Divorce without blame is not the real problem

Last year, right-wing commentator Steven Crowder caused a stir when he publicly lamented that his wife was leaving the marriage.

“My wife at the time decided she didn’t want to be married anymore,” he complained. “And in the state of Texas, that’s perfectly legal.”

I remember wanting to spit out my coffee when I read this.

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Why would any self-respecting person admit out loud to an audience of millions that he believed the law should keep a woman trapped in a marriage with him against her will? What kind of narcissistic claim was that? “How dare you let her leave me?” he seemed to say in his blameless tirade against divorce.

And his audience was largely understanding. Conservatives have been denouncing the evils of divorce without blame for decades, blaming it for problems such as the destruction of the family, the widespread throwaway mentality toward the institution of marriage, the epidemic of fatherlessness, and other societal ills.

Of course, public sympathy for Crowder was relatively short-lived. His ex-wife released some video footage of him behaving like a bully, silencing him for a while. But the crusade to abolish no-fault divorce, especially in Republican states, seems to have gained momentum in recent years. It is led by popular conservatives such as Dusty Deevers, Ben Carson, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Matt Walsh and others. The Texas Republican Party has added a call to abolish no-fault divorce to its 2022 platform. Both Nebraska and Louisiana Republicans are considering similar proposals.

Deevers recently argued that easy access to divorce causes “social unrest, rampant dishonesty, lawlessness, violence against women, war against men, and the expendability of children.” His statements came alongside his support of Oklahoma SB 1958, a well-intentioned but ill-conceived disaster that would put people (especially women) in grave danger if it ever passed committee.

Keeping abused spouses in marriages with abusers until they can legally prove the abuse is a recipe for killing people, especially when the abusive spouse controls the family’s finances. This is a reckless policy that seems completely “detached” from the wisdom and insight of people who have already walked these paths.

GK Chesterton is credited with the quote, “Don’t tear down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place,” and that statement rings true here. We on the right seem to have a pretty short memory when it comes to the horror stories that inspired Reagan to sign the first no-fault divorce bill in 1969.

But when it comes to conservative discussions on this issue, we generally don’t hear anyone reflecting on the sordid history of rising female suicides and domestic violence. All we seem to find are self-appointed spokespeople claiming to advocate for children and families without having earned the right to claim they are experts on the issues they highlight.

It is all well and good to remind the public that divorce is hard on children. I completely agree with you. Marriage should for life. Children REALLY suffer when their parents separate. That is objectively true. It is not really up for debate. The throwaway marriage culture creates countless victims, and we need to have a broader discussion about preserving marriage and fighting for the relationship when times get tough.

But in Christian circles, all everyone wants to talk about is how divorce ruins children. No one wants to talk about how staying in abusive marriages has scarred children for life. Divorce hurts children, but so does a childhood of domestic violence, and for some reason conservatives don’t seem all that interested in amplifying the voices of children growing up in families with toxic marriages. These experiences do nothing to advance the preferred narrative. And when these voices are raised, they are generally dismissed as fringe groups that must not distract from the main issue, which is preserving marriage at all costs.

I hear one thing a lot is that the data shows that abuse is not a factor in most divorces in America. We really need to challenge that belief.

Dates are important. I don’t deny that. But it’s also true that there are truths that dates don’t reveal. My no-fault divorce says we divorced because of irreconcilable differences, when in reality it was the quickest and safest way to escape abuse and infidelity. That’s the reality for countless people across the country. If you have the option of getting out of this as quickly, safely and inexpensively as possible, or the option of hiring an expensive lawyer to take your ex to a risky trial where anything less than incriminating evidence will end badly for you and your children, which option will you choose?

They’ll check the “irreconcilable differences” box and work to get over the trauma as quickly as possible. And then family policy groups will take your data and conclude that abuse isn’t really a problem. And they’ll be dead wrong.

Frankly, I don’t think the average, decent man has any idea how widespread domestic abuse and violence really is and how difficult it is to prove in court.

Decent men don’t think like abusers, so it doesn’t occur to them, like many other men do. They keep telling me, “If a woman is abused, she can file for divorce because it’s her fault, and she’ll be fine.”

But they never seem to have an answer as to how the woman is supposed to manage this if she is a housewife without her own income and her husband is in charge of the finances.

They don’t know how she can prove that he is whispering his constant verbal threats to her, thus avoiding recording or the attention of potential witnesses who could corroborate her claims.

They don’t know how to help her get taken seriously by the police when she tells them that he has been holding her captive in the house for the past three hours, but he denies it ever happened.

Visit the website of any divorce attorney in a state where fault divorce is the norm, and you will hear it loud and clear: “Emotional/psychological abuse is quite difficult to prove in court.”

So no, I don’t think trapping (often) destitute women with their abusers will save the family. I think it will only mask a problem that most of us would rather not see.

And no, of course I’m not saying that all no-fault divorces are the result of abuse. But I am saying that many are. And I’m saying that you would never know that from a superficial look at the statistics.

And let’s assume that Dusty Deevers and Co. actually manage to abolish no-fault divorce. What then? Do we really think they will lift a finger to help abused women? I’m not particularly optimistic.

We’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of times what the Theobros do to abused women: they throw them back into the lion’s den, tell them to submit and pray for their husbands, and then look the other way. How many dozens of times have I written about this and brought the receipts? Google Eileen Gray.

Marriage at the expense of the woman’s physical and emotional health is not God’s recipe for a thriving family. Do you really think the children will be happy in this environment? Of course not.

If the only thing holding a marriage together is a law that prohibits either spouse from leaving, we’ve already lost. That’s not the kind of relationship that will provide children with the safety net you want to provide them. A marriage is only as good and healthy as the people in it.

No-fault divorce has not created a new problem, but rather brought to light an existing problem. Let’s talk about it.