chuck and Camilla got married civilly (Di was dead, but her husband was alive after he and Camilla got divorced.)
MAGATs may be somewhat surprised at the longer-term effects of banning no-fault divorce.
I suspect they think that if couples can’t get divorced they will stay together and work on their marriage and their children will live in a household with both parents present and active. I think though that in many (most, I’d say) cases the parents will still split up. They may not be able to marry other partners, but living together without marriage is not frowned upon as much as when it was derisively called “shacking up” and the children resulting from these relationships are no longer called “illegitimate.”
In fact, the big difference may be that the higher-earning parent will not be required to pay child support, so that the real victims of the loss of no-fault divorce may be the kids.
If no-fault divorce laws are abolished I will never get married again if my husband dies. Just like I wouldn’t live in a state that outlawed abortion. I’d rather be alone than cede power to anyone over my body or what I get to do with my life.
I think this is the main difference between women in modern and previous generations. Previous generations never had these freedoms. I grew up taking them for granted. And I would never go back.
What you’re going to see is even fewer women getting married and having kids than ever before. You think the decline is bad now? This would backfire so badly for conservatives.
The next step is making women the default property of their fathers, husbands, Brothers, or whatever living male relatives they have. I doubt any law would specifically call it ownership, but the laws could be structured in a way that all but literally means property.
Hm. I have no relatives.
[Channeling Dave Allen’s Priest]
Relatives will be provided!!!
This sounds like a feature, not a bug, from the Republican point of view.
The interesting thing, to me, is that according to this, the states with the highest divorce rates are red states, while the states with the lowest divorce rates are New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York and California. It seems like they’re pissing in their own well.
Not quite. The Church of England does allow divorced individuals, including ones with living ex-spouses, to marry, although it is left to the discretion of the individual vicar whether permission is granted. That was actually already the rule when the present King and Queen married. The problem then was more that they had been unfaithful with each other while still married. In contrast, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were allowed an Anglican wedding. She was already divorced when they had first met.
My wife’s Catholic ex-mother-in-law refused to acknowledge her son’s divorce, even after meeting me. As long as my wife, her ex-husband, and the State of Texas agreed they were divorced, I didn’t much care. She was a crazy lady, anyway.
I don’t want to call the posters here alarmists, but this is ridiculous. No fault divorce hasn’t been universal in the US. My mother was a family law attorney in Illinois, and rolling back no-fault in Illinois would roll back the law to… 2016. Seriously, before that divorce required a “fault” from one party or the other. Is Illinois a No-Fault Divorce State? (2024) - Vantage Group Legal
If you’re in a “fault” state, what happens if a party wants a divorce is one accuses the other something unforgivable in a marriage (infidelity, but there’s other things) and the other side… drum roll… stipulates! There, done. They can get divorced. Tada.
I’m not saying no-fault is useless. It isn’t. But it’s nowhere near a make or break thing. Someone wrote a fantasy upthread re a detective and fake sex and crap like that. C’mon, where does crap like that come from? “Fault” divorce just isn’t that hard to navigate. I would absolutely agree with someone that says “why should someone have to!?” but in one state or another it’s been something couples have had to negotiate for decades and they’ve done so.
If anything, the problem is a couple w/o means and law advice would have trouble finding their way through this. No fault allows couples of lesser means to divorce, and that’s a good thing.
Why do you think using a detective and fake sex is a "fantasy’?
From this article about no-fault divorce:
The routine was that a husband would be “caught” in a compromising position with some woman, either his actual girlfriend or a woman who’d been paid to go along with the put-up job.
Often, they bedded long enough in a hotel for a room-service waiter or a private detective with a camera to catch them and voila, exhibit A. Usually it was the husband; either he was actually cheating, or he chivalrously volunteered to the charade because men’s reputations were not besmirched by adultery the way women’s were.
Also from that article:
Michael J. Higdon is a professor and associate dean at the University of Tennessee’s law school, and he can go as super-law-nerdy as you like on the topic of divorce laws. He remembers running across a 1934 New York Mirror newspaper headline from at-fault days, “I Was the ‘Unknown Blonde’ in 100 New York Divorces!”
Perhaps the “100” was hyperbole, but it’s pretty evident that faking adultery was not all that rare.
Why wouldn’t it have been enough for the couple to say in court “He cheated on me, and I want a divorce!” “Yup, I cheated on her, and she can have a divorce.”? If the husband is willing to go along with it, that’d be a lot easier than the charade with photographic evidence, and if the husband isn’t willing to go along with it, then the charade wouldn’t work, either. Courts don’t generally get picky about evidence for things that both sides agree on.
You would think both spouses claiming the husband was unfaithful would be enough, but the courts seemed to want evidence. I’m guessing the attitude was, “We don’t want to grant divorces willy-nilly. If we just take people’s word for it, we’re pretty much granting them willy-nilly.”
This of course eventually led to no-fault divorce when it struck lawmakers that the ruse of finding “evidence” meant that for those who could afford it divorces were being granted pretty much willy-nilly anyway.
Interesting factoid: One of the biggest opponents to no-fault divorce in California was the State of Nevada. They had a nice revenue stream from their Reno divorce racket which required one of the couple to reside in Nevada for six weeks.
Yep, and it used to be that in many jurisdictions it was specifically forbidden for the parties to collude to fake a case for divorce. Another “loophole” in some jurisdictions was the “abandonment” cause (just move away and stay away and not supporting for X years) but that imposed upon one of the parties added hardship.
Then the state would assign you a legal guardian.
It’s not related to divorce laws but supreme court justice Sotomayor believes gay marriage may be next on the list of things the supreme court will overturn given a ruling they made last Friday.
I think, more broadly, Alito and Thomas (at least) have their sites set on several issues they’d like to overturn and will get to them as they can.
Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.
“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”