Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America.
Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or ācrueltyā (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: āEven if you could prove you had been hit, that didnāt necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,ā saidĀ Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina.
Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signedĀ the nationās first no-fault divorce law, allowing people to end their marriages without proving theyād been wronged. The move was a recognition that āpeople were going to get out of marriages,ā Zug said, and gave them a way to do that withoutĀ resorting to subterfuge. Similar laws soon swept the country, and rates ofĀ domestic violence and spousal murderĀ began to drop as people ā especially women ā gained more freedom to leave dangerous situations.
Today, however, a counter-revolution is brewing:Ā Conservative commentatorsĀ andĀ lawmakersĀ are calling for an end to no-fault divorce, arguing that it has harmed men and even destroyed the fabric of society. Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, for example,Ā introduced a billĀ in January to ban his stateās version of no-fault divorce. The Texas Republican Party added a call to end the practice to itsĀ 2022 platformĀ (the plank is preserved inĀ the 2024 version). Federal lawmakers like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) andĀ House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as former Housing and Urban Development SecretaryĀ Ben Carson, have spoken out in favor of tightening divorce laws.
Slight non sequitur, but slightly connected (welcome to my brain). Anyone can safely ignore this long, rambling comment.
Thereās a series of books called The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. It starts off as kind of an HP Lovecraft meets spy novel meets a sys admin workplace humor thing. Somewhere in there, I think itās the 4th book, thereās one called The Apocalypse Codex that deals with a quiverful group of Christian true believers that are accidentally worshipping an otherworldly horror and using parasites to āsaveā folks. It even features a forced birth center. Iāve known quiverfull, prosperity gospel, literalist folks my entire life, but every time I hear about quiverfull people I still think about that novel. I can highly recommend the series if anything I wrote above sounds remotely interesting, especially if you can get the audiobooks. Hereās one of my favorite passages from that book:
āTheyāre believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalistsāthey are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isnāt saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.ā
Other than the extra-dimensional horror, I think the book pretty accurately describes the mindset of those people. The series metaphor for modern society is so good that he had to delay and rewrite the last book because the original plan, prior to the pandemic, was to have the final resolution be a highly contagious disease.
The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set.
Did we just become friends?
Yes :)
Iāll have to check it out. Every time I see some of the radical xtianist/magabrained set in action, I think about the way that America is portrayed in The Rapture of the Nerds.