A key shortlister for former President Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate thinks America should crack down on how many people are allowed to have divorces.
Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate who served as Trump's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, outlined his plan in his book, "The Perilous Fight," released on Tuesday, for getting rid of "no-fault divorce" laws, according to NBC News.
“The reason this matters is that no-fault divorce legally allows marriages to end much more quickly than in previous decades," wrote Carson. "When there are relatively few legal or financial consequences connected with divorce, it’s natural for people to gravitate toward that option when their marriage hits a rough patch."
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According to the report, Carson claims that people pursuing divorce have not taken into consideration the impact separation will have on their children.
“What those people often don’t consider, however, is the harm — both present and future — inflicted on their children once a divorce is finalized," Carson wrote. "For the sake of families, we should enact legislation to remove or radically reduce incidences of no-fault divorce."
In earlier eras, divorce required a partner to prove misconduct by their spouse, such as domestic violence or infidelity — and state judges rarely granted divorces even in such cases, which led to millions of people, particularly women, being trapped in dangerous or toxic environments.
Today, all 50 states, beginning with California in 1969 under legislation signed by then Gov. Ronald Reagan, now have no-fault divorce laws, which allow any married couple to divorce simply by attesting to "irreconcilable differences," without the need to legally prove anything.
Studies have found these laws reduced domestic violence and suicide rates among women. Despite this, there is an ongoing desire among some right-wing activists, particularly the Christian nationalist movement, to reverse these laws.
Ironically, even as divorce has become easier to obtain, it has become less frequent. Divorce rates peaked around 1980 at 5.4 per 1,000 people per year, after laws around it were liberalized, but have trended back downward ever since and are currently around 2.4 per 1,000 people per year — even as marriage rates are simultaneously rising.
