No-fault divorce has been on the books for more than 50 years— first signed into law in California by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1969.When the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June 2022, overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, analysts predicted a wave of socially conservative legislation, particularly laws that chip away at women’s rights to individual freedoms.
In his new book, “The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family,” former Trump Cabinet member and potential Trump running mate Ben Carson says this: The decision — and the desire — to marry is such a wildly individual, personal, messy, beautiful, hopeful process. It’s also pretty universal. We aspire to marriage and revere marriage and show up for marriage and celebrate marriage across party lines, across gender lines, across geographic lines, across demographic lines, across faiths. Those of us on the side of equality fight for more people, not fewer, to have access to it.
We ask more of it. We expect more from it. We give it more boxes to check and feel let down when it fails to. Is that, in part, because we’ve made it less mandatory — for social acceptance, for financial stability, for the right to move out of your parents’ house — to enter into marriage? That marriage is, for the most part, something you enter because you want to, not because you have to? And would marriages today remain better than marriages of earlier eras if we made them harder to leave?But, he maintained, a life of self-fulfillment and personal growth can also be a life that builds and sustains...