You Can't Ban No-Fault Divorce

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 4:35 AM on April 16, 2008.

Kathryn Joyce has a great piece up about the continuing agitating of anti-divorce nuts, who are trying to perform the social equivalent of putting toothpaste back into the tube. What's really great about this dude from Marriage Savers, though, is that he openly argues that marriage should be a legal trap.

Basing its implied equation of liberal divorce laws with unjust war, McManus justifies the term “Unilateral Divorce” because “in four out of five cases, one spouse did not want the divorce, but had no choice.” In a press release announcing the new Reform Divorce website, McManus argued that one spouse’s freedom to divorce the other without permission was the reason behind America’s high divorce rate.

Unfortunately for them, these are reforms that will only pass Republican muster if you only reverse a woman's right to sue for divorce. After all, the John McCains and Newt Gingriches of the world would have been fucked if their first wives (or second) were able to prevent them from trading them in for younger models. But I suspect that these Marriage Savers would be perfectly happy to accept a compromise that allowed men to sue for divorce and not women. Though I suppose even an equal divorce law that prevented men from divorcing as well as women would fuck women over more than men, because men that aren't politicians would do what they always did before, and just leave without bothering with the divorce. Women are the ones who more often need the protections of divorce.

In case there's any doubt that this is more about women's freedom than men's (though, to be fair, the anti-divorce nuts also get off on thinking about men being trapped in unhappy marriages as a sacrifice to the patriarchy), check out this article.

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages.

Of course, the groups are the sort that should immediately raise suspicions---a bunch of wingnut organizations that are too busy thumping the Bible to crack it open and realize that it's about more things than the importance of all people being wedged into very narrow gender roles. They defined costs incurred by single "parents" (read: unmarried mothers) very, very broadly, making the findings pretty much guaranteed as illegitimate.

Scafidi's calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes.

The idea that poverty is caused by single motherhood more than the other way around has no real evidence for it, and the reverse does have some evidence. So we can dismiss the study right out of hand. But I can't help but point out how weird it is that they included education. Are they saying that a bunch of broke single moms would somehow be able to pull their kids from public school and put them in private school if they married, most likely to men that are in the same socioeconomic class? Skeezy, but I'm not surprised to see that kind of statistics-bending. These folks are so committed to proving that men are the sole source of everything---life, morality, civilization itself---and that women can't provide any of these things, that they're not going to be stopped by something minor like intellectual honesty.

Thankfully, the article has counterperspectives from people who know what they're talking about.

But Tim Smeeding, an economics professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, who was not involved in the study, said he's seen no convincing evidence that the marriage-strengthening programs work.

"I have nothing against marriage -- relationship-building is great," he said. "But alone it's not going to do the job. A full-employment economy would probably be the best thing -- decent, stable jobs."

He also noted the distinctive problems arising in black urban areas where the rate of single-mother households is highest.

"A high number of African-American men have been in prison -- that limits their future earning potential and makes them bad marriage partners, regardless of what kind of person they are," Smeeding said. "A marriage program doesn't address that problem at all."

Another expert not connected to the study, University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock, suggested that bigger investments in education would pay long-term dividends -- improving economic prospects even for children from fragmented, disadvantaged families.

"Providing a global number doesn't give us anything to go on," said Smock, who was skeptical of the study's $112 billion estimate.

"We're now nearing 40 percent of kids in America born out of wedlock," she said. "I can't fathom that those marriage programs, even with increased investment, are going to reduce that."

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.