What is highlighted here is only the first tentative volley in the Reich's ubiquitous war on American life. Keyes with his report is bringing this attack to the front lines outlining the roles of Family Leader, Family Research Council and NOM.
For years, social conservatives have been fighting to prevent certain people from getting married. But they’re waging a parallel battle, too: Trying to keep married couples together.
In cooperation with the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, socially conservative politicians have been quietly trying to make it harder for couples to get divorced. In recent years, lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced bills imposing longer waiting periods before a divorce is granted, mandating counseling courses or limiting the reasons a couple can formally split. States such as Arizona, Louisiana and Utah have already passed such laws, while others such as Oklahoma and Alabama are moving to do so.
If divorces are tougher to obtain, social conservatives argue, fewer marriages will end. And having more married couples is not just desirable in its own right but is a social good, they say. During his presidential campaign, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) emphasized finishing high school and getting married as cures for poverty. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically,” he declared at a 2011 event in Iowa.
A legislative movement against divorce may seem like a non-starter in a country where half of married couples avail themselves of this right, but as with legal challenges to Obamacare and the rise of the tea party movement, today’s fringe idea can quickly become tomorrow’s mainstream conservatism.
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Yet the conservative push for “divorce reform” is finding sympathetic ears in statehouses, where Republican lawmakers have regularly introduced bills to restrict the practice. Their rationales range from the biblical (God bemoans divorce in Malachi 2:14-16) to the social (divorce reduces worker productivity) to the financial (two households are more expensive to maintain than one). Leading conservatives such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have also argued that marriage is a solution to poverty.
The cause earned national support in 2011 when three Republican presidential candidates — Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and Santorum — signed a pledge from the Family Leader, a conservative organization in Iowa, that urged “ ‘cooling-off’ periods” for people seeking what it called a “quickie divorce.”
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At least a dozen other states since 2011 have tried to make divorce more difficult. Along with Iowa, New Hampshire and Oklahoma have tried to eliminate no-fault divorce for parents. In Oklahoma, lawmakers are also considering a bill that would virtually prohibit no-fault divorce but preserve divorce as an option in cases of “impotency.” Other states are pushing legislation to lengthen the waiting period before a judge can grant a divorce, including up to two years in North Carolina. Currently, most states have a two- or three-month waiting period before a divorce is finalized, though it is longer in a handful of mostly Southern states, including Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
Conservatives aren’t just fighting same-sex marriage. They’re also trying to stop divorce. - The Washington Post
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