Christian Nationalist Ex-Oklahoma Schools Chief Ryan Walters Is Getting No-Fault Divorced
Congratulations to his family on getting to spend less time with him.
Former Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters is one of the holiest men in all the land. He worked tirelessly for many years to use the power of the state to convert children to Christianity, without care or regard to how “unconstitutional” that was. A Bible in every classroom! Every wall straight up papered with the Ten Commandments! State funding for Catholic charter schools! Forcing kids to watch videos of him praying to Donald Trump! Sure, many of his initiatives failed, but he did ultimately succeed in one thing: spending over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to pay PR firms to promote his “personal brand” and secure over 400 media appearances for him.
To be fair, he was also really good at sending and showing porn to his colleagues.
And now he is about to be very good at being alone.
Last Friday, Ryan Walters filed a petition to divorce Katie Walters, his wife of 15 years and mother to his four children. In the filing, Walters’s attorney cited "a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility" as the reason for the divorce, claiming that this "destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible."
In other words, a no-fault divorce.
If you haven’t been paying too much attention to the worst people in the world, you may not be aware of the Right’s hysteria over “no-fault divorce” these last few years, which they claim has just ruined everything by allowing women to leave their shitty husbands without needing to prove abuse or adultery.
Sure, it’s also significantly decreased suicide rates in married women, decreased domestic violence across the board and led to far fewer men being fed arsenic-laced ham sandwiches by wives with no other recourse for getting out of a bad marriage. But it’s really inconvenienced men who would like to force the women they feel they own to stay married to them, as God intended.
While all states now allow for no fault divorces, Oklahoma allows for both no fault and fault divorce, which means he had the option to have a divorce of which his Christian Nationalist pals might have approved, but he decided against. One of the benefits, we might note, of no-fault divorce, is that people don’t end up having their dirty laundry made public in court records. Does Walters have something to hide? Did he send porn to too many people? Were there not enough Ten Commandment posters in their home, causing him to lapse and break the sixth?
Of course, it doesn’t actually seem as though Christian Nationalists are that mad at no-fault divorce when it’s the man who files, so perhaps that is the difference here? They haven’t been too clear about how they want this New Gilead to work beyond just, you know, women giving up all of their rights so that they can be happy.
After all, they seem to be pretty okay with all of Trump’s divorces in pursuit of younger women (though perhaps, in their world, it is a more valid reason than escaping domestic violence).
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While it’s totally possible that his wife is just as awful as he is, it’s hard not to be happy for any woman who no longer has to wake up every morning and gaze upon that insipid face. The children, too, are pretty lucky, as this gives them at least a fighting chance if they happen to not turn out to be heterosexual, cisgender Christianists.
Hopefully, between this and the defamation suit he is currently facing from a teacher he accused of “threatening” Donald Trump because his kids posed with a Trump mask and a sword in an old Facebook photo found by the crack team at Libs of Tiktok, he will be kept busy and thus unable to continue his mission to force-convert the children of Oklahoma.
Or, you know, send out any unsolicited porn.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Note the second demand on the second Xitter screenshot: "Repeal marital rape laws".
That is what they really want, freedom of access to money's bodies, whether the women involved give their consent or not.
>>In the filing, Walters’s attorney cited "a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility" as the reason for the divorce, claiming that this "destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible."<<
My only surprise is that this didn't happen sooner because, in my very fabulously queer opinion, Walters is gayer than an instructional anal penetration video featuring Rainbow Bright, the entire run of RuPaul's Drag Race, and Josh Hawley.