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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   23645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Merz famously voted against criminalizing marital rape in 1997.

This is technically true, but lacking context and very misleading in practice.

There was a general consensus to criminalize marital rape, but disagreement on the details (whether to allow the victim to retract an accusation.) Importantly, a CDU backed proposal to criminalize marital rape had been voted out earlier the same year - so the majority of Merz' political opponents also "voted against criminalizing marital rape". The individual votes for the other proposal weren't tracked, so we don't know Merz' vote, but there's reason to believe he voted in favor (later, he cited the retraction issue as the sole reason for his no vote in the second proposal).

Also, marital rape wasn't actually legal, it just didn't fall under "rape", it would still have been prosecuted under "sexual assault". So strictly speaking, it's not even technically true.

That seems plausible. TIL.

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