You Can't Ban No-Fault Divorce

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.