Utah State Senator’s Adultery Scenario Features Jobless Wife and Cheating Husband

A new divorce bill proposing that spouses who cheat should pay more in alimony was struck down during a committee meeting at Utah’s State Capitol this week, but not before State Sen. Lyle Hillyard (R., because of course he is) managed to remove one of his shoes, unroll his dress sock, and insert his entire stinky foot into his unhinged, boa constrictor mouth. In offering an example of when a spouse might deserve payback alimony for partner’s extramarital affair, Hillyard painted a very specific picture of your typical adulterer and his motivations:

You get a woman who is a stay at home mom. She’s been married for maybe 20 years. She got married at age 18. She’s now 38. She’s got six children, and maybe she’s gained 30 or 40 pounds from where she was before. She’s a stay-at-home mom taking care and raising these children. She has no job occupation, and her husband’s divorcing her because he had an affair with a 19-year-old secretary.

Hillyard was of course insisting that, in such a scenario, the philandering husband would be at fault for destroying the marriage and the wife would therefore be entitled to additional alimony. His example, however, reveals the suppurating ulcer at the center of his conception of gender roles — wives are in the home, spitting out kids, eating cream cheese cookies and not having “job occupations,” while husbands are taking their 19-year-old (presumably female in Hillyard’s scenario, but hey, no pronouns = ambiguity = sexual experimentation) secretaries to the local P.F. Chang’s for after-work agave margaritas. Why can’t it be the other way around, hmm? Why couldn’t a wife be drag racing her Mitsubishi Eclipse in a strip mall parking lot with her 19-year-old intern after hard day at the office while hubby binge-watches Cake Boss and tries hard to ignore the sound of his half-dozen children tearing bite-sized chunks out of his sanity?