Ryan Walters Divorce

Divorce sucks. I’m a once-divorced guy on marriage #2, and like virtually everyone in this country, I know sizable number of divorced persons, and not one of them says, “Yeah, that was fabulous and I wish
everyone could go through it.”

Ryan Walters is going to go through it. Not only is he going to go through it, but he’s the one who filed.

If you’ve forgotten about Walters, I could link to a dozen posts about him here, or I could let Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette sum up some career highlights.

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.

He has since finished with that job (though it has not finished with him-- he’s just been sued by one of the teachers whose career he tried to destroy for insufficient MAGA devotion). Now he heads a right wing anti-teacher-union group.

The divorce petition he filed against his wife cites “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.” Otherwise known as a no-fault divorce.

I am not here to jeer or mock Walters over this. As I said, divorce sucks, and while it is sometimes inevitable, it’s also wrenching and painful and confusing and difficult and all the complicated things a human-to-human unraveling can be. And there are four children involved which really sucks for everyone.

Walters has absolutely been a rabid christianist culture warrior, part of the same crew that considers no-fault divorce a scourge and insists that if we just put the decalogue up in classrooms and make everyone read the Bible and just follow God’s law to the black and white letter, our lives will unfold in pristine straight lines. Just live your life in the light, avoid the dark, and don’t let anyone tell you that life is sometimes complicated and grey. Folks like this get kicked in the gut but wiggly grey reality all the time; Walters just happens to be one of the ones who gets kicked in public.

Thing is, Walters has kicked a lot of other people in public who did not ask for it, even as he has used his position to deliver a lot of noise about how other people should live their lives. He has publicly gone hard after some teachers, going as far as trying to have them drummed out of the profession, for not Living Right. So media and social media are making hay out of this newest chapter.

Charges of hypocrisy are not useful. But when someone is this absolute and noisy and combative about his black-and-white beliefs, one must wonder whether they are an actual true believer or if they are just cosplaying for the grift. It’s times like this that give us a clue.

I’ll hope that people show Walters some grace. I’ll hope that going through a messy, complicated patch will move Walters to broaden Walters’ understanding of human complexity and lead to him showing a little grace himself. I’ll hope that he doesn’t go the MAGA route of deciding that his own failings don’t matter because he is not like those Other Terrible People.

The couple has said they plan to co-parent with their children’s needs in mind, and I wish them luck with that. There is no guilt like divorced parent guilt. I’ve taught plenty of children of divorce and co-parented two of my own, and while each situation has its own challenges, mostly what I’ve learned is that the biggest damage is done when a parental divorce leads to children learning that they are not the most important thing in their parents’ lives, that they are less important than revenge or anger or self-indulgence.

Walters has never been a serious person (well, maybe back when he was an actual classroom teacher) and he used every ounce of his power to promote an unserious version of school, not intended to educate students to find their way and be fully human in the world. Instead, the culture warrior model of education is a place where children are empty drones to be stamped into a particular two-dimensional mold in a version of the world that says people get what they deserve and they had damned well better follow the rules (which include things like “make lots of babies” and “women stay home and serve while their husband takes care of Important Stuff”) and know their place.

This is not a serious approach to being truly human in the world, and every fifteen minutes the real world, and every time one of these people gets their hands on real power over education, children suffer for it. Meanwhile, roughly every fifteen minutes, real life trips one of these guys up, unserious people facing a serious moment. Sometimes they block it out with denial, sometimes their weak and brittle views break, and sometimes they grow up a bit. Walters (and family) deserves the space and grace to find their way forward, even if some of us are not inclined to give it to him.

In the meantime, we should remember that this is why education should present young humans with a full, rich, complicated, and even controversial of the world as it exists, all black and grey and white and wiggly, rather than trying to lock them into some two-dimensional tiny unserious view of the world that tries to pretend that a whole range of humans and human experience does not exist.