Instead of Legalizing Adultery, Legislators Should Be Championing Fidelity
“Qualified as a misdemeanor since 1907, the law was designed to discourage individuals from cheating on their spouse as a means to secure a divorce. At the time, infidelity was the only way to legally split.” - Daily Citizen
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Well, maybe three.
1. I appreciate the spirit of what they’re saying in this article. Adultery isn’t good for families… in addition to just being wrong. I’m not denying that.
2. There’s no reason why authorities couldn’t legalize adultery and verbally advocate for fidelity at the same time. These aren’t really mutually exclusive activities. Legality and morality have always been two distinct, though related, things. Sometimes a law is immoral. Quite often the immoral is legal—for good reason. (Do we really want to live in a society everything wrong is illegal? Even under Moses, God didn’t do that.) So, leaving a question of morality to choice rather than legal mandate is not a new thing or even an inherently bad thing.
3. This just seems really out of touch. As a society we’re long past taking adultery very seriously. A law is not going to change that, and as a matter of principle, it’s a bad idea to have laws on the books that you have no intention of enforcing. True, sometimes law can be symbolism: we’re making a statement about what we value. But on the whole, law shouldn’t do that. It’s for things we intend to actually penalize.
So the real problem here has to do with the beliefs/values and norms of our culture. You can’t fix that problem with laws.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
In certain parts of the nation stealing from stores is no longer seen as wrong and in many places those laws are no longer being enforced. How far should the trend away from Biblical morality go within the laws of our country?
I am not denying that we have gone quite far from being able to enforce much of the law in the area of adultery, but this conversation seems to be neglecting the issue of the victims of adultery. I remember my dad justifying his adultery and wondering why my mom was so upset. I remember dad's bar room buddies reinforcing his thoughts. We have so many influences throughout society telling people sin is okay and few people stop to think how hurtful that was to my mom. This move is yet one more stick in the eye.
My take is similar to Aaron's; if the law is not going to be enforced, you may want to take it off the books. Otherwise the law becomes a mockery. This is especially the case in adultery, where the aggrieved spouse is first of all humiliated ("why wasn't I enough for him/her?"), and second of all faces humiliation during cross examination ("Isn't it true that you let yourself go and withheld yourself from your husband/wife?"). No surprise that aggrieved spouses, male and female, weren't signing up for that.
My hunch here is that a lot of aggrieved spouses are, in effect, prosecuting adultery through divorce court. The aggrieved spouse doesn't need to testify in court about the adultery--that can be a quiet note to the adulterer "you earned this buddy" outside of legal pleadings--and the aggrieved spouse gets half of marital assets and often child support or even alimony. Given that that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's a big penalty for infidelity.
Yes, there are some who don't think it's a big deal, but when I look around, I think the majority still realizes that adultery is wrong.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
In certain parts of the nation stealing from stores is no longer seen as wrong and in many places those laws are no longer being enforced. How far should the trend away from Biblical morality go within the laws of our country?
It’s a good question, but we don’t have to try to answer it in a vacuum, because political theorists have wrestled with versions of it for a long time. Maybe centuries? I’m not an expert on the history of that, though I used to read a lot on related topics. Three factors come to mind…
- Limited resources: We know we can’t enforce every law that would/might put a stop to some bad behavior. There are always limited law enforcement resources.
- Effort-benefit ratio: The ratio of law enforcement effort vs. benefit to society. Some evils should be illegal, and should be enforced—ideally—but they’re extremely difficult to investigate and prosecute fairly, so #1 above kicks in.
- Liberty model & trade-offs: What value does your government place on individual freedom? You can fight a whole lot of ‘crimes’ more efficiently in an authoritarian model. But then you have models built on the belief that humans are entitled to freedoms (or “endowed… with… inalienable rights”). There’s always a trade-off between enforced morality and freedom of conscience. There is no opportunity to do something ‘virtuous’ where you face “do A or you’ll pay.” (Not mention the vulnerability everybody has to arbitrary ‘justice’ in authoritarian models.)
Maybe #3 is really two factors or more. I’m thinking out loud mostly.
To sum up, this is very general, but if one believes…
- humans should not only refrain from harming one another but should actively do good,
- doing good voluntarily has more beauty and ‘goodness’ than doing good because you’ll get punished if you don’t
- humans ought to thrive and they thrive best when as free as possible
it then makes sense to pursue law-making/government in a way that seeks the best set of these tradeoffs… Which argues for focusing on basics like protecting life and property.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Which argues for focusing on basics like protecting life and property.
And yet we have a political party in this nation that resists doing both and people still are puzzled why the majority of evangelical Christians do not support that party.
I wish it were that simple. We used to have a party that was focused on defending life and property. Arguably, today the closest thing would be the Libertarians.
The problem there for a lot of evangelicals, is that evangelicals tend to want more from government than the basics of protecting life and property. So in the wrestling match between what is “morally important but free” vs. “morally important and legally protected,” evangelicals have been uncomfortable with Libertarianism on lifestyle issues.
Today’s Republican party is largely opposed to what conservatives have historically understood as the rule of law, so protection of life and property is pretty weak there. They are slipping a lot on abortion again and don’t care at all about fiscal conservatism (unless it’s the isolationist flavor, e.g. Ukraine). If you don’t care about fiscal conservatism, you don’t really care about excessive taxation, and you aren’t really protecting property.
On the other hand, the Democratic party is conspicuously anti-life on the “not yet born” side, generally even less interested in fiscal responsibility, and increasingly intolerant of anything and everything traditional.
There’s no “party” clearly vote worthy. At the top, there are aren’t really any individuals either. I see worthy elected officials here and there in almost direct correlation with how much they distance themselves from the top party leaders and the party in general. … so we’re in an interesting place. Somehow it’s all upside down.
Among other things, this is what happens when you have poor leadership at high levels.
(Edit to add: Mike Johnson has been refreshingly grown up lately—so of course he has earned the ire of the ‘no good deed shall go unpunished’ Republican party of the moment. But I still don’t know how Johnson’s mind really works, how much character or depth of political understanding he’s working from. He seems too comfortable with Trump, but of course everybody has to play that game to survive right now. It’s a sad day when an organization becomes infected with a parasite so powerful you can’t survive unless you pretend that the parasite is actually great in every way.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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