Headline:
Project 2025 and the Conservative Push to Resurrect Fault Divorce: A Deeper Look at Marriage Laws
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Project 2025, fault divorce, no-fault divorce, conservative marriage laws, J.D. Vance, divorce laws in America, breadwinning men, alimony, women’s liberation.
Article:
The objective of extinguishing no-fault divorce forms part of Project 2025, an undertaking organized by advisers from entities such as the right-wing Heritage Foundation. This concept establishes an agenda for a hypothetical second term for Donald Trump as the US President. This notion is not a standalone proposal. The recently endorsed Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance labels the no-fault divorce as a significant deception the sexual revolution has played on the American population.
The conservatives’ aim is to revert to the "fault divorce" judicial system, which mandated marriage to be fundamentally binding unless one spouse violated any of the "faults" embraced by states in a patchwork-like manner. In this context, judges had the discretion to refuse divorce under numerous circumstances, thereby immuring people who sought an exit from their marriage.
However, contemporary conservatives carry a different goal — the resurrection of this system but in a more deleterious form. The fault divorce structure was based on men’s societal role as providers, obligated to continue supplying support to their wives if they bore the guilt for the separation. This was an inherent aspect of a social contract where wives were bound to domestic labor, ranging from childcare to other domestic tasks, in exchange for financial safety. This security, subsequent to a separation, was assured through alimony.
This fault divorce regime, a colonial legal doctrine, began to relax with the advent of the American Revolution, under the rationale that wives should be able to liberate themselves from husbands who had wronged them. Over the next few decades, each state started to add new faults resulting in a proliferation of separate sets of rules.
In some states, adultery remained the sole violation. Conversely, other states had an extended list of faults, including abandonment, cruelty, and excessive drinking. Often, the laws necessitated a witness to testify the spouse’s fault. Strikingly, in Illinois, a witness had to perceive a husband hitting his wife twice for the wife to qualify for a cruelty-based divorce.
The selective resurrection of the fault divorce system proposed by Project 2025 poses a threat more significant than before, especially for the "traditional" homemakers it also commends. The conservatives only desire to revive fault divorce — to the exclusion of the alimony system that once accompanied it.
Within their vision to reestablish the fault divorce regime, conservatives also aim to dismantle substantive due process — the legal cornerstone for the right to marry, instrumental in legalizing interracial and gay marriages. The resurrection of fault divorce alongside the obliteration of the fundamental right to marry would result in a marital system even more oppressive than the one that trapped women in abusive marriages and held them to higher standards than their husbands.
Project 2025 seems determined to usher past restrictions without providing compensatory structures, marking a significant regression in the evolution of marital laws. While conservatives may consider the era of male breadwinning as a golden age of marriage, they fail to recall the gender inequality and continued financial obligation it wrought upon many. As the debate around the restoration of fault divorce continues, the impact on women’s rights and familial stability remains a contentious point.
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