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The Perversion of the Marriage Contract
Paul A Rahe has a post on the Main Feed, The Haunting Fear That Someone is Having a Good Time, where he talks about the absurdity of the modern view on sexual consent and how it removes passion from the relationship. The last several years have seen a rise in accusations of sexual assault on college campuses with the rise of Kangaroo courts treating accusations as truth without any investigation, frequently resulting in the expulsion of the accused without any opportunity to defend himself in a court of law.
Whether it is Mattress Girl or The Duke University Lacrosse team, real damage has been done to young men based on false allegations that were acted upon without any legitimate investigation or trial. This has resulted sexual consent contracts. I am not kidding. There is even an app! I’m sure most of you already know this.
For me, the real absurdity is how this happened. In the ’70s, no-fault divorce was passed in the US. This led to a rapid increase of divorces that lasted to the ’80s while there was also a steep decline in marriage rates (Census Data for the time period).
I grew up in the 90s and knew many kids whose parents were divorced. Many claimed they would never marry. And true to their word, the late 90’s and early 2000’s were marked by a rise in cohabitation. I get it. Why do you need a paper that says you love one another? It is just a paper and means nothing and its none of anyone else’s business. Right?
Not only this, but marital rape was enshrined in law across the US by 1993. Some may think, “Well that’s a good thing, right?” Violent assault was always against the law in the US, but marital rape was considered a misnomer because the marriage contract provided consent.
Wait. Hold on a second. Let’s follow this trail, shall we?
- 1960’s – Sex is acceptable outside of the marital framework
- 1970’s – No fault divorce weakens institution of marriage, leads to rise in divorce and lower marriage rates
- 1993 – The marriage contract is no longer considered a contract of sexual consent
- 1990’s – Rise in cohabitation, the questioning of why we need a piece of meaningless paper to say we’re in love
- Now: Sexual consent contracts
So, are you telling me we are issuing short-term marriage contracts???
What happened is we deconstructed marriage and what it meant to be married, divorcing it from sex and long-term commitment and making it solely about the individual. Marriage was no longer necessary for sex and if sex no longer needed marriage, why do we really need marriage? Once sex didn’t need marriage, it was completely removed from marriage. If Marriage didn’t confer any individual benefits, then why go through the process of marriage in the first place? Why not just live with the person you love?
Except it would appear that humans actually needed more than just anchor-less sex. Women have actually been harmed, but not by the men they falsely accuse. They would engage in activities with men they weren’t quite certain about, typically while inebriated, resulting in regret and sometimes depression. Usually, he blows her off – it was just a one night stand, right? If she were to get pregnant, abortion wasn’t hard to get, but this just led to more depression. The world around her said that free-sex and abortions were ok, so clearly the depression and regret has nothing to do with those, so it must mean there was something wrong with the actual sexual encounter… could it have been rape? So then a false accusation is levied against an innocent man. So rather than stop our paltry culture of the sexual merry go round and re-legitimizing the benefits of marriage, little contracts were drawn up to provide for these misled and misinformed youth to continue in their destructive behavior rather than change. There is a word for this and it is perversion.
Published in Marriage
If we’re talking about adultery, you’ll get no quarrel from me. I was referring to sex between unmarried people.
Again, I’m not familiar with the underlying data, but that does seem to be the consensus among researchers. Here’s a passage from a different book by one of the co-authors of the earlier book and here’s a chart and passage from a paper I found doing some quick googling:
That too. That has a societal impact as well. You’re kidding yourself if you think one thread is in isolation.
Yeah, but you’re mininmizing the data from 1908 to 1930. That was even more of an issue than the 1950’s. How come the shot gun weddings from that period didn’t lead to massive divorce rates? Therefore teen pregnancy rates by themselves are not the issue. The issue is divorce and more specifically the freedom to divorce.
Not how I’m reading it.
The chart above shows the percentage of brides who are pregnant at the time of their weddings (broken out by age), but does not show the relative sizes of these age groups. According to the first quote, Americans were getting married in the 1950s at (on average) younger ages than they had since 1800. Assuming that’s correct, then the 1950s would be different from 1908-1930 both because the rates of bridal pregnancy were relatively high and (more importantly) there were more young teen brides and teen brides are dis-proportionally pregnant.
I think I’m on the record as opposing no-fault divorce (at least, to the extent that it’s possibly for one spouse to unilaterally disengage from marriage without cause or penalty). If not, put me on record as such now.
Regardless, I think you’re assuming that the societal changes only followed the change in law; my argument is that the two drove each other (among other things).
According to this the difference in the median age of a woman marrying from 1910 and 1950 is only a year and few months. That’s hardly driving your argument.
They may may have been related. I can see that, but there were so many other elements to the puzzle (contraceptives, post WWII demographics, drug use, anti establishment world views, loss of faith) which caused so much harm that it’s hard to pull a thread out, as I’ve said before. It’s all symbiotic. All pretty negative, if you ask me. But I do think the freedom to divorce was the greatest factor.
EDIT: Actually on second thought, contraceptives may have been the biggest factor. Hard to tell.
I don’t have a statistical background, but that actually strikes me as a fairly large change under the circumstances (it’s hard to imagine the average going much lower than 20.3). The average is also three years younger during the same period for men.
Hear! Hear! As a female in close proximity for many years to the family courts (in a professional capacity), I concur that women can and do “blow up marriages for cash and prizes”. Where I reside, in the South, the woman is presumed to be a gold-star Sunday School teacher, (no matter her true character) and the man is presumed to be a drink-to-much, deer-hunting, kid-ignoring SOB (no matter his true character). All this is from the exclusively MALE judges in family court in my area. There is no down-side at all for the woman…she either gets child support (20% and up of the father’s income until the youngest turns 18) or she gets Daddy Government assistance. SHe gets complete control of the upbringing of the child(ren) and dad gets visits – with kid(s) that mom has done her best to poison against him. It is maddening!!!
Because the no-fault divorce laws did not get passed until the late 60’s early 70’s. The cynical view is that proves if the laws had been in place earlier then the divorce rate then would have been sky high also.
That’s exactly my argument.
How good were those marriages without no fault divorce laws? I respect taking marriage vows seriously but the literature of that time had a ton of unhappy marriages.
An appeal to literature is really unfortunate. For five hundred years our romantic literature has celebrated adultery and fornication while whining about morals and Christians. Secular literature is part of the problem.
If you have an out to marriage and not try to make it happy, then most marriages will be felt to be unhappy. If you have an out, then you perceive the fields to be greener elsewhere. There is always a more perfect spouse somewhere else.
Yes, exactly. Literature is after conflict. As Tolstoy opens Anna Kerenina, “All happy marriages are alike; each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way.” And he goes on to tell a story of an unhappy marriage. Unhappiness makes for a good story line. It’s like the journalism quip: dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is a story.
That is, of course, one of the downsides to when divorce is a relatively easy option.* It absolutely can lead to greater temptations to find pleasure elsewhere.
The flip-side is that the possibility of divorce can also spur people to improve their behavior. “If I don’t get my act together and stop drinking, my wife might leave me and take the kids.” As Dennis Prager has said, marriage without the possibility of divorce has the same moral hazards as tenure: If you know you can’t get fired, you might act like it.
(* This is where I say again that I need to do some reading on the subject. No-fault divorce strikes me as a bad policy idea so long as it takes only one party to instigate it.)
Limited divorce options may have made it more likely for the woman to think more carefully about who she tied the knot with…
I get the desire to consider young people with no self-control. I’m not saying they can live up to high expectations, either. But high expectations, while restrictive, also results in fewer dumb results.
Young people are capable of making good choices if taught, but I feel that society has bought the assumption hook, line, and sinker that young people’s brain development means they just need to be kids for longer… and longer… and longer… so why teach them?
You teach them so that when their bodies say “GO GO GO”, their brains have something to process other than “This feels so good, it can’t possibly be wrong.”
I don’t expect my 15 year old to be a perfect specimen of moral goodness. I do expect him to think for half a second if he should accept his hot girlfriend’s invitation to her empty home while parents are out. I can not fathom how we can’t even afford our sons and daughters that level of confidence while 200 years ago, they were signing on to fight in a war for Independence.
LOL, I never thought about it that way. There’s an element of truth to that. However, the statistics after no fault divorce speak otherwise.
One of the few areas of disagreement I have with Prager.
Do you think the logic is wrong, or that it’s misapplied?
I’m thinking logic is misapplied. Government intrusion in research demanded some protections for researchers.
Individual adults should take better care in who they choose to marry/reproduce with.
Well, no question there.
I’m inclined to call it a false choice. I don’t know the context of that line, but the usual subject for reforming divorce is whether we should have no-fault divorce.
You would still have the Some potential for the sam problem with divorce limited to certain causes. Wherever the line is for legal grounds for divorce, someone could be a terrible spouse staying on the other side of that line. There could be abuse there. It would be very difficult for the state to address this problem.
Church discipline provides more options. A negligent spouse who does not give cause for divorce could still be subject to church discipline.
Well, first off, no-fault isn’t about having to worry that you might get fired. It’s about having the “freedom” to fire your spouse for little or no cause at all. Marriage covenants are deadly serious, unbreakable promises — “til death do you part.” But, Dennis’s is a divorce-mentality (as evidenced by his three marriages) — looking for an excuse rather than looking for a way to overcome the challenges that arise — and there are always challenges.
There seems to be a misconception that Catholics don’t divorce (or, aren’t ever supposed to). Not true. Jesus says clearly that divorce is acceptable for infidelity in Matthew 19. What becomes the issue for Catholics is remarriage, where there’s potential for adultery if the first marriage was sacramentally valid (the couple was of sound mind and knew what they were promising).
Covenant-mentality versus divorce-mentality. Which do you think is more likely to produce virtuous behavior? Lifelong relationships? Which are better marriages — the ones where people behave because they’re afraid of getting canned? Or the ones where people permanently commit to love and cherish?
I really love the caliber of women commenting at this place.
I hear what you’re saying, but I didn’t mean to overstate the case. My argument is simply that the more restricted divorce is, the more opportunity there is for misbehavior within marriage (knowing that you can’t be “fired”).
To be absolutely clear, there are also serious social costs to allowing divorce to be too easy, especially unilateral, no-fault divorce. My sense is that the old system was too restricted, but that our current one marked a major over-correction.
Kind of two sides of the coin, if you ask me, but I take your point.
Again, I think the ability for one spouse to unilaterally end a marriage without cause or penalty is a bad idea, both from a moral perspective and a social perspective.
According to Wiki (I haven’t followed the links) only Tennessee, Mississippi, and South Dakota require that no-fault divorces be consensual; all other states allow unilateral no-fault divorce. Interesting.
Again, no contract should allow someone to walk away *and* take half the other person’s stuff, when the other person did not do anything wrong.
Also, I simply cannot believe that cheating has gone down, when acceptance of the behavior has gone up.
No disagreement there.