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This always strikes me as such an odd left-wing shibboleth to throw out. The actual concept of prosecuting marital rape under the law seems like a really nuanced and difficult idea, not one that is easily simplified to "well duh you fucking troglodyte of course this can only go one way."
Yeah, it's annoyed me even when contemporary conservatives and traditionalists defend the concept (I have seen them criticising foreign countries for not criminalising it) - the concept implicity undermines the traditional understanding of marriage.
Marital rape wasn't a crime because in the past it was assumed (required) that marriage came with an obligation to engage in sexual intercourse with your spouse. There's a reason the euphemism "fulfilling the marital obligations" was used in the past. Catholic teaching, still, teaches that spouses shouldn't refuse one another unless there's a genuine reason and the requests themselves are reasonable.
What defendants of the concept of criminalising marital rape will argue that it's basically to stop violent rape with marriage - i.e. a husband physically and violently forcing himself on his wife. That there were a huge epidemic of women who actually being violently raped by their husbands but no one could do anything about it because it was "legal". But the reality was it was and is already a crime in the form of various spouse battery statutes. In practice, marital rape is used to describe any "coercion" a husband uses on his wife to sleep with her. But this creates huge ambiguity - it's expected, traditionally, that the husband and wife would be having sex so any sexual act itself couldn't be considered evidence of coercion. It demonises normal sexual marital expectations.
The concept of marital rape itself is a good example of how liberal presuppositions have become omnipresent in even our closest relationships. Marital rape as a distinct concept from domestic violence only makes sense where marriage is merely a sexless economic contract between cohabitors that can be broken at any time, and not a union of two bodies and souls.
There are striking parallels to the introduction of no-fault divorce.
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