Let’s Digress About No-Fault Divorce
I recently saw an article about Indiana House Bill 1684 on social media. It seems the bill would attempt to eliminate, or at least curb, the occurrences no-fault divorce among married couples with kids.
I’ve had the controversial opinion that the downfall of marriage wasn’t with the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell where they crammed down same-sex marriage from a federal level onto the states in 2015. My position has been the downfall of marriage was actually closer to when no-fault and unilateral divorce were instituted between the 1970s-1990s.
Additionally, I don’t think same-sex or traditional marriage should exist from a governmental standpoint in the first place, at least not from the federal level. Marriage is pre-political, meaning that the government doesn’t “create” marriage; it should only be acknowledged by government and not granted, rejected, or defined by it. People have been doing marriage long before the government decided to get involved in it.
In their book The Meaning of Marriage, George and Elshtain say,
“Given the pre-political nature of conjugal society, the state regulates it rightly by recognizing it as a natural fact with its own norms and purposes. The state ought not treat conjugal society as its own creation. Where there is evidence that parents are failing in their duties to each other or to their children, the state may intervene. Absent this, however, the state ought to leave conjugal society, rooted in the union of one man and one woman, alone.”
I would love to get rid of no-fault divorce altogether. I think it’s asinine and antithetical to the institution of marriage to get married and when things become inconvenient, burdensome, or when a spouse decides they’re “different people than they were before” to get a divorce just by one party declaring there are “irreconcilable differences” and ending it. I want a more robust institution than that. I want a martial institution where one party has to admit fault.
Yes, some divorces will be inevitable. Some marriages (the vast minority, based on the studies) will have spouses who will experience abuse, neglect, or infidelity from the other. Those marriages likely should end in divorce barring some sort of legitimate repentance, forgiveness, and rebuilding of trust over time.
All of those divorces would have someone at fault by definition, and I’m fine with that. But to dissolve marital ties at the drop of a hat with the only reason being, “Yeah, we’re different people now and just aren’t feeling it anymore” isn’t good enough in my opinion.
This is only magnified when children are involved. Intellectually, I knew how important a stable marriage was before having kids. Now that I actually have kids, I have a more visceral understanding of it.
As married parents, we’re our kids’ whole world. Everything they know revolves around us being a stable and unbreakable duo at the center of their lives. When parents get divorced, that world blows up. In both The Meaning of Marriage and The Abolition of Marriage the authors talk extensively about this. It’s also generally easy to observe in kids who have divorced parents, regardless of the reasoning for divorce. There’s something different about them, we all know it, and it’s tragic.
Parents, experts, and the online peanut gallery can sloganeer about how children are resilient, how marriage is about a spouse’s happiness, and try to sell the benefits of co-parenting and two Christmases as often and as voraciously as they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that divorce legitimately wrecks kids.
From what I’ve read of this proposed House Bill, it would seek to curb no-fault divorce only among married couples who have custody of minor children. There are carve outs for abuse, neglect, and infidelity; this bill isn’t about those unfortunate circumstances. It’s only about the other cases where the sole reason for the divorce is an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. It would require that whichever spouse filed for the divorce would also have to provide a witness (counselor, friend, family, etc.) to testify that the marriage is irretrievably broken and the court would then have to make their determination based off of that information.
I’m not sure if it’ll actually pass or not, but it seems like a good start to me.