Way back in 1970 when the women’s liberation movement was just gathering momentum, a New York University professor named Warren T. Farrell provided the rationale for why it should be supported by men. Essentially, his argument was that men should eagerly look forward to the day when they can enjoy free sex and not have to pay for it.
Farrell advocated a never-never land where a husband should no longer be “saddled with the tremendous guilt feelings” when he leaves his wife with nothing after she has given him her best years. If a husband loses his job, he should not feel compelled to take any job to support his family, Farrell told the American Political Science Association Convention.
Farrell spoke in academic verbiage, but his message was clear. A husband should be able to go “out with the boys” to have a drink without feeling guilty, and alimony should be eliminated.
The male millennium that Professor Farrell so eagerly sought and predicted has largely come about. The chief change in our now-liberated society was the adoption of easy, no-fault divorce.
Starting in California in 1970, the no-fault concept swept rapidly through state legislatures. Fifteen years later, 49 out of 50 states had passed some variation of no-fault divorce.
This change in our divorce laws has affected the social, economic, cultural, and legal fabric of our society more than anything else that has happened in the last two decades. One can avoid participating in or succumbing to other changes, but the changed laws and attitudes about divorce affect us all.
No one can force you to have an abortion or to read pornography. If you can’t pray in school, you can still pray at home, in church, and in your heart. You can escape what you deem to be intolerable situations by changing your job or your school.
But divorce – the dissolution of a solemn mutual contract in which your pledge your life, your honor, your name, your commitment, and your future – can be thrust upon you without your consent. The very existence of this sword of Damocles hanging over every husband and wife validates an attitude about marriage that is temporary and based on self-satisfaction rather than on commitment and responsibility.
The trouble with the present situation is that it takes two to marry, but now one spouse can terminate the marriage without the consent of the other.
No-fault divorce was supposed to eliminate the acrimony and the lying. Now, the bitterness and the lying to get custody of the children can be even worse. False claims of sexual abuse of your own child can be more devastating to a man than false claims of adultery.
The radical feminist movement peddled easy, no-fault divorce as “liberation” for women when, in fact, it was liberation for men. The feminists didn’t discover their mistake until Lenore Weitzman published her landmark 1985 book, “The Divorce Revolution,” which proved that easy divorce means economic devastation for women.
Despite the profound effect of the post-1970 divorce laws, there is very little public discourse about them. Magazines, lifestyle sections of newspapers, and television documentaries explore in depth almost every other facet of the women’s liberation and the sexual liberation movements, but no-fault divorce seems to be a sacred cow.
Were these changes in the marriage laws good or bad? And for whom? Do married couples have the right to do their own thing and seek new marital experiences without accountability either to their solemn promises or to their children?
A new booklet called “The Human Costs of Divorce: Who Is Paying?” By Peter M. Weyrich (published by the Free Congress Foundation) is a significant step in starting a national discussion. It certainly is time that someone spoke up and said out loud that a large part of the human costs of divorce is paid by the children.
Weyrich has done a careful job of synthesizing the major current research on what happens to children after divorce, and it’s not a happy picture. He documents his booklet from recent studies that analyze the effects of divorce on the child’s psychological attitude toward his parents and siblings, his gender identity, and his scholastic achievement.
Weyrich’s recommendations for how society can cope with these problems would not be mine, but he has rendered a valuable service in collecting the data in a nonjudgmenetal way and posing the questions. If we don’t ask the hard questions, we’ll never get the answers.
