A Look at Strange Divorce Laws: Why Your Mother-in-Law Doesn’t Matter

Sometimes I think divorce can be a bit too easy. People offer plenty of different reasons for grounds for divorce: we’ve got issues, such as….

• Infidelity
• Abuse
• Abandonment
• Imprisonment
• Insanity

That’s just to name a few. Some people can come up with major doozies, though, but at the very least the law can try to cover all the bases and ensure that fair is fair. Sometimes, though, we can go way overboard: case in point, let’s take a quick look at Wichita, Kansas, and their statute about mothers-in-law. That’s right, the scary mothers wanting to bury the other spouses for whatever reasons….

Would you believe that in Wichita, Kansas, there’s a law prohibiting a woman from using her soon-to-be former husband’s mistreatment of her mother as a reason to divorce him? Far be it from me to think that this would be absolutely shallow and crude, but apparently Kansas must’ve had many instances where the woman saw that the man wasn’t being very ‘nice’ to her mother. That would then mean the woman had every right to divorce her husband? Logically and emotionally, it’s understandable; but is that fair? Most definitely not.

I, however, think it’s pretty amusing that they had to make a law about it. Divorce doesn’t have to be frivolous. In fact, it really shouldn’t be. It’s not haphazard. It’s not an ‘easy way out.’ If there has to be a divorce, it would have to take Dorothy’s tornado to make it happen. Without a doubt, we wouldn’t be in Kansas anymore, Toto – not if everyone’s getting divorced left and right.