"But until you get the law changed, what right has the state to punish people who exercise their rights under that law?"
Same right it has to fine people for not keeping their ad valorem tax tag up to date, using their concealed weapon license in a reckless manner.
Your examples are poorly chosen and inapplicable, because this is not about somebody somehow misusing or abusing their legal rights (or deliberately skirting the law), but using them exactly as intended under the law. You may not like the law, but that dislike itself does not invalidate it.
It's called the police power of the state and it's purpose is to regulate the exercise of rights so that they don't threaten the health, welfare and safety of the people of the state.
Liberal nonsense.
Show how divorce directly and concretely "threaten(s) the health, welfare and safety of the people of the state". Not some abstraction about our spirits all being harmed because two people couldn't make their marriage work - that's the trick libs use when they want to bloat the state.
The same twisted logic could be (and has) been used to justify everything from banning smoking to transfats to Prohibition to "gun control." It is appalling that a conservative would employ it.
If you don't like the law, you get it changed. Or you try to change hearts and minds through public appeal. That's the conservative approach. But give the state new power to punish people for exercising their legal rights? That's the province of the other side.
Liberal nonsense? Are you crazy?
The police power of the state is the most ancient principle of government known to man. It can to us along with the common law from England.
Do me a favor. Go down to your local law library, or online, and look up police power in "Words and Phrases". Read the cases about it. I know you can find the Slaughterhouse Cases, a USSC case, online. It is a landmark police power case. Read it. Then get back to me.
Show how divorce directly and concretely "threaten(s) the health, welfare and safety of the people of the state".
You forgot to say "Show how no-fault divorce. . .". You left out the word "no-fault". An oversight, I'm sure.
The fact that now half of all marriages end in divorce because of no-fault and it alone, when the basic binding unit of our society and nation is the family, even families that don't get along well. There are others, but that's sufficient. A house with a rotten foundation, falls.
You say, get the law changed. And I ask, how specifically and feasibly?
