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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
That’s why I brought up church discipline. It provides a means to deal with the smaller problems. The state cant engage at the level of church discipline, so different bounds may make sense.
I suppose the legal cause allowed for a divorce could be small so no spouse is trapped. Of course, children will always be victims in a divorce – except when escaping abuse, but that’s not the issue in question here.
Difficult to get a divorce – bad spouse without consequence.
Easy to divorce – bored spouse files for divorce, takes a bunch of money, alimony payments, child support payments, custody. The awards given in at-fault divorce should not be given in no-fault divorce. There should be consequences for walking away for little or no cause.
I was thinking about it last night myself. Prager is wrong. Actually I’ve been down on Prager lately. He’s become so simple minded.
Covenant mentality? Now there you go asking the modern world to be Christians. You can’t expect people intent on doing their own thing and living for oneself to actually even understand covenant mentality. I’m being sarcastic of course. It just shows you the level of degeneration that western culture has come to.
That and people tend not to write about things when they go well. It’s bizarre that nobody in Madmen goes to church or prays. I remember alot of Christianity with that generation.