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I want you to imagine your sister being brutally raped and assaulted by her husband, beaten within an inch of her life, torn up inside, even if she gets a divorce she won't be able to have children again or walk ever again.
And what you aren't going to be mad about it because she was married?
If that's what marriage is to you then the majority of the country will demand it be banned.
Marriage was better before the 1970’s. I am not going to pick and choose which policies we did back then that made marriage effective. Everyone I ever knew had happy grandparents.
I would kill the guy.
So you think the government should stand in-between marriage vows? I don’t want the government in my bedroom with my wife.
We do have a third way. People who want the government in their spousal relationships should get civil unions. People want to get married should get married.
Citation needed. Inability to leave or resist domestic abuse is not "better."
Where in your marriage vows does it say that your husband has the right to rape or abuse you without legal recourse? Marriage is a predominantly religious social contract that does not supersede regular laws.
If your interest is in marriage as a religious entity I have so many questions. Do you believe in a separation of church and state? Why this religious thing and not all the other religious things? Can you find a reputable religious figure saying this is remotely appropriate or a good idea?
I am not saying you should have an inability to leave. Personally I don’t believe in divorce, but in extreme cases I am fine with allowing some divorce.
Citation needed: TFR was higher than. And just on vibes it seems like most people died with a loving spouse back in the day. I’m not sure how you quantify “happy marriage”, but when I was growing up it seemed like there were a lot of happy old people. It just worked.
Where: Bible. Marriage was a Christian institution. “Be fruitful and multiple” is the first divine command given by god to mankind. The purpose of marriage has always been about children. Wives have a duty to use their body to create little humans. America is a Christian nation.
How does this interfere with a separation of church and state? I’m literally saying the government should not stand between two peoples religious vows.
Can I find a reputable religious figure? Does God count as I quoted above? He commands this.
And to be 100% clear my interpretation of marriage was the law of the land for 200 years. Changing it seems like it has been a bad idea.
I mean if you say "marriage requires allowing your husband to abuse and rape you" then marriage will be banned overnight. This is not an improvement. Women have rights now and the reality of domestic violence is now something that isn't covered up by society. That genie is not going back in the bottle.
Therefore this idea is a failure of pragmatism if that's your goal.
Additionally what you are saying is really incompatible with most historical and modern interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, perhaps not Islam though, I don't know.
Ultimately it sounds like you want women not to have any rights or protections anymore, perhaps purely to maximize fertility perhaps for other reasons. If that is not what you want to advocate for then consider the ramifications of what you are choosing to focus on.
Well, yeah, it was outlawed sometime in the '70s with that exact justification.
The only problem here is that "abuse and rape" were trivially redefined as "doing anything I don't want to do that exact minute" one unit of Planck time after.
I fully believe women deserve the same set of rights and protections that men currently enjoy no matter what that set contains.
Right now, that's the empty set.
Okay then this is the problem. Fix that instead of letting men violently rape their wives.
It's not freaking rocket science.
I don't know why people here consistently successfully diagnose problems but then refuse to suggest anything other than the most extreme, stupid, or unethical solutions.
Yes feminism and modern gender politics seem to have caused problems. The solution is not going to be rape.
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So you don’t believe in freedom? Free people should not be able to choose their own systems?
This is obviously an improvement because people had happier marriages back in the day. It is exactly what you say - pragmatism.
I want women to be happy. I love women, I’m a feminists in the sense I’m pro-women.
I want the common good. I want happy women. People don’t actually want rights. They want successful relationships and happiness. I’m giving them that.
And yes giving a husband the right to beat his wife sounds bad but it made women happier. Part of that is because men also had many duties to women like if they needed to work in a steel mill 16 hours a day to provide material comfort to their wife……they did that.
In the Sopranos Michael was chastised for putting hands on his girlfriend by a higher ranking mafiosa whose girlfriend was his niece. And the mafiosa said it was none of his business if he put his name on her. Because then he would also have obligations to her.
A big part of marriage is your making commitments to each other. For a wife a large part of that commitment is sexual availability and children. And a man has a duty to provide. And I do think the wife’s commitment is a permanent consent. That’s what makes marriage special. And yes sometimes girls are lazy and I think marriage means a man has a right to take what has been promised to him.
This isn’t the same thing as saying “I want to allow men to be monsters to their wife”. I don’t want that. But I do not think the government should be litigating what happens in a marriage.
The whole reason gays wanted marriage and not civil unions is because marriage is something special. These trade-offs versus today’s legal marriage which is really just a contract are worth it.
Freedom? I believe in the freedom to not be forcibly penetrated without legal recourse when I am explicitly not consenting.
Your freedoms end when your fist (or penis in this case) touches my face is a classic line for a reason. You haven't really presented any evidence that any modern people would consent to marriage if it implies a reduction in legal rights, particularly this one and even if fine with it the state does plenty of things to protect people from certain kinds of mistakes or abuse. Domestic violence is an area where people are strongly interested in expanding these protections because even in the modern world some women will let themselves be beaten because they feel they have no other options.
Also, where's the evidence that marriages were happier back in the day? Fiction shows many examples of women celebrating the death of their spouses because of abuse that they couldn't escape. The inability to leave because of restrictions on divorce or alternate options does not imply happier marriages, it implies more human suffering.
If you want to encourage stronger bonds you have plenty of options that don't empower sexual or physical abuse.
There are plenty of ways to encourage the strengths of marriage that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. What you are arguing for is frankly morally abhorrent.
You might imagine a world that did in part exist in the past where the husband is a decent man and works all day and comes home to a woman who sees sex and domestic tasks as her duty. And those people do exist today. But your moral and legal infrastructure has to account for the guy who is fresh out of prison, has children with three different women, smokes on the couch all day and beats the shit out of his wife for a thousand and one reasons or no reason at all.
So do I. But enough about being drafted into war or being expected to work inherently dangerous jobs to make a living.
Well, the solution "moral and legal infrastructure" settled on was just assuming every man is that man. In so doing, instead of expecting a wife we've given literally every opportunity and incentive to leave to do so and categorizing her failure to do so as consent, we beat every other husband and justify it with 'but he might start doing it someday, #yesAllMen'.
At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen?Can I see them?
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People should be free to choose marriage and not have the government in their marriage.
And again your jumping to this “all leads to bad things”……nobody is saying you can’t get divorced.
The best proof I have is that today men blame women for being bad women and women blame men for being bad men. This shows up in polling. The old system just worked. It’s a Chesterton Fence. However human psychology evolved the relationship rules I’m describing just work. It’s pragmatic. It’s common good.
That's not proof the old system worked better. What if the reason the new system sucks is social media, and the old system would have been even worse in the modern world?
Religions do not get to decide that their adherent (or even non adherents) are not impacted by laws. This is always a civic disaster. The entire project of western civilization was moving away from this.
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Even the very left-wing reddit absolutely loves the scene in Roseanne where Dan beats the shit out of the guy who abused his sister-in-law.
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He's not saying it's acceptable. He's saying it isn't rape. There are many bad non-rape things.
No, he said the law should have no capacity to intervene in matters between a man and his wife, which is frankly stupid.
Additionally you'd find many people who might be willing to support a different standard for rape in cases of spouses, but violent forcible rate with clear non-consent is simply not that.
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