In 1969, then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law.

He thought it would smooth things over for families who had to go through divorces.

You know, save time, cut legal costs, and protect the kids from having to sit through ugly court battles.

But we all know what happened next. Divorce rates

soared 250% nationwide from 1960 to 1980. Reagan's own son, Michael, later wrote, Dad said

signing that bill was one of the worst mistakes of his political career. If your parents didn't divorce, your aunts and uncles,

cousins, teachers, preachers, boyfriends, or best friends parents probably did. And I know no one

wants to talk about it, but maybe why we don't want to talk about it is because that might

mean having to figure out how to fix it.

Today's rate of divorce and all the cultural and personal fallout that comes from it

would strike anyone from before 1960 as a nightmare scenario.

But now, over half a century later, we've gotten used to the unthinkable. When a law has the opposite

effect its framers intended and a 250% opposite effect at that, we would expect some backtracking.

We would expect someone to raise his hand and say, hit the pause button here. We would expect voter outrage, or at least a public debate.

But that didn't happen.

Today, if a candidate even suggests divorce reform, the media sets itself on fire, just to ask J.D. Vance.

But it's not just the media.

In the last 20 years, most Americans have become a whole lot more permissive toward divorce.

The share who said it should be easier to get a divorce was just 29% in 2006.

Today, 52%.

Acceptance of divorce has become widespread and normalized, among the very people most hurt by it, the adult children of divorce.

The data is in, and we have a five-alarm fire. Children of divorce earn less over their lifetimes. They complete fewer years of education. They have poorer physical and mental health outcomes.

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