Missouri Lawmakers Still on the Cutting Edge of Nineteenth Century Ideals

By: Rick D. Massey, J.D.

Copyright © 2010

Back in the good ole’ days, divorce was among those special privileges reserved for rich people. Given enough money, anything is possible. It seems that some Missouri lawmakers would like to set everyone’s clock back a hundred years or so. Not satisfied with stopping gay people from getting married, Missouri Puritans want to stop everyone else from getting divorced. A new law currently before the Missouri House would repeal the State’s no-fault divorce and impose a two-year waiting period. This could return us to a quieter time when white men controlled their households and women knew their place.

Before states began to change their laws to provide for “no fault” divorce, things were not so good for poor women or for their children. But things were pretty good for rednecks, bullies, and religious fanatics. You could not get a divorce as long as your spouse did not want one unless you could prove something really bad about your spouse.

This gave rise to the cottage industry that has been immortalized in sleazy detective stories. If you were rich, you hired someone to follow your spouse around, take a bunch of pictures, and dig up enough dirt to get your divorce granted. Even if your spouse was clean as a whistle, enough money could usually turn up someone willing to testify about your spouse’s secret dark side. By this time, the spouse that was refusing to grant your divorce before was probably ready to sign anything just to get rid of you. Problem solved!

If you were poor, and especially if you were a woman and married to some controlling creep who didn’t “believe” in divorce, but did believe in beating you up in private and sleeping with everyone else in the neighborhood – well you were just out of luck. No one really cared much what happened to you behind closed doors anyway. Because your friends and neighbors were most likely birds of the same impoverished feather, they had their own problems. Meanwhile, the “haves” of the village, completely oblivious to how their rules affected the lives of the “have-nots”, attended their church functions and cocktail parties and patted one another on the back to salute the statistically low divorce rate in their community.

We can only hope there are enough rational twenty-first century legislators in the Missouri House to keep HB1234 from becoming law. Many of my colleagues are already expressing concerns that this will make people think twice about getting married in the first place. People with the means and foresight will get around the law by drafting contractual arrangements to avoid getting trapped in a terrible marriage. Those less fortunate who cannot afford to hire creative lawyers will simply live together and not get married at all. Surely that is not the result these lawmakers intended. But then it wasn’t thinking things through that got them far enough down the road to draft such a stupid puritan law in the first place.