Some news today from the state of Texas: “Sen. Angela Paxton files for divorce from Attorney General Ken Paxton.”
State Sen. Angela Paxton announced Thursday she has filed for divorce from her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation,” Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said in a post on X. “But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.”
Here is the full text of Sen. Paxton’s tweet:
Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds. I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage. I move forward with complete confidence that God is always working everything together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.
The curious part of that, for folks who keep abreast of Texas politics, is her reference to “recent discoveries.” That’s an odd phrase given how many not-recent discoveries are a matter of public record, as that Texas Tribune article above summarizes:
In her divorce filing, Senator Paxton alleged that her husband had committed adultery, listing it as the “grounds for divorce.” The couple stopped living together more than a year ago — “on or about June 1, 2024” — according to a copy of the filing obtained by The Texas Tribune. …
Paxton’s record of aggressively suing the Biden administration is matched only by his penchant for scandal, culminating in his impeachment by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him after a nearly two-week trial.
Angela Paxton attended her husband’s trial but was not allowed to vote on any issues or participate on deliberations over whether to convict or acquit.
The impeachment claims focused on benefits Paxton provided to Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, as well as an alleged extramarital affair the attorney general had with a former Senate aide. According to investigators, the affair ended briefly in 2019 after Angela Paxton learned of it, then resumed in 2020. The woman he allegedly had an affair with was called to testify before the Senate and came to the chamber, but left without speaking.
So Sen. Paxton’s “biblical grounds” for divorce is adultery but it’s, like, not that adultery, but some other more recent one. Or some other recently discovered older one. Or something.
I don’t know, it’s not really any of my business, except that the Paxtons are public officials whose business, for decades, has been making their business everybody else’s business and making everybody else’s theirs.
Those of us who speak white evangelicalese didn’t need to see the official filing to understand that her use of “biblical grounds” referred to adultery on his part. That’s how divorce works in white evangelicaldom — it’s completely unacceptable unless you can demonize your former spouse and put 100% of the blame on them for sinning like a sinful sinner. (This gets weird in cases where it turns out both spouses were cheating, meaning there is no blameless party who can claim an acceptably blameless divorce. The best path forward here is an extravagant re-conversion, which functions kind of like a rehab stint for a TMZ celebrity to create a clean slate.)
But outside of white evangelicalism’s subcultural jargon, there are plenty of other “biblical grounds” for divorce — cases in which some biblical writers say divorce is not only acceptable, but mandatory.
The most infamous example of this — the most despicable — comes from the later chapters of the book of Ezra. Ezra returns to Jerusalem and learns that hundreds of Israelite men have Moabite wives and families. This miscengenation grieves him enormously and he decides that what God mush want is for all of those men to divorce those wives and to send them away along with all of those filthy half-Moabite children.
Send them away to where? It doesn’t matter to him. Just away — away into the wilderness like Hagar and Ishmael, I guess. Or send them back to Moab or maybe pay El Salvador to take them.
And so this is what happens in that story. Ezra mandates a mass-divorce for so many hundreds of families that it takes several days to carry it out. And then all of those countless women and children are sent away with nothing and no one to look after them.
It’s a really, really horrible story.
I would guess that neither of the Paxtons knows that story. I would guess that 90% of church-going Texas Republicans don’t know that story. And that they do not understand how important that horrible story and all of the many, many condemnations of it throughout the Bible really are.
This is why they are ruthless people. And why they are Ruth-less people.
I admire the book of Ruth — and the author of the book of Ruth — for rebuking Ezra’s actions at the heart of the matter. Several other biblical writers recoil from Ezra’s wicked cruelty by asserting that, No, divorce is Bad, actually. So we get things like Malachi spluttering — almost out of nowhere if you’re ignoring the Ezra story — that “God hates divorce.”
But the author of Ruth doesn’t see that as Ezra’s problem or the root of Ezra’s sin. The problem wasn’t that he was too permissive about divorce, but that he oversaw the mass-deportation and abandonment of a multitude of women and children. So Ruth isn’t about “No, divorce is Bad, actually.” It is, instead, a fierce declaration that, “No, actually God loves Moabite women and God loves Moabite children and they are precious to God.”
And the form of her* rebuke to Ezra and of her rejection and condemnation of his wicked ideology is even more audacious. It’s not a jeremiad. It’s a romance novel. It’s a romance novel with a Moabite widow heroine — a woman with nothing and no one to look after her. And it’s a romance novel that dares to suggest that King David himself is one of those very same part-Moabite children.
And this novel is so overwhelmingly successful that it becomes canon and so unassailable that even the biggest Ezra-fans among the redactors of the rest of the scriptures are forced to accept that, Yes, OK, from now on Ruth is officially King David’s great-grandmother.
Ken and Angela Paxton could both use a lot more of the book of Ruth about now.
And so could the rest of America.
* I say “her,” suggesting that the book of Ruth may have been written by a woman because, well, just read it.
I’m not suggesting this because romance is “chick-lit,” but because it’s the book of Ruth and not the book of Boaz with him portrayed as the hero and protagonist and central figure who rescues the otherwise undeveloped woman-in-need-of-a-man-to-rescue-her character. I could very well be wrong, but Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz all just read like they were written by a woman.
And yes, it absolutely was written after and in response to Ezra’s mass-deportation. If it had existed before that, then my guys Jonathan son of Asahel and Jahzeiah son of Tikvah, Meshullam and Shabbethai the Levite would have been citing it loudly when they protested against that horrible plan.
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