![]() In marriages where the partners are, even after thoughtful reconsideration and counsel, estranged beyond reconciliation, we recognize divorce and the right of divorced persons to remarry, and express our concern for the needs of the children of such unions. This accomodationist mentality was evident in a 1976 pronouncement issued by the United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in America. It didn't help that many mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders were caught up in the zeitgeist, and lent explicit or implicit support to the divorce revolution sweeping across American society. The anti-institutional tenor of the age also meant that churches lost much of their moral authority to reinforce the marital vow. Increases in women's employment as well as feminist consciousness-raising also did their part to drive up the divorce rate, as wives felt freer in the late '60s and '70s to leave marriages that were abusive or that they found unsatisfying. The sexual revolution, too, fueled the marital tumult of the times: Spouses found it easier in the Swinging Seventies to find extramarital partners, and came to have higher, and often unrealistic, expectations of their marital relationships. ![]() The nearly universal introduction of no-fault divorce helped to open the floodgates, especially because these laws facilitated unilateral divorce and lent moral legitimacy to the dissolution of marriages. The divorce revolution of the 1960s and '70s was over-determined. This imbalance leaves our cultural and political elites less well attuned to the magnitude of social dysfunction in much of American society, and leaves the most vulnerable Americans - especially children living in poor and working-class communities - even worse off than they would otherwise be. In the case of divorce, as in so many others, the worst consequences of the social revolution of the 1960s and '70s are now felt disproportionately by the poor and less educated, while the wealthy elites who set off these transformations in the first place have managed to reclaim somewhat healthier and more stable habits of married life. In the years since 1980, however, these trends have not continued on straight upward paths, and the story of divorce has grown increasingly complicated. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. ![]() This legal transformation was only one of the more visible signs of the divorce revolution then sweeping the United States: From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled - from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union followed California's lead and enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. But no-fault divorce also gutted marriage of its legal power to bind husband and wife, allowing one spouse to dissolve a marriage for any reason - or for no reason at all. ![]() The new law eliminated the need for couples to fabricate spousal wrongdoing in pursuit of a divorce indeed, one likely reason for Reagan's decision to sign the bill was that his first wife, Jane Wyman, had unfairly accused him of "mental cruelty" to obtain a divorce in 1948. Seeking to eliminate the strife and deception often associated with the legal regime of fault-based divorce, Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce bill. ![]() In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan of California made what he later admitted was one of the biggest mistakes of his political life. ![]()
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