By Maria Padhila
You know the traditional Tarot drawing on The Devil card? It depicts a man and a woman chained to a pedestal on which the big, evil goaty guy himself perches. It’s odd that Christians would want to put us into such a picture, but that’s what’s happening. The latest moves toward government control of our lives and loves come from the trendy move by several Republicans to limit the freedom to end a marriage.
Elimination of no-fault divorce, imposition of waiting periods, demanding “proof” of problems: just as with contraception, is this really a battle we’d ever thought we’d be fighting all over again?
And just as control over reproduction could be taken, the power to end a personal relationship could be legislated away.
Legislators seem to have chosen this from a menu of sure-fire click bait election issues. A column from Scott Keyes of ThinkProgress, at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, gives the lowdown; it’s worth reading the whole thing.
For years, social conservatives have been fighting to prevent certain people from getting married. But they’re waging a parallel battle, too: Trying to keep married couples together.
In cooperation with the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, socially conservative politicians have been quietly trying to make it harder for couples to get divorced. In recent years, lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced bills imposing longer waiting periods before a divorce is granted, mandating counseling courses or limiting the reasons a couple can formally split. States such as Arizona, Louisiana and Utah have already passed such laws, while others such as Oklahoma and Alabama are moving to do so.
If divorces are tougher to obtain, social conservatives argue, fewer marriages will end. And having more married couples is not just desirable in its own right but is a social good, they say. During his presidential campaign, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) emphasized finishing high school and getting married as cures for poverty. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically,” he declared at a 2011 event in Iowa.
A legislative movement against divorce may seem like a non-starter in a country where half of married couples avail themselves of this right, but as with legal challenges to Obamacare and the rise of the tea party movement, today’s fringe idea can quickly become tomorrow’s mainstream conservatism.
Well, who wouldn’t want a cure for poverty? Except the cure isn’t marriage, no matter what “studies” may say.
I had my daughter at age 40. During my pregnancy and early years, lots of people made frenemy-bitchy remarks to the effect that I would be an old lady and unable to keep up with her and therefore she wouldn’t do well. I comforted myself by gathering studies to the contrary. I’ve given that up — taking a mother-daughter aerial silks class or going to festivals together is a better way to keep up with her — but two kinds of such studies stuck with me.
Several pointed out that a major contributor to stability and success of children has been having older parents. And one of the most consistent indicators of success for children, across all cultural lines, has been having lots of books in the home.
Should we legislate how many books are in homes? Maybe legislation ensuring that children actually have a home to put those books in would be a better start.
But the point there is the old causation problem. Older parents tend to be more stable (your humble narrator perhaps excluded), earn more money or at least are better at managing it, know how to feed themselves, for heaven’s sake — hell, I managed to stay alive until age 40, so at least there was that. Having my child at 40 was a conscious decision; a wanted child has a better chance of doing well. Having the freedom to actually make that decision was a matter of straight-out upper-middle-class democracy white-lady privilege; that same privilege gave my daughter an advantage right out of the chute.
Having books in the home means, first, that you have a home. Having books in the home means someone in the family can read; another privilege. Having books in the home means someone has the stability and reliability to carry those heavy suckers from place to place, and that there haven’t been many places to move to. While there are certainly refugee camps with books around, are there many books in the trap house? I have my doubts.
The books and the older parents don’t cause the success; they’re just present with it, signifiers of privilege. The marriage doesn’t cause the success; it’s just another signifier. Take any of these away, and there’s no reason a child can’t still succeed wonderfully in life — if he or she is in a world or society that actually gives a damn. Ours shows every indication of not giving much of one, particularly in places that include Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum, which apparently has no compunctions about breaking up the sacred family when it means someone gets to cash out on that process.
Perhaps the Republicans’ Las Vegas backers would like to send us back to the world of Desert Hearts or The Women, where women flocked to Nevada to get divorces. Here’s Keyes on the good old days of divorce:
For most of American history, to obtain a divorce, one party had to prove to a judge that the other party was at fault, meaning he or she had committed certain grievous acts that irreparably harmed the marriage, such as adultery or being convicted of a felony. Emotional or physical abuse wasn’t always enough; even adultery or abandonment could be insufficient if a spouse reluctant to get divorced convinced a judge that his or her partner was similarly culpable.
And as historian Glenda Riley showed in her 1991 book Divorce: An American Tradition, loveless couples often found creative ways to persuade judges to end their marriages: As recently as the 1950s, some couples would stage a bust, complete with hotel room, “mistress,” photographer and private detective who would testify in court about the husband’s (or wife’s) supposed illicit deeds.
I think “staged adultery photographer” would be kind of an interesting job, but not that great. It’s also interesting, as Keyes points out, that Ronald Reagan (divorced guy) signed no-fault divorce into law in California, the first state to legalize it.
Most of the Republicans seem to be like Henry VIII on the issue: it’s OK when I do it, and in fact, let’s throw some laws in to make things easier for me — and harder for the rest of you sluts.
Either that, or there’s a job-creation movement afoot: all the nanny positions that will need to be filled when we’re all trapped in forever marriages, with no birth control, and no one to take care of the kids.
But the more serious side of this is that people not only need to be free to create their own relationships, but that staying in a bad relationship can be deadly. More from Keyes:
No-fault divorce has been a success. A 2003 Stanford University study detailed the benefits in states that had legalized such divorces: Domestic violence dropped by a third in just 10 years, the number of husbands convicted of murdering their wives fell by 10 percent, and the number of women committing suicide declined between 11 and 19 percent.
That’s what you call chained for life to a devil — and let’s not forget cases of men being abused, that are more likely to go unreported. The stakes are way too high — so please keep your eye on this one in your local and state elections, and don’t let movement on this one just slide by.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you, Maria.
I would further assert that you are describing the fundamental economic and social mentality of oligarchy, aka “it’s OK when I do it, and in fact, let’s throw some laws in to make things easier for me — and harder for the rest of you sluts”.
slut (n.) http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slut
c.1400, “a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman,” according to OED “Of doubtful origin,” but probably cognate with dialectal German Schlutt “slovenly woman,” dialectal Swedish slata “idle woman, slut,” and Dutch slodde “slut,” slodder “a careless man,” but the exact relationship of all these is obscure. Chaucer uses sluttish (late 14c.) in reference to the appearance of an untidy man. Also “a kitchen maid, a drudge” (mid-15c.; hard pieces in a bread loaf from imperfect kneading were called slut’s pennies, 18c.).
Specific modern sense of “woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive” is by 1966. Meaning “woman of loose character, bold hussy” is attested from mid-15c., but the primary association through 18c. was untidiness. Johnson has it (second definition) as “A word of slight contempt to a woman” but sexual activity does not seem to figure into his examples. Playful use of the word, without implication of messiness or loose morals, is attested by 1660s:
My wife called up the people to washing by four o’clock in the morning; and our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily, doing more service than both the others, and deserves wages better. [Pepys, diary, Feb. 21, 1664]
Compare playful use of scamp, etc., for boys. Sometimes used 19c. as a euphemism for bitch to describe a female dog.
There is a group of North Sea Germanic words in sl- that mean “sloppy,” and also “slovenly woman” and, less often, “slovenly man,” and that tend to evolve toward “woman of loose morals.” Compare slattern, also English dialectal slummock “a dirty, untidy, or slovenly person” (1861), variant of slammacks “slatternly woman,” said to be from slam “ill-shaped, shambling fellow.” Also slammakin (from 1756 as a type of loose gown; 1785 as “slovenly female,” 1727 as a character name in Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera”), with variants slamkin, slammerkin. Also possibly related are Middle Dutch slore “a sluttish woman,” Dutch slomp, German schlampe “a slattern.”
Regardless of the form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people, those few work mightily to ensure “the exact relationship of all these is obscure” so that the “sluttish” many remain “chained to the devil” ’til death do they part.