Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America.
Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or “cruelty” (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: “Even if you could prove you had been hit, that didn’t necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina.
Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, allowing people to end their marriages without proving they’d been wronged. The move was a recognition that “people were going to get out of marriages,” Zug said, and gave them a way to do that without resorting to subterfuge. Similar laws soon swept the country, and rates of domestic violence and spousal murder began to drop as people — especially women — gained more freedom to leave dangerous situations.
Today, however, a counter-revolution is brewing: Conservative commentators and lawmakers are calling for an end to no-fault divorce, arguing that it has harmed men and even destroyed the fabric of society. Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, for example, introduced a bill in January to ban his state’s version of no-fault divorce. The Texas Republican Party added a call to end the practice to its 2022 platform (the plank is preserved in the 2024 version). Federal lawmakers like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, have spoken out in favor of tightening divorce laws.
Quiverfull folks are a whole bundle of crazy.
Slight non sequitur, but slightly connected (welcome to my brain). Anyone can safely ignore this long, rambling comment.
There’s a series of books called The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. It starts off as kind of an HP Lovecraft meets spy novel meets a sys admin workplace humor thing. Somewhere in there, I think it’s the 4th book, there’s one called The Apocalypse Codex that deals with a quiverful group of Christian true believers that are accidentally worshipping an otherworldly horror and using parasites to “save” folks. It even features a forced birth center. I’ve known quiverfull, prosperity gospel, literalist folks my entire life, but every time I hear about quiverfull people I still think about that novel. I can highly recommend the series if anything I wrote above sounds remotely interesting, especially if you can get the audiobooks. Here’s one of my favorite passages from that book:
“They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.”
Other than the extra-dimensional horror, I think the book pretty accurately describes the mindset of those people. The series metaphor for modern society is so good that he had to delay and rewrite the last book because the original plan, prior to the pandemic, was to have the final resolution be a highly contagious disease.
The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set.
Did we just become friends?
Yes :)
I’ll have to check it out. Every time I see some of the radical xtianist/magabrained set in action, I think about the way that America is portrayed in The Rapture of the Nerds.
Yeah we had a big quiverfull church not far from where I used to live. They were in a cycle of being in the news every few years for how they promote their flock to get on government assistance to afford more kids. People making six figure incomes were getting a variety of benefits because they had over a dozen kids, in two cases two dozen kids. This would piss people, garner calls for legal changes to stop this abuse, bring up how they are exactly the type of people who want to scare people with “welfare queen” stories, etc.
For a couple generations, the pumping out children mandate made it grow. However, around the third generation they started seeing a steep decline in parishionership. Basically the founding members’ kids weren’t nearly as willing to stay in this cult, and by their grand children’s generation, their birthrate wasn’t enough to replace their flock. By the time their great grand kids’ generation came around (current time) they were quickly dwindling in numbers. Now every time their welfare stuff hits the news they now have interviews with people who cut their families off, and left the cult, being interviewed about how insane they are.
From what I have been able to find, this seems to be the general timeline of these “super family” sects. They burn themselves out, and as time time progresses, the burnout comes more, and more, quickly. So the long term prospects of the baby factory faiths isn’t good.
I sure am feeling like a rambling old man today.
By the time the oldest kids become parents they’re already tired of being parents because mom and dad can’t possibly keep up with a dozen kids and sure aren’t paying nannies and babysitters.
By the time a couple generations go by, there’s no more help. They still get government assistance if they don’t get out but grandma and great-grandma still have school aged kids and aren’t helping (let’s face it, pappy ain’t doing it).
So who the fuck is taking care of these hundred and change kids? It’s only good for a surge unless you have multiple wives (again, you know the guys aren’t doing it), which is not happening at a rate that makes a difference, although that happens a little bit. So by that third generation you’ve got a fuck-ton of kids who definitely think it’s bullshit.
I grew up in a semi-related cult and saw that happen in real time. The one I grew up in wasn’t the “super family” welfare abuse type but did preach to have as many as you could handle while still being able to afford them. I personally know the people you’re talking about and they’re super literalists, young earth creationists, and dispensationalists who hand wave millennialism with “a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day”. Some of them believe that the war in heaven started the day the Jewish people went back to Israel and that the horsemen of the apocalypse are already here. Some referred to covid as either Plague or Death until they decided it was fake. They’re sure that every event is the harbinger of the rapture.
Hearing these people talk is fucking wild. I know they’re a minority, but if you go into some of the more insular rural communities you’ll meet them and they are fucking serious. They don’t understand why you and all of their kids can’t just see what’s happening.
I lived an hour away from a “church” that did shit like snake handling. They did not talk about their sect to strangers and were generally very wary of anyone not in their cult. Very strange people. Sorry you had to live through that.
I guess they talked to us because we were the “light” version of their church. I don’t really know how they’d treat a real outsider I guess. They always tried getting us to come to church stuff with them.
It was normal to me. My parents weren’t bad people and they didn’t make me raise my younger siblings. I didn’t get abused like a lot of the kids around me. I put up with some bullshit, but we all do to some extent.
I appreciate it, though.
Yeah lived in Appalachia, if you drove 1 or so hours out of the city, into the mountains you could find some wild shit.