Kansas State Representative Keith Esau has introduced a bill that would eliminate no-fault divorce in the Sunflower State. He has some interesting ideas on matrimony:
“No-fault divorce gives people an easy out instead of working at it,” Esau told The Wichita Eagle on Friday. “It would be my hope that they could work out their incompatibilities and learn to work together on things.”
…Esau disputed the suggestion that bill was an example of government overreach. He said the state gives benefits to married couples, such as tax breaks, so couples shouldn’t enter into the institution of marriage lightly.
Moreover, he said, the state has a vested interest in supporting “strong families,” and divorce undermines that.
“I think we’ve made divorce way too easy in this country,” he said. “If we really want to respect marriage it needs to be a commitment that people work at and don’t find arbitrary reasons to give up.”
Of course, one of the immediate effects of this law would be that couples seeking a divorce would have to face-off in court and point fingers at each other. Either that, or one of them would have to accept the blame for their failed relationship.
Divorce is tough on kids, but nasty divorces are toxic.
But this isn’t even the worst bill that was considered in the Kansas House this week.
On Tuesday, the Kansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a measure designed to bring anti-gay segregation—under the guise of “religious liberty”—to the already deep-red state. The bill, written out of fear that the state may soon face an Oklahoma-style gay marriage ruling, will now easily pass the Republican Senate and be signed into law by the Republican governor. The result will mark Kansas as the first state, though certainly not the last, to legalize segregation of gay and straight people in virtually every arena of life.
If that sounds overblown, consider the bill itself. When passed, the new law will allow any individual, group, or private business to refuse to serve gay couples if “it would be contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Private employers can continue to fire gay employees on account of their sexuality. Stores may deny gay couples goods and services because they are gay. Hotels can eject gay couples or deny them entry in the first place. Businesses that provide public accommodations—movie theaters, restaurants—can turn away gay couples at the door. And if a gay couple sues for discrimination, they won’t just lose; they’ll be forced to pay their opponent’s attorney’s fees.
Unlike Rep. Esau’s idiotic no-divorce bill, the anti-gay measure will actually become law. Most likely, the federal courts will strike it down as unconstitutional, but that won’t prevent Republicans in Kansas from wasting money defending it.
I already doubt I’m going to want to get married; unless the woman I’m with really wants it. It’s one of the reasons the person I’ve been dating for a year or so and I are probably going to break up when she finishes graduate school. We’ll still be great friends, though.
Anyway, this would only make me be like, “Fuck marriage” even more. Keep chugging that chicken.
I find that sad, Seabe — though I take it from your comments there are other reasons for the break-up too. If she were really the woman you wanted to be with, you’d invoke the “woman I’m with really wants it” exception and pull the trigger.
One question. Why stay with someone for another year if you know she’s not the one?
Because I’m not looking for marriage — certainly not right now — we have fun, it’s a growth experience, and imo there are plenty of reasons to date that aren’t related to looking for someone you’ll be with forever.
And yeah there are other reasons, the least of which we don’t know where she will be working (could be all the way around the world). Too many puzzle pieces to fix together, really.
Maybe divorce isn’t the problem and what they should really do is make remarriage a lengthier and more expensive process than your first marriage.
One judge suggested the first marriage should require time and $$ – but evidently KS doesn’t want to discourage marriage.
I’ve often thought the very same thing. If I were putting together a marriage curriculum, I’d want everyone to take a course in Imago relationship theory or Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication. Perhaps a course with John Gottman, a scientist who’s done extensive research on what it takes to make relationship work.
I’d want people to get that behind every conflict is a mirror. We only get upset about something “out there” if some part of ourselves is implicated. Otherwise, we might feel sorry for the other person. We might not want to live with that person or stay connected in any way. But responses like anger, frustration, bitterness all mask our projection onto others of what’s really an inside job.
A life partner is one of the great things in life. It sustains you when you’re down. It makes being up even sweeter. It builds strong families. No matter if the whole world is against you, he/she has your back.
But it has to come from within. It can’t be forced from the outside. Some people get married for the wrong reasons. Some don’t really realize what they are committing to. Sometimes people don’t really know one another. Sometimes one or both parties have masked who they really are. Sometimes, with all good intentions, it just doesn’t work out. The State should no more force a couple to stay together than it should force them to get married in the first place. The State’s only concern is how to deal with innocent by-standers, like children and creditors.
I’m old enough to remember when it was hard to get a divorce in Illinois. Although young, I could see the hurt it made when one party couldn’t start anew and had to have an illicit relationship. I could see the pain it caused classmates to have parents that routinely shouted at each other and engaged in physical violence. The easiest legal ground was infidelity. This caused otherwise no fault couples to engage in a degrading charade wherein one partner, usually the man, there being less societal condemnation for him, to go to a motel whereupon a detective the lawyer engaged would “break in” and take photos of him in a “compromising position” with a woman employed by the detective. The man would then “confess” in court, perjuring himself to get the divorce. Does Kansas want that?
I’m a divorce lawyer and I cannot begin to express what a clusterfuck it would be to go back to fault-based divorce. Perhaps it sort-of worked when divorce was rare and disparaged as socially harmful. Today, it would be a farce. It would keep people like me very busy. My interest is in various forms of alternative dispute resolution such as collaborative divorce and divorce mediation. A law like that would essential prevent any divorce from being amicable, at least on the surface.
The concept behind the law makes about as much sense as trying to force people to be religious. If it’s not sincere, any professed spiritual conviction is worthless. In fact, worse than worthless, it forces people to be religious hypocrites. Perhaps fundamentalists like that because it would essentially everyone to be very much like them.
When I see the evil, small minded, retrograde bigotry on display, I keep thinking: Well, one day it will blowback on them.
Can it be sooner rather than later?
Because this is depressing.
Kansas — home of Koch Industries. Wouldn’t daddy and his boys have worked on their political game plan at home first before taking in on the road?
Where does all the hate come from? Apparently we now know at least some of it comes from Kansas.
How embarrassing! This dude is my state rep. Ugh. To be honest, I don’t much care if a bunch of straight people end up stuck in miserable marriages…
Schadenfreude.
But on the subject of Kansas, I think this critique of the liberal party in Salon.com is spot on.
“Even more alarming for Democrats were the stark implications of “Kansas” for their grand strategy of “centrism.” As I tried to make plain back in 2004, the big political change of the last 40 years didn’t happen solely because conservatives invented catchy conspiracy theories, but also because Democrats let it happen. Democrats essentially did nothing while their pals in organized labor were clubbed to the ground; they leaped enthusiastically into action, however, when it was time to pass NAFTA and repeal Glass-Steagall. Working-class voters had nowhere else to go, they seem to have calculated, and — whoops! — they were wrong. The Kansas story represented all their decades of moderating and capitulating and triangulating coming back to haunt them.
Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/the_matter_with_kansas_now_the_tea_party_the_1_percent_and_delusiona
l_democrats/?source=newsletter
And democrats want to elect clinton again? Good grief!
The less money that trashbags have to spend to hurt their fellow Americans, the better.
Let’s get legislation like this passed in every state to take away the fascists’ money.
I hope it passes. Then the cocksure sons-of-bitches will get what they got coming to them. I might add that my brother (in Kansas) has been divorced 4 times. He roundly supports this bill claiming that if “someone” had made him work harder he would still be married.
I wonder which wife he would be married to?