Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), claimed that leaving “unhappy or even violent” marriages “didn’t work out for the kids,” suggesting that people trapped in violent marriages should stay in them to preserve family stability. You know what’s worse for children than divorce? Domestic violence—highly destabilizing for children and disproportionately affecting women.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also condemned no-fault divorce—as well as feminism and birth control—as responsible for mass shootings. In reality, enactment of no-fault divorce laws has resulted in significant decreases in domestic violence, strongly associated with mass shooters, and a significant decrease in women murdered by intimate partners. Yet, Johnson chooses to blame women, rather than address male violence.
Underlying these conversations is a sinister presumption: that women have a societal obligation to forgo their right to self-determination. Thematically, these men frame a woman’s choice as destabilizing to society, normalizing male entitlement to women and declining to encourage self-improvement or accountability among men. Structurally, they exclude women from the conversation about women’s choices.
Republicans have renewed their efforts to attack civil rights and American liberties, and now they are eyeing no-fault divorce. Conservatives have begun engaging in concerning rhetoric around no-fault divorce, arguing that it is unconstitutional or against the Christian conception of marriage. Should challenges to no-fault divorce become mainstream, efforts to combat violence against women will face extreme setbacks.
In 1969, Republican California Governor Ronald Reagan approved the country’s first no-fault divorce law. In no-fault divorces, spouses could be granted a divorce for irreconcilable differences without having to prove misconduct by a spouse¹. Notably, prior to this law, women had to prove that their husbands had committed some wrong-doing – such as adultery, domestic violence, cruelty, or abandonment – or persuade them to agree to a divorce. Desperate to receive divorces, some individuals participated in “divorce tourism,”² the relocation to another state that had more lenient divorce laws, while others concocted stories to prove wrongdoing – but most women suffered in silence. Unable to prove their husbands had wronged them, they languished in loveless, and at times abusive, marriages.
It is not an over-exaggeration to say that no-fault divorce saves women’s lives. According to CNN³, A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners. Although divorce rates generally increased, no-fault divorce did not promote divorces but merely allowed all those who wished to dissolve a marriage to finally do so without an overly-prolonged and burdensome legal process. The rise in divorce rates reflected a pre-existing public desire, as opposed to an increased interest arising from the changing laws. Now, the majority of couples claim “irreconcilable differences” in their divorces. However, a reimposition of antiquated fault-based divorces will force individuals to not only prove fault but also “create[s] animosity where it doesn’t need to exist,” according to a divorce coach who spoke with Ms. Magazine⁴, thereby harming the children and families that proponents of fault-based divorce claim to advocate for.
Some Republican lawmakers and politicians have begun criticizing no-fault divorce, arguing that it is too easy for people to obtain a divorce. According to the Guardian⁵, right-wing religious conservatives claim that contemporary divorce laws “deprive [men] of due process and hurt families.” The Texas Republican Party 2022 Platform, for example, expressed a desire to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage,” directly threatening no-fault divorce¹. Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance described how no-fault divorce makes it “easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”⁶ Beverly Willet, co-chair of the Coalition For Divorce Reform claimed, “unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment. Too often in family court, defendants are deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.”⁷ Contributors to the draconian Project 2025 have also expressed interest in ending no-fault divorce⁸, a concerning development as they lay out policy agendas for a potential Republican presidential victory in the 2024 General Elections. All of these perspectives represent dangerous conservative ideologies that pose a threat to individual freedom and the rights of women.
Renewed threats to no-fault divorce are alarming, especially in relation to discussions of violence against women. Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline shared, “any barrier to divorce is a really big challenge for survivors. What it really ends up doing is prolonging their forced entanglement with an abusive partner.”⁹ Legal changes that promote full-consent divorce would trap women in decaying and violent marriages if abusive husbands refused to grant their consent for a divorce. The elimination of no-fault divorce would threaten to transport us back to a day in which women were considered their husbands’ property and domestic abuse was considered a private matter as opposed to a crime. Researcher and university professor Justin Wolfers elaborated, that men’s rights activists “speak about no-fault divorce as a feeling that they’re ripped off because they don’t control their property. The moment you go a step further and admit that people are no longer property, this rhetoric becomes a lot less persuasive.”⁴
The overturn of Roe v. Wade and ensuing attacks on abortion, birth control, and IVF prove that anything is possible. Republicans have displayed renewed interest in “protecting the American family” and have expressed this through concrete action. As Dobbs taught us, nothing is guaranteed, and even well-accepted and established laws and norms can be attacked. Divorce is a social justice issue, an equality issue, and a violence prevention issue.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’re “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to Gaza. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected a lawsuit accusing President Biden of being complicit in genocide in Gaza. The judges agreed with a lower court that the courts cannot review foreign policy decisions made by the executive branch.
The Center for Constitutional Rights has sued President Biden, accusing him of failing to prevent genocide. The legal group sought an emergency order to block Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, from providing further military funding, arms and diplomatic support to Israel, the lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of Palestinian plaintiffs.
We go now to Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Can you talk about the significance of the court dismissing your case, Kate?
KATHERINE GALLAGHER: Good morning, Amy, and thank you very much for having us on this very busy morning and for bringing attention back to Gaza, where there is an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. And so, it is against that backdrop that we are really deeply not only disappointed, but troubled by the unanimous decision of the Court of Appeals from the Ninth Circuit to dismiss our case.
Just to step back and explain what this case is, back in November, Defense for Children International-Palestine, Al-Haq, three Palestinians in Gaza living under the genocidal assault and five Palestinian Americans brought forward this case, framing U.S. conduct as complicity or aiding and abetting genocide and failing to prevent what was already in November a serious risk of genocide. So, they filed the case in federal court invoking clearly established law — the duty to prevent genocide and the prohibition against aiding and abetting genocide, which is codified in U.S. criminal law. It is in the Genocide Convention. And it has been recognized, including by the Biden administration, as binding customary international law. So, the plaintiffs turned to the courts and asked the courts to, please, put an injunction to stop the flow of two-ton bombs falling on Palestinian children, women, the entire population across the Gaza Strip, to stop the weapons being used in an aerial bombardment to maintain a total siege, denying food, fuel, energy, electricity, and decimating the health infrastructure, bombing hospitals and doctors. This is the case that was filed in November.
And it has been supported over the many months of litigation by a robust factual record, including findings by the International Court of Justice that there is plausible genocide in Gaza, supported by statements and reports from U.N. experts, affidavits by former State Department officials, expert opinions by the world’s leading genocide expert, William Schabas, and by historians of genocide and Holocaust studies here in the United States, that this is indeed a plausible unfolding genocide in Gaza.
And so, it is against that backdrop where there is a strong factual and legal case and unambiguous legal obligations on President Biden and Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin to not aid and abet genocide — it’s against that backdrop that the court yesterday abdicated its role and said that whenever foreign policy is invoked, the courts need to step back. They essentially said that foreign policy and conditions of war — they did not mention genocide, they did not say that this is an unfolding genocide in Gaza — but that conditions of war are ones where there really has to be deference to the executive branch, and that there isn’t a role for the courts to hold executive conduct against black-letter law and make declarations when executive conduct has exceeded what the president and his cabinet members are permitted to do. And so, they have said that this case needs to be dismissed, and essentially given the blank check to carry out any kind of conduct that the executive wants in times of genocide, in times of war, the blank check that the Supreme Court warned against and said did not exist back in the post-9/11 days in a series of cases.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play for you — before we get to the end of this show, I want to play for you a clip of Scott Anderson, director of the U.N.'s refugee efforts in Gaza, talking about the aftermath of Israel's bombing on Saturday of al-Mawasi. That was designated as a safe zone in Khan Younis. The attacks killed at least 90 Palestinians and injured hundreds more. CNN reports at least one U.S.-made munition was used in the airstrike, identifying the tail fin of a joint direct attack munition — that’s a JDAM — a Boeing-manufactured GPS-guided kit. This is Scott Anderson.
SCOTT ANDERSON: On Saturday, I visited Nasser Hospital after a strike in the safe zone of Mawasi, and the hospital itself was in Khan Younis. I’ve been in Gaza for nine months, and I’ve witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I’ve seen in the nine months that I’ve been here. The health facility was overstretched. There were more than a hundred people injured. The air was filled with the smell of blood. And one health worker was mopping up pools of blood on the floor using only water, because there aren’t sufficient supplies of disinfectant material or other cleaning supplies to stop the spread of infection. There’s not enough beds, hygiene supplies, sheeting, mattresses or scrubs. And many patients were treated on the ground or on waiting room benches without disinfectant. And this puts even treatable injuries at risk of sepsis and much more significant complications. Now, ventilator systems were not working due to electrical problems.
And as I walked through the hospital and talked to families and children, we saw toddlers who were double amputees, children paralyzed and unable to receive treatment because they don’t have the equipment at the hospital in Khan Younis, and others who were separated from their parents. And we also saw mothers and fathers searching frantically within the hospital for their children, unsure if they were alive. One mother I talked to told me that she was told to move to Rafah because it would be safe there, and then she was told to move to al-Mawasi because it would be safe there. And unfortunately for her and her family, that was not true. And I think the words of this mother are a reminder that nowhere is safe in Gaza, and no one is safe in Gaza. That family had three children impacted by the blast. One child was completely uninjured, miraculously. Another child was paralyzed, and the other son was killed.
I mentioned that there’s nowhere safe in Gaza. And I think we saw that over the weekend both with what happened in Mawasi, but also the incident at the Beach camp, where 25 other people were killed. And what’s urgently needed is a complete ceasefire, for all parties to the conflict to protect the civilians wherever they are, but especially in U.N. schools and hospitals.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Scott Anderson, director of the U.N.'s refugee efforts in Gaza, director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza. Katherine Gallagher, you're a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Your case was just dismissed. Talk about what your efforts are now going to be, and how what he’s describing, that happened, you know, well after you brought your lawsuit, in al-Mawasi, an Israel-designated safe zone, that killed nearly a hundred Palestinians and injured 300 more, means.
KATHERINE GALLAGHER: Amy, I wish that the clip that we just heard was an unprecedented account, but, unfortunately, it is stories like that, accounts like that, that we’ve been hearing for nine months, of Palestinians being forced from one supposed safe area to another and being bombed, whether women, children, and in this case, there have been almost 15,000 children that have been killed and 20,000 that are disappeared, that we don’t know if they are buried under rubble, if they are detained in Israeli prisons. We don’t know where they are. So, over the course of these nine months, where that account, time and time again, has been heard, what we’ve also heard is that indication that U.S. weapons are being used. And U.S. weapons continue to be sent.
So, if we have not yet succeeded through the courts — and we will consider our next options, whether in domestic courts or in foreign courts or before international bodies, where we continue to press this case — we will also be bringing the case to those who are complicit. I think it’s time for weapons companies — you mentioned Boeing in that clip — to stop sending weapons. There are legal responsibilities and, frankly, moral responsibilities.
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.
KATHERINE GALLAGHER: We call on the Biden administration to heed its at least moral responsibility and stop aiding and abetting genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for a director of development to lead our fundraising team. Learn more and apply at democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff. Special thanks to Denis Moynihan. I’m Amy Goodman.
Most people probably don’t know this but Wikipedia has a page called “List of Israeli assassinations.” It begins in July 1956 and stretches over 68 years until today. The majority on the list are Palestinians; among them are famous Palestinian leaders PFLP’s Ghassan Kanafani, Fatah’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir - also known as Abu Jihad, Hamas’s Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and Islamic Jihad’s Fathi Shaqaqi.
When looking at the long list, it is impossible not to notice that the number of assassinations and assassination attempts Israel has carried out over the years has increased exponentially: from 14 in the 1970s to well over 150 in the first decade of the new millennium and 24 since January 2020.
I was reminded of this list when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a news conference on July 13 to celebrate Israel’s attempt to kill Hamas’s military commander Muhammad Deif in Gaza. Israeli fighter jets and drones had just hammered al-Mawasi camp, which now houses an estimated 80,000 displaced Palestinians living in densely populated tents.
Within just a few minutes of the fusillade, the pilots had massacred at least 90 Palestinians, including scores of women and children, while injuring an additional 300 people. All of this occurred in an area Israel had previously designated a “safe zone”. As gruesome images of dead bodies charred and shred to pieces filled social media, reports surfaced that Israel had used several US-made guided half-tonne bombs.
In his news conference at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Tel Aviv just a few hours after this bloodbath, Netanyahu admitted that he was “not absolutely certain” that Deif had been killed but maintained that “just the attempt to assassinate Hamas commanders delivers a message to the world, a message that Hamas’s days are numbered.”
Yet even a quick perusal of the “List of Israeli assassinations” makes clear that Netanyahu was speaking with a forked tongue. He knows all too well that Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi or military leaders Yahya Ayyash and Salah Shehade have done very little to weaken the movement and may well have increased its following.
If anything, years and years of Israeli assassinations demonstrate that they are primarily used by Israeli leaders to pander to and rally their constituencies. Netanyahu’s recent news conference is no exception.
But as macabre as the Wikipedia List is, the names on it only tell a partial story. That is because it fails to include the number of civilians killed during each and every successful and failed assassination attempt.
For example, the July 13 strike was the eighth known attempt on Deif’s life, and it is difficult to calculate the total number of civilians Israel has killed in its scramble to assassinate him. The Wikipedia List fails to capture how the increase in assassinations has led to an exponential increase in civilian deaths.
This becomes clear when we compare Israel’s current assassination policy with its policy during the second Palestinian Intifada. When Israel assassinated the head of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, Salah Shehade, in 2002, 15 people were killed, including Shehade, his wife, 15-year-old daughter, and eight other children.
PALESTINIAN FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION: 300 athletes were martyred during the aggression on the Gaza Strip, the last of whom was Shadi Abu Al-Araj, goalkeeper of the Khan Yunis Youth Team.
Eight Palestinian athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics will be symbols of "resistance" during the Israel-Gaza war in Gaza, a Palestinian Minister said on Sunday as the official delegation left the occupied West Bank.
This will be the eighth time Palestinian athletes have taken part in the Olympics since 1996, but Olympic committee head Jibril Rajoub said the athletes had never felt so much attention.
The athletes are preparing for the start of the Paris Games on July 26 in a "very dark moment in our history", said Palestinian Authority Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Varsen Aghabekian Shahin.
"You are not just athletes, you are also ... symbols of Palestinian resistance," Ms Aghabekian added.
French organisers have stepped up security in Paris in response to the conflict.
"We want this participation to be a message from the Palestinians to the world that it is time for them to be free in their homeland," Mr Rajoub said.
"Through this participation, we want to present the suffering of the Palestinian people and the unprecedented killing taking place in Gaza."
Palestinian-American athlete Valerie Tarazi has arrived in Paris on a mission: To “speak up for the people who can’t” and raise hopes in Gaza as she prepares to represent them at the Olympics.
Making the Games “has been a dream of mine forever,” the swimmer, who will compete in the 200 meters individual medley, told NBC News in a video call, shortly after landing in the French capital last week.
Tarazi, who is planning to start a Ph.D. having just completed her master's degree in supply chain management at Alabama’s Auburn University, said she had envisioned herself at the Olympics ever since she was a child watching the Beijing Games in 2008.
But as well as fulfilling a personal ambition, Tarazi said, she hopes to use her presence in Paris to speak up for the people of Gaza, where more than 38,700 people have been killed in the Israeli military campaign, according to local health officials, since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which saw around 1,200 people killed and around 240 people taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.
“We’re not here to compete for ourselves or represent ourselves,” said Tarazi, who was born and raised in Chicago. “This is more than that.”
The 24-year-old is one of eight Palestinian athletes set to compete in Paris, along with fellow swimmer Yazan al Bawwab, taekwondo fighter Omar Ismail and judoka Fares Badawi. Boxer Waseem Abu Sal, runners Layla Almasri and Mohammed Dwedar will also take part, while Jorge Antonio Salhe will compete in the skeet shooting.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 285 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll reaches 38,794, with 89,364 wounded." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
UNRWA is seen as a lifeline for Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip as it provides humanitarian support to millions of people.
But Israeli attacks and the blocking of crossings into the enclave have impeded aid distribution to 2.3 million people, most of whom are displaced, worsening the humanitarian crisis.
Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general said last week that the agency is also being targeted.
Here are some statistics since October 7 provided by UNRWA:
- 189 UNRWA installations have been damaged.
- As of July 14, Israeli forces had killed 197 UNRWA staff.
- Only 10 of 26 UNRWA health centres in Gaza are currently operational.
- There have been 458 incidents impacting UNRWA premises and the people inside them, including at least 74 incidents of military use or interference at UNRWA premises.
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