The Right Aims to Turn Back the Clock on American Divorce Law

From Time:

Though the proposal is not included in the Project 2025 policy book, eliminating no-fault divorce is one of the goals of many of the advisors to the project — an initiative put together by groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to lay out an agenda for a second Donald Trump Presidency. And this is no isolated proposal. Newly minted Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance has called no-fault divorce “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”

What many conservatives want is a return to the “fault divorce” legal system, in which marriage was fundamentally binding unless one spouse — and only one — violated anything on a list of “faults” articulated by states in hodgepodge fashion. Judges had the power to deny divorces for multiple reasons, leaving people who wanted no part of marriage stuck together.

Yet, modern conservatives don’t just want to resurrect this system — they want to make it even worse. The fault divorce system assumed men to be breadwinners who were required to continue providing support for their wives if they were at fault for the divorce. It was a part of a social contract in which wives had to provide household labor, ranging from childcare to sex, in exchange for financial security (which after a divorce meant alimony). 

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