Republican Senator Believes Divorce Should Be More Difficult to Get: 'Good for Women and Families'

A Republican senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, was recently caught on tape calling for sweeping changes to the divorce rules. Rolling Stone obtained the tape and dissected it in a new article published on Friday that discussed Hawley's thoughts on the no-fault divorce statute, which lowered the requirements for ending a marriage. What's worth noting is that Hawley has advocated for the abolition of no-fault divorce since his time as an associate professor at the Missouri School of Law.

Hawley reportedly stated, "You know, a lot of people have proposed changes to that. My view has always been: It’s a state issue … And states should, you know, do what they want and what they think works best. I think the main thing is it’s got to be something that’s good for women and for families." 'No-fault' divorce permits married couples to legally separate without having to prove that one spouse committed a crime, such as infidelity or abuse. 

These laws were a major victory for feminists when they were passed and started to be enforced in the late 1960s. Even before they were around, many women had a hard time breaking out of controlling or violent partners. They had to endure the humiliating ordeal of proving abuse in court, which many abused women could not bear before they could even think of getting a divorce and their fair share of the marital assets. Alternatively, they could persuade their abuser to agree to the divorce. Furthermore, males have traditionally reaped the financial benefits of heterosexual marriages to a greater extent than women, many critics have said stringent divorce rules serve to trap women.

Additionally, while discussing no-fault divorce in a 2012 article for National Affairs, Hawley managed to exclude the terms 'abuse' and 'domestic violence' from his 4,500-word piece on the new conservative age of the court system. He highlighted in his article, "Our society will never be a place where the poor can advance until we get more stable, two-parent families. Justice and strong families hang together. Conservatives should support tax reforms — like increased child credits and marriage credits — that reward two-parent families. They could, as Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have proposed, consider subsidies to parents who provide child care in the home, or even pension-style credits that reflect the approximate economic value of years spent in household labor. And they should reconsider the wisdom of no-fault divorce."

Hawley even backed Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker in May when he remarked that women should feel more rewarded when they have a family. Hawley told Spectrum News at the time, "I posted a clip where he talks about not being too nice when you’re standing up for your convictions, and I think his expression was the church of nice and I just think he’s right about that. We need a different generation of kids that are willing to say no that’s not right, there is such a thing as right and wrong, I’m not going to go in for all of this lefty garbage and I just thought that his calls for folks to stand up and be bold was great."