A word about adultery

There becomes no way to differentiate between those who are hypocritical and those who have erred.

Sure there is. We can tell be seeing how self-righteous and judgmental they are.

Men of wealth and power have always been allowed to collect wives or mistresses or women in some other way. It was either legal, tolerated, or society turned a blind eye to it. The idea that one of the first wives could object or get a divorce if her husband behaved that way is pretty new. The idea that she would be allowed to take any minor children with her in such a divorce is even newer. We have to find better ways to deal with ideas of love and marriage than the ones developed under completely different circumstances, ideals that take into account the children first.

It's so sad... Working with working-class families in my area, I see the results of divorce every day, the effects of which are often carried down over generations. Children without a father in the home are much more likely to have a child in a non-committed relationship, or get divorced themselves.
When I was a resident in an inner city family practice clinic, I noticed that the one most important factor dividing families who were descending into poverty and those were rising out of it was whether or not the parents were married and not substance abusers.

This past week I read the helpful reminder that in the New Testament, the word that is translated as love (agape) regarding marriage, conveys not an emotion but an act of will. [I'm not a Greek reader but the writer of that statement is a credible commentator]. Love is a command and needs to be maintained even if feelings die. This is the exact opposite of the present culture in which love = feeling and when the feeling goes, the person pulls out of the marriage leaving family wreckage behind. For Christians, maintaining our marriage is one of the best Christian witnesses any of us can do.

A better way to put my postscript would be to say that you can't be "pro-gay-marriage" *and* "pro-gay-adultery" without committing adultery and/or a logical fallacy.

And not a single mention of the hypocrisy here. Here's a man who has a record that any right-wing politician would be proud to call his own ... including opposition to reproductive rights, marriage equality for Gay couples, and adoption by same-sex parents. Here's a man who is venomously opposed to giving law-abiding, taxpaying Gay couples any of the same legal benefits and responsibilities that Straight couples have always taken for granted, a man who won't even give Gay couples a SINGLE CHANCE to prove that they are up to the challenge of monogamy and commitment. What a tremendous example Mark Sanford has proven himself to be.

Judge not lest ye be judged.

A tendency to be opinionated and judgmental is one of my own greatest faults, so I can sympathize to an extent, but as I get older I think I am LESS inclined to be judgmental because I can see the shades of gray and look at a person and see the pain that might be behind a poor decision. A person who molests a child was likely abused himself and/or loathes himself, is immature, may have an orientation he can't control. It's not an excuse and we need to protect children from those people, but when I looked at the stats I discovered that it is not true that most of those people cannot be reformed, particularly young people. The stats say otherwise. I think society has swung too far in the direction of draconian punishment and away from prevention, protection and rehabilitation. Adultery happens because someone has poor self control and a transitory view of marriage, but there were probably some cracks in the marriage beforehand.

Your view of things seems to incline in these cases towards justice without mercy, black and white without the shades of gray.

This captcha system is annoying. It is hard to see the blasted code and messages get lost.

Franklin Jennings -

People make mistakes. People do stupid things. People do bad things. They do that whether they have been going out lecturing others about how others should comport themselves or not. We need more politicians like Jimmy Carter who are willing to model strongly ethical, strongly moral behavior while admitting their own weakness, even if it was trivial and he was mocked for saying it, and fewer who spend time lecturing others on how to behave, whether or not they then show us that they have feet of clay.

That doesn't mean that we don't need to set high standards for ourselves and be models for others. Of course we should do all we can to model the kind of behavior our society needs to see. People do need to stay together for the sake of the kids and they need to grow up enough to show that they are truly doing it for love, not just show or cultural pressure. No child wants to grow up in a broken home, but they don't want to grow up in a home where their parents are Martha and George from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" either. No one forces people to be uncivil to each other, even if they feel somehow disappointed in life.

People who feel the need to lecture us about moral behavior, while also engaging in behavior that is not moral are hypocrites. I'm sure there are a few Church Ladies out there who don't actually engage in any of the sins that they so prissily disapprove of, but they tend to miss the very strongly moral idea of forgiveness.

I don't have to forgive Sanford for his adultery. It's none of my business. How his adultery affected his behavior as a husband and father is something that he needs to work out with his wife and sons. Even if the voters of South Carolina forgive Sanford for his decisions as governor that had arisen from the adultery, that doesn't mean they need to trust him again. Expecting him to leave office would not inherently mean that they don't forgive him, but they might consider that he wasn't really contrite about the abuse of office if he did not resign.

Rod is to be praised here. I hope he is capable of living up to his ideals, just as I hope I am and that the rest of us are. He is at least pointed in the right direction; of how many can we say that?

Too many people who vehemently oppose same sex marriage, people like Mr. Sanford, are strangely silent on the real problem marriage faces, that is divorce, and its usual attendant, adultery.

I remember reading, I think it was in Christianity Today, a very self-righteous piece by some guy who was leaving the Episcopalians because they were not standing firm against homosexuals. OK. But the Episcopalians have for many years now accepted divorce and remarriage without a boggle. Furthermore, those practices are forthrightly condemned by Christ himself in so many words, whereas you sort of have to look around for references to gays. Where was all that righteous, allegedly Bible-based indignation when we needed it?

I'm afraid what it boils down to is other people's sins. So much easier and more comfortable to condemn those gays over there (those bad people!) than it is to confront the sins of ourselves and people we know.

Rod's not like that. Whereas I disagree with him about same sex marriage, there's no doubting his integrity.

Duh-huh. Way upthread, what I meant to say was you can't be pro-gay-marriage *and* pro-gay-adultery without committing hypocrisy and/or a logical fallacy.

Your strong reaction comes from an honorable place. Gov. Sanford is my governor, and one of the few politicians I actually liked - I'm so disappointed and disgusted. I think that should be the first reaction of anyone who is passionate about marriage, or children, or truth. Isn't mercy & grace more valuable when the true hideousness of the act is first acknowledged?

...this culture we've created of adult selfishness at the expense of children...

Absolutely. But it's more about childishness than selfishness, about emotional immaturity (cf Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence) than greed.

McLuhan wrote (The Medium Is The Massage 1967) that the major challenge facing us in the age of electronic media "...is growing up, and it is total. Mere information will not suffice."

Our environment encourages quick, shallow thinking (life in the fast lane) and the challenge of patience and allowing for real growth is in many ways tougher now than ever before. One need not actually consider the question one is asking before learning the answer, because so much information is so readily available that it fools us into thinking we've got the answer we need. Silence is hard to come by, as is solitude, yet we need both the same way we need sleep in order to repair ourselves and grow.

The symptoms of this are our divorce (>2.3 million each year) and abortion (

Time for a long walk with the dogs.

Wow, really doesn't like something there, reformatted:

The symptoms of this are our divorce [ >2.3 million each year ] and abortion [

Freelunch said "I don't have to forgive Sanford for his adultery. It's none of my business."

I have been thinking of something for several months now. It has slowly dawned on me that all that I do not only affects my family, or God but also the church and the world. When I say something hurtful to my child, they are the first affected but the ripple does not end there. As a whole, everything that people do affects one another. Even if you took God out of it (and I certainly would not since I am a Christian) then this thought still applies. This is not about laws but about how as a society each thing we do either builds us up or tears us down. I realized this because each day when I read or watched something terrible then I would mourn for that thing. Crying for those that hurt. Hurting for those that are so torn up inside that they caused pain to others. On the other side to see the joyful news and feel the happiness of those people certainly helped build me up that this world is not so wicked. I honestly do not think I can live by the "this is none of your business" motto anymore. All that we do affects others whether we like to admit it or not.

Mrs. Damian (Ouida) Garcia

Nope. Their system is broke. Too bad that they can make so much money on advertising but won't spend anything fixing their comment system.

The escape character does not work. Let's try the ampersand lt semi again [ < ]

All that we do affects others whether we like to admit it or not.

I agree completely that our behavior affects others. I don't agree that his behavior affects me enough that I have the right to decide whether to forgive him. All I can do is take care of my own life. I don't have to approve of his behavior. I can even condemn it because of the way it affects others, but he didn't betray me. He didn't violate an oath of marriage to me. It's not my business to forgive him or not to forgive him. That would be presumptuous on my part.

Nope. Their system is broke. Too bad that they can make so much money on advertising but won't spend anything fixing their comment system.

And I just say, Amen.

freelunch,

I don't disagree with what you say, thought I do think you ought to extend your remarks to take note of the fact that liberals are every bit as much inclined toward political hypocrisy as conservatives are.

Witness all the "feminists" and Tammy-Wynette-bashers who stood by and stand by their man Bill Clinton, despite the fact that he was and is a serial exploiter and harasser of women less powerful than him, typically younger than him and of a lower socioeconomic class than him.

Witness all the liberal advocates of "temperance" and "moderation" and "unity" and "civility" who stand by their man Barack Obama who stood by and/or stands by his men Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.

And to combine these two sorts -- among many other sorts -- of liberal hypocrisy into a witch's brew of snobbish, misogynistic incivility, intemperance, and immoderation, witness the ongoing liberal rhetorical gang-rape or hate-f*ck of Sarah Palin.

And, to save anyone so inclined to "accuse" me some typing-time -- no, I did not vote for Palin and McCain, having never voted for any Republican before.

MargaretE,

I'm not aware of any comments he made about sexual responsibility while he was having an affair, though he had said things prior to that, but I am aware that he made a huge deal about fiscal responsibility while he used state funds to see his lover in Argentina. Do you agree that he is a hypocrite about financial responsibility?

I don't condone adultery, becuase it involves a breaking of trust, but a large part of the problem is that not everyone is suited to monogamy, and our society offers them no above-board honorable alternative. (Try getting elected as a perpetual bachelor). Keep also in mind that "till death do us part" is a long time these days. In the old days, that meant maybe 12 or 15 years (and not everyone was faithful then). These days, we're telling people that they have to never have sex with anyone else for 50 years or more. It's insane to expect that to work for all people.

Many do find a comfort and security in that arrangement. Some people are joyously happy being celibate too, but it's not for everyone. Swingers have an interesting approach to all this. They maintain their emotional monogamy but explore their sexuality with others together and openly. Again, not for everyone, but some of the happiest and most well adjusted people I know are in this category. Many have been married for 30 years or more. (Insert conservative gnashing of teeth about moral relativism here)

I don't suppose I have anything profound to say, other than to add that I hate, I mean I really hate, this culture we've created of adult selfishness at the expense of children.

I don't have much to disagree with in Rod's post here, but I would just add a note of caution. When you start thinking about how dreadful contemporary American culture is, it's awfully easy to drift into nostalgia for a mostly imaginary past. This is a natural danger for conservatives (liberals and libertarians have their own comforting self-delusions they can fall into, too). Let's try to criticize what we don't like about modern society while keeping in mind that there was never any golden age in the past when everybody was moral and happy.

Aside from that, I identify with a lot in Rod's post here. I also find it very difficult to respond calmly to situations involving, or depictions of, adultery or child abuse. (Actually, it's not just abuse; I have a very hard time coping with movies, stories, or news involving any kind of bad things happening to children....)

---------- Begin long rant... -------------

The thing is, though, I too frequently see people who I would characterize as "conservatives" using the existence of adultery, divorce, etc. as clubs to beat up on the rest of us. Look at the comment threads about gay marriage in NH recently, where Erin was over and over again citing the high rates of adultery, divorce, single parenthood, etc. among straights as yet another reason to deny marriage to lesbians and gays.

Now, I don't think that the moral failings (and hypocrisy) of people like Mark Sanford, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, Jim Gibbons, Ted Haggard, David Hager, Helen Chenoweth, Kirk Fordice, etc. should be taken as discrediting the entire social conservative worldview. Individuals' failings to uphold their own moral standards don't invalidate those moral standards. As "rr" pointed out eloquently in comments in another thread here, some environmentalists may drive SUVs, and some doctors may smoke; but those individual failings don't change the facts that our oil-guzzling lifestyle is bad for the environment and that smoking is unhealthy.

But I would like to see conservatives thinking twice before using adultery, divorce, etc. as political or rhetorical weapons. What do I mean by this?

It's one thing to argue that adultery is wrong, that divorce is often damaging to children, and so forth, if your purpose is to try to reduce the incidence of adultery or help couples stay together or mitigate the impacts on children or whatever.

It's something entirely else to become enamored of one's own "strict moral standards" to the point where you use that as a rhetorical point, even on other issues. Again, reading many of Erin's comments here, I'm struck by the aggressive way she uses the moral failings of heterosexual couples as yet another excuse for denying marriage to gays.

I think this is a dangerous pitfall for social conservatives -- dividing the world into two groups of people, "us" (the small persecuted minority of true Christians who have good moral values, even when some of our leaders fail to uphold them) versus "them" (the culture at large). Once you've done that, it's easy to mentally associate all moral failings as part of one undifferentiated mass, for which the "other" side is to blame.

Take, for example, adultery and divorce. I am admittedly a fairly far-left-leaning progressive, and most of my friends and relatives are as well. We include a lot of extreme theological liberals (Quakers, Unitarians, congregationalists, etc.) and no shortage of agnostics and atheists. Naturally, we all strongly support same-sex marriage. But (I realize this may be inconceivable to Erin) as far as I can tell, most of the people in this group have very strong moral values. Not just the normal "leftist" moral values of helping the poor, protecting the environment, etc. -- but also "traditional" values like marriage and fidelity in marriage, and raising children well. Despite being well into middle age, the incidence of divorce or adultery in my very liberal circle of acquaintance is small to nonexistent (as far as I know....).

I'm not at all saying this to boast or to prove that my friends (or liberals in general) are better than other people. I'm just trying to point out that, while some of the conservatives here tend to lump together all "moral values" issues, the rest of us don't. We do support same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but we also believe very strongly in the importance of marriage itself, in monogamy within marriage, in raising children to be good citizens and morally strong adults, etc.

I don't see Rod's post about adultery here as being problematic in any way. But I'd like all of those reading this who consider themselves "social conservatives" or "Christian conservatives" to think twice about how they use moral values in their discussions. Do you recognize that people who differ from you may nonetheless have very strong moral values (some of which might be the same as yours, some might differ)? Or do you employ them as a weapon to beat up on others? In the comments to the post by Ta-Nehisi Coates that Rod linked to earlier, there was a lot of discussion of the moral danger of pride. Which, really, should we all be more concerned about -- the sexual and romantic lives of others, or our own pride and arrogance?

This is such a complex topic. I write that first to reassure readers that I am consciously trying to keep my normally long posts as brief as possible.

Marriage is a subset of mating. Human history has run the gamut of every combination and permutation imagined. By way of comparison: Some cultures did not consider a couple married until they proved that they were a fertile mating, the usual proof being the woman getting pregnant and giving birth. My comparison is simple: The modern morality around sex is a complete contradiction of that. And please, I intend no value judgments here...

But this and other comparisons should inform our discussion. We make assertions -- I'm as guilty as any -- that do not look beyond the personal or local scope. "Tradition" is very subjective. A person from one of those earlier cultures would consider any longstanding childless marriage immoral, for example.

The subtopic around problems later in a marriage and the notion (Christian or generic, the reader must decide how to approach this) that the couple must or should stay together for the sake of the children presents an inherent contradiction: One can show (raising my own hand) that there are scenarios in which the couple staying together can be and sometimes is more damaging to the children than a divorce would be.

I hasten to add that I'm fully aware that I'm offering anecdotal evidence, and I do not intend to prove or disprove any general point. Perhaps the general point should be one of steps and judgments instead of a binary choice. Do the work to repair the relationship, but be aware of the diminishing returns threshold (wherever it may be) and be prepared to consider ending the relationship as the best "fix" available.

Teaser comment: Romantic love is a centuries-old controversy. There was a point not so long ago (in historical terms) that romantic love was not even on the list of values in making a marriage. Why, I ask, should romantic love not be one of the primary considerations in maintaining the relationship if we as a culture put such a high value on it for getting married in the first place?

J, thank you for pointing out that not everyone who supports gay marriage is a polymorphously-perverse, multi-swinging profligate.

quote: "I think this is a dangerous pitfall for social conservatives -- dividing the world into two groups of people, "us" (the small persecuted minority of true Christians who have good moral values, even when some of our leaders fail to uphold them) versus "them" (the culture at large). Once you've done that, it's easy to mentally associate all moral failings as part of one undifferentiated mass, for which the "other" side is to blame."

J,

Thanks so much for a very thoughtful post. I agree with you here. Unfortunately, as have many others, I have been guilty of this on before on this site. I would add, however, that liberals engage in this kind of behavior at times as well. I think it manifest itself the most when ones group is out of power. For example, this was the case with liberals during much of the Bush years and now many conservatives are falling into this way of thinking with Obama in power.

In the end, I think what you have described isn't conservative or liberal. It is simply human. Although I believe the left bears its fair share of responsibility for the sexual immorality and breakdown of the family in our society, it's a lot easier for social conservatives to focus solely on the left and ignore the role people on their side play in this as well. On the other hand, while the left's critique of the way corporations pollute the environment has merit, it is likewise easy for liberals to attack corporations and the right instead of focusing on the fact that many of them live lifestyles that aren't exactly environmentally friendly. These are just two examples, though certainly more could be cited.

I don't think that people should abandon their theological and ideological convictions and cease critiquing those who disagree with them. Nonetheless, I think the warning you give about associating all moral failings with the other side is a wise one. We should all ponder it.

rr

ditto Mrs (Oiuda): "All that we do affects others whether we like to admit it or not." and most especially when we accept the office of representative of the people, either in commercial activity (a CEO's duty to all the stock/stakeholders) or in public policy (a politician's duty to all her constituents) regardless of the peccadillo committed.

ditto J re: temptations to moralistic dualism ( "them" and "us" ) a particular danger for social conservatives, where the betrayal of duty is more far-reaching. It sunders solidarity to numerous members of the cohort being represented, callously abandoning countless more without a voice (the unborn, minors in disadvantaged circumstances, vulnerable incapacitated persons) and reasserts vigorous antagonism to the project we actually pursue: life, liberty and happiness, NOT one of moral probity, which belongs in the realm of ethical and religious association.

Better I think would be for us to try to grapple with what aspect of the methods we are defending (faith, tradition, law, partisan politics) encourage the practice of phronesis, and which in fact do the exact opposite and obstruct the exercise of phronesis.

In After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre makes a similar call for a phronetic social science, combined with weighty criticism of attempts by social scientists to emulate natural science. He points out that for every prediction made by a social scientific theory there are usually counter-examples. These derive from the unpredictability of human beings, and the fact that one unpredictable human being can have a world-changing impact. Following Pascal, he argues that the shape of Cleopatra's nose changed the course of history, for if her profile had not been beautiful it is unlikely (according to this argument) that Mark Anthony would have pursued her, with significant consequences for Roman political history.

Geoff,

The rub is that I doubt you would agree with my definitions -- the traditional ones -- of either "marriage" or "adultery."

In any event, I mistyped that post in unfortunate haste.

What I meant to say was:

A better way to put my post-script would be to say that you can't be "pro-gay-marriage" *and* "pro-gay-adultery" without committing *hypocrisy* and/or a logical fallacy.

Marriage means "no adultery."

"No adultery" means "no non-monogamy."

"No non-monogamy" means "no gay lifestyle."

"No gay lifestyle" means "not gay."

So marriage means (among other things) "not gay."

Please note that I do not take "gay" and "homosexual" to mean the same thing.

Marriage means "no adultery."

Well then, I guess you don't believe in heterosexual marriage either, huh.

I think it's important to understand the longer-term instigators of current views on divorce and separation: the double-whammies of the Great Depression and World War II, and the increasing mobility of Americans that gained momentum with the widespread acquisition of cars in boom that preceded them. As many may be aware, divorce rates spiked at the end of the War, but the previous half-generation saw a lot of abandonment and break-up of families due to economic pressures. The exodus to the suburbs and the governmentally-encouraged nesting* of the immediate post-war period put a damper on things for a while, but eventually, the longer-term trend resumed.

* Yes, what we think of as a natural return to hearth and home after the war was in no small part a result of active government policy and propaganda - the Democrats did not want a repeat of what happened after World War I, when they failed to prepare the domestic economy for the return of a large volume of veterans, provoking a depression that returned the GOP to power. So, in WW2, they planned for the end of the war to avoid that fate again. And they largely succeeded. But most people don't realize how the government's hand was active in this....

Thanks for the reply, rr. I appreciated your comment in the first Sanford thread.

I agree wholeheartedly that what I was describing isn't a left/right thing, it's a "human nature" thing. What I was commenting on is the way I see that particular aspect of human nature playing itself in one particular circumstance.

Actually, one thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is the psychological danger involved in being cut off from the culture in which one lives. I know that I myself engaged in a lot of apocalyptic thinking circa 2002-2003, when it seemed like the whole country had gone mad. This helps me understand how a lot of people on the conservative side are probably feeling right now.

Several years ago I read a book by Malise Ruthven about the rise of militant islamism (A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America). This is a bit off-topic but I highly recommend it; Ruthven is a British scholar and journalist with an excellent understanding of both Islamism and human psychology. (He taught a class about Islam that I took in college back in the 1980s).

Anyway, one of the points Ruthven makes is about the hardships of moving to a country where you don't have a lot of cultural support networks. In the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, seemingly westernized and technocratic men would move from Muslim countries to the West and find themselves cut off from both their original culture and their adopted culture. Some of these men perceived the West as characterized by "spiritual emptiness". Ruthven writes:

The perception of spiritual emptiness is really a mark of cultural alienation. The emigrant becomes obsessed with the materialistic and hedonistic aspects of Western culture because he does not know how to gain access to its spiritual and aesthetic goods. [...] As Raban acutely remarks, "[This sense of cultural disconnection] confers a heroic glamour on the everyday alienation felt by the immigrant -- especially the male immigrant -- who struggles to keep his head up in a foreign culture ... Your corrosive solitude is the measure of your invincible superiority to the [unbelievers] in their hellbound ignorance and corruption."

Ouch. Cultural alienation? Obsessed with the materialistic and hedonistic aspects of Western culture? The "heroic glamour" of turning one's corrosive solitude into an imagined sense of superiority over the unbelievers?

Ruthven is talking about Islamists living in the West, but he could just as well be talking about alienated "social conservatives" homeschooling their kids or about a lot of us progressives who loathe mainstream American culture. I'm not about to go out and buy a television or encourage my daughter to take up Barbie and Disney and all that commercial sexist crap, but reading this does make me worry more about the psychological downsides of alienation from mainstream culture.

John E.,
You sound like a really good husband. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a man praise his wife! My dad had his faults, but he never spoke against my mother or let any of us speak disrespectfully to her. I think it's partly owing to his example that I recognized a good man when I saw him and snapped him right up...my husband is far better than I deserve!

But I want to thank Lord Karth -- you should all thank Lord Karth -- for getting you all back on the true purpose: reproduction of the species.

I recently went on retreat for a week or so. I took some books, though. One of them was called The Secret Life of Sharks. (It's out of print, and probably not worth searching for.)

The book is about hammerhead sharks off of Baja California. The author, who is now in his 60's, did a lot of research on these fish, back in the day, especially on the question of why these sharks, a predator species, should swim in schools. (Schooling is typically a strategy of prey species, not of predators.)

But it doesn't matter. Because today, 2009, the sharks are gone. Like so many fisheries (cod comes to mind) the population has been destroyed by overfishing. The sharks, like the cod, aren't there any more, and they probably aren't coming back. I didn't have the heart to finish the book.

We don't need any further reproduction of our species. There are quite enough of us right now, and the population is still rising. (It has TRIPLED in my lifetime alone.) Unless some of the mechanisms suggested here (lowering birth rates and so forth) are not too little, too late, we are headed for a disastrous population crash and massive numbers of human deaths.

Karth, we have enough trouble already. What we need now is not more "reproduction" of our species.

Am I the only one who wonders what this means:

I dunno, I didn't have any problem with that. I took "under most circumstances" to be a reasonable qualifier. One could concoct all kinds of hypothetical scenarios.

children, while nice, are a lifestyle choice and can be procured by adoption

Erin, you oppose adoption? My son and his wife's "choice" to have a daughter by adoption (since she is a Type I diabetic, and having their first child nearly killed her) is a bad thing? And how about the abandoned children of this world? That couples adopt them is a bad thing because....because everyone should have as many of their own children as possible, and too bad for the kids whose parents cannot or will not care for them?

Yes yes, this couple's decision is bad bad, because they chose to protect the life of the wife and mother by - wait for it - artificial contraception!! No!!! So there you are. They are hopelessly lost, along with all those other bad people who don't conform to Erin's ideas!

Karth, we have enough trouble already. What we need now is not more "reproduction" of our species.

The largest single religious denomination in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, is adamant that we need to have more, bigger families and refuses to discuss the impact of such doctrines. Various protestant sects have similarly silly ideas, being most obvious with the Quiverfull movement. With powerful leaders advocating such irresponsible doctrines, there is little chance that we will do anything but bring disaster on our planet.

Betty Carter, thank you for your kind words - may we all be fortunate enough to marry a spouse who is better than we deserve!

J, then refute my arguments! I have plenty of people who just like to put the most negative spin on what I write and attack the caricature of me they've drawn in their minds, as Observer is illustrating here.

Tell me what marriage is. Tell me what you see as its reason for being, its purpose, its definition, its limits. Tell me how your understanding of marriage creates a positive cultural effect on our increasingly broken society. Go ahead--I'd like to hear it!

My belief is that the anger I get on this is because people *can't* do what I've just asked you to do. Why not? I know for some it's because the word "marriage" doesn't have a fixed meaning, or means only "whatever will be the most opposite to a traditional understanding of marriage," but if you really believe that there's a third option, something which is not-A and not-B that somehow manages to give a clear definition of marriage while protecting children yet making adult happiness primary (or whatever), then tell me what it is!

What is "C," J? How am I wrong when I see only two competing definitions, one of which will assuredly win out in our culture?

Observer,

I don't in fact believe in about half of what passes for "marriage" among heterosexuals -- the half that ends in divorce.

And I certainly don't believe in the one fourth to one fifth of "marriage" among heterosexuals in which adultery comes in.

If you aren't sure that you can be faithful, don't promise that you will be, by getting married.

If you make that promise, then you keep it -- or, at worst, if you come to be unsure that you can get, then you tell your spouse the truth, then take things from there, wherever they go.

This isn't astrophysics.

Erin, a partial answer to your plea...

Franklin Evans
June 26, 2009 12:28 PM

Marriage is a subset of mating. Human history has run the gamut of every combination and permutation imagined. By way of comparison: Some cultures did not consider a couple married until they proved that they were a fertile mating, the usual proof being the woman getting pregnant and giving birth. My comparison is simple: The modern morality around sex is a complete contradiction of that. And please, I intend no value judgments here...

But this and other comparisons should inform our discussion. We make assertions -- I'm as guilty as any -- that do not look beyond the personal or local scope. "Tradition" is very subjective. A person from one of those earlier cultures would consider any longstanding childless marriage immoral, for example.

====o====

Erin, the challenge here is not that we must refute one side or the other. The challenge is in approaching the topic objectively, and with conscious awareness and acknowledgement that we (you, I, everyone) project our beliefs and experiences into the topic.

Personal response: "C" is both A and B together, concurrently and with a dynamic balance that no one can control or predict. My anecdotal refutation of A "for the children" is personal and specific: If my eldest sister had not threatened my mother to disappear with us younger ones is my mother didn't tell Dad to leave, we were all going to finish the path to insanity. I ask you to trust me about that. My own healing included 13 months of therapy as an adult.

The abstract discussion has no value beyond defining the terms and suggesting paths of exploration. I, for one, and with all due respect, would take personal and extreme insult -- not to mention feeling threatened because of my narrow escape from permanent mental injury -- from anyone who thought my parents were wrong to divorce. Grain of salt, etc.

Observer, you can't seem to stop taking everything I write personally (and a bit petulantly, I might add).

I didn't criticize your son. I didn't define infertility, and if I did I would simply call it the inability to carry one's own child, which would certainly include people whose medical conditions make it inadvisable to do so. And I know fertile people who adopt, especially special-needs children, in addition to having their own children--one family I knew of had fourteen children in this way, and it was a beautiful thing. Yes, I do think artificial contraception is morally wrong, as my Church teaches, but that's not the subject of the present conversation, is it? And yes, I also think our contemporary attitudes about marriage and children do indeed risk reducing children to objects--but that's the part that you clearly disagree with. Fine--but I can't understand your constant need to get personal about it.

And yes, newsflash, I'm a Catholic who accepts Church teaching--all of it. Nobody ever gets petulant with me when I oppose torture or practically all uses of the death penalty based on the same teachings, though.

I dunno, I didn't have any problem with that. I took "under most circumstances" to be a reasonable qualifier. One could concoct all kinds of hypothetical scenarios.

Except that Rod, presumably, doesn't accept very many qualifiers, and, among those he does accept, I doubt the lack of repentance would be "reasonable".

Observer @ 2:18 PM writes:

“We don't need any further reproduction of our species. There are quite enough of us right now, and the population is still rising. (It has TRIPLED in my lifetime alone.) Unless some of the mechanisms suggested here (lowering birth rates and so forth) are not too little, too late, we are headed for a disastrous population crash and massive numbers of human deaths. “

Your demographics are off. It’s a fairly well-known fact, among professional population demographers at any rate, that fertility rates are falling in a great many countries. For most First World countries, the US being the lone exception, the fertility rate is actually below replacement level. Even in most Second and many Third World nations (Iran among them if memory serves), fertility rates are below replacement level. The real reason underlying the current population explosion in undeveloped places like Nigeria and Pakistan is a collapse in the death rate, not an increase in birth rates. People are being kept alive longer than they used to be, mostly through improvements in public health and sanitation. In the US and Western Europe, most of these improvements have already been made, which is why the so-called “demographic transition” did not visibly hit those areas very hard.

In truth, aging and de-population are likely greater long-term issues for the world as a whole, most especially in the area of providing pensions and medical care to all the newly expanding elder/beneficiary classes. Red China is expected to have a serious pension problem in the near term, as is Japan and Western Europe. Our difficulties here, while still very serious, aren’t a patch on the tail of what those countries are facing.

The other part of the problem is the education and training of those members of the upcoming productive age-cohorts. A trained mind is an economic asset; an untrained one a costly liability. The problem here is that the USA is going to be suffering more and more from a deficit in both the number and caliber of trained minds, thanks to a formal education system that has allowed hyper-egalitarian ideology and ethnic/racial hypersensitivity to replace the inculcation of actual skills and the training of intelligence as its guiding objectives, along with an informal (media-based) education system that is little more than an exercise in applied emotional engineering..

In short, what we need is the reproduction and training of the actually talented and skilled among our species. The beliefs, habits and practices that married, two-parent families tend to inculcate play no small part in this process. What we’ve got is the coddling and expansion of the non-productive elements, and the discouragement of those skills and talents we actually need. THAT is the real problem.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

C. S. Lewis has been cited, but not his most relevant comment (from the essay We have no "Right to Happiness" in God in the Dock)

"After all," said Clare, "they had a right to happiness."

We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighborhood. Mr. A., had deserted Mrs. A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs. B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr. A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr. A. and Mrs. B were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonably expect to be very happy. It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs. B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war.

It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs. B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs. A., too. She had lost her looks—and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life. You mustn't, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he'd sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. "But what could I do?" he said. "A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came."

So, Observer says marriage has no fixed meaning, and Franklin says meaning "C" is "both A and B together." Which is interesting in that it sees our contemporary state of tension between marriage's competing definitions as a permanent ideal--but again, history doesn't really show a healthy society in which that was the case for a long term.

I've been dabbling in Carle Zimmerman's "Family and Civilization" (which I should have finished a long time ago) and he convincingly illustrates how when competing definitions of the family co-exist in large numbers, usually one or the other will prevail. Zimmerman defined three family types: trustee, domestic, and atomistic, each with its own unique concepts of marriage, family obligations, family definition, power structure, relationship to the larger society, etc.

As I've been reading the book, I can't help but think we're on the verge of a new family type: the post-atomistic or, perhaps, the type of the anti-family. As a family is defined by its bonds, such as husband-wife, parent-children, extended family, and so on, so the new post-atomistic, or anti-family, type is defined by its insistence on retaining the self to the theoretical detriment of the larger bonds. There is nothing *ideally* (not circumstantially) seen as being worth preservation except the self and its present concept of happiness. Whatever must fall by the wayside for the protection of the self must simply fall, and there is to be nothing more said about it.

Such a type would seem to define someone like Sanford; for all the rhetoric he's given, it's clear to see that he persisted in his illicit relationship past all sanity or reason. But then it also defines those who enter marriage with the strong, articulated belief that they shouldn't have to give anything up from their single life, or "deal with" in-laws, or accept children as a feature of the relationship (e.g. that idea I mentioned that children are optional to marriage, not an important reason for it)--which means that it defines a lot of families today.

And, again, that's where I see the whole social construct of marriage breaking down. If marriage means whatever we want it to mean, can be dissolved at will, does not obligate the spouses toward each other or toward children, etc., then why have it? I think that the argument could be made by the post-atomistic types that marriage only makes the eventual separation more expensive and enriches lawyers--certainly it does not, in and of itself, make a relationship stronger, more permanent, or more conducive to the subjugation of the Self to the Other--which isn't really even seen as a goal, most of the time.

The problem with Erin and Lord Karth's analysis is that it leaves out a major component. Historically and in most societies, it is true that marriage was about children. It is also true that historically and in most societies marriage was about *property* - marriage (and reproduction) were central means of consolidating economic relationships - period.

As one historian observed in pre-modern Europe, marriages began about property arrangements between families, were in their middle period mostly about raising children, and ended, according to testaments and epitaphs, about love as people who had spent their lives together had developed deep ties of affection. Modern marriage, the same historian (and I honestly can't remember who it was) observed, began about love, in its middle was mostly about raising children and often ends (in divorce) as about property. But at no point has the economic relationship of marriage ever been fully separable from the reproductive purpose - there is plenty of historical evidence for this, ranging from the Jewish Ketubah to the early focus of Christian law on betrothal prices.

All of this historical evidence does include the economic protection of children, but it goes much further than that, making provision for the rights of childless widows and widowers, divorce where it was permitted (among other sources, the French historian Cyrille Vogel has found that divorce seems to have been fairly common in the early middle ages, and the formulae for permitting divorce were specifically Christian, ie, a loss of "caritas" for example), and the death of children. In many places and times, children were an uncertain outcome - many died in infancy, a woman or man might be infertile, and so the history of marriage is very, very clear that it is never just about children - it is about the economic alliance of two parties, and their families, about inheritance and property rights and economic status - and this is true in virtually all times and places, in families both poor and rich, although of course, there are better records for the rich.

The attempt to write a history of marriage that is not about property, money and extended family interests comes from both sides of the story - those interested most in unfettered sex insist that love is all that ever really mattered, while those most interested in sexual morality insist that children are all that ever really mattered. Neither is correct.

Erin's dualism makes no sense, placed in actual historical context. If marriage was never only about children, than the rights of adults to secure their status by marrying can't be a modern invention. While our reproductive options are mostly modern, they are not of a piece with the desire of adult heterosexuals to marry for status, property or security - one is modern, the other has been utterly intertwined with marriage throughout its history. Of course, admitting this is enormously problematic, because it requires acknowledging that gay couples that want to get married have a historical tie to the institution as a property arrangement. That, and the western insistence on romance as all is sufficient to justify trying to erase the past.

Marriage is an institution that has traditionally produced three things. Love, children and property rights. We get in trouble because we have two conflicting narratives in our society, liberal and conservative, the former denies the importance of the second two, the latter of the first and last - and both of them would prefer to deny that marriage is fundamentally an economic institution designed to enrich families - yes, offspring if they follow and survive, but also the two participants and their extended families. I do not think we have successfully eliminated the mercenary elements of marriage, we have merely denied them for our own political purposes.

As for adultery, I'm against it, obviously. I have had the miserable displeasure of watching a friend of mine (after the fact, I would have advised her otherwise, of course) have an affair with another mutual friend, a former teacher of mine. The process cost them both enormously - she lost her husband and her job (she was up for tenure and the event became public), he has effectively lost his children and his wife, both lost my respect, both spouses were deeply injured, all children involved incredibly hurt, each lost a whole host of friends and many of my circle were forced to choose sides, so a whole community was broken up. Both participants were economically impoverished with divorce, job loss, the loss of another source of revenue as it became known. Both participants are miserable. And the whole thing was entirely predictable - it is what happens when one has an affair. I have never even been tempted - I've yet to go anywhere where my husband wasn't the most appealing person in the room, but even were I to be, the loss of everything - love, children and economic security - would be too high a price to justify it.

Sharon Astyk

J wrote: "I could go on, but really, the main point here is that marriage is about two people who love each other formally seeking the community's recognition and support for their decision to commit their lives to one another. That is the starting point, and from that, worlds can follow."

J, all due respect, but as much as I appreciate that as a religious idea of what marriage is, what does the secular state have to do with it?

The state, as I've written many times before, doesn't care who you love. Nor does it care if you make a public commitment to that person.

The state cares about children (specifically, not ending up with the bill for children whose parents are derelict in their duties) and about legal notions like inheritance, etc. The state originally held the view that marriage wasn't just *any* commitment; it was intended to be permanent, and only the narrowest of exceptions and the most rigid or painful of processes allowed for the civil dissolution of a marriage (and many religions, not just Catholicism, frowned greatly upon civil divorce).

Now, though, with marriage becoming a very transient commitment with no *intrinsic* connection to children and parental obligations, why should the state get involved? What is the state's compelling interest in granting tax breaks, setting inheritance laws, etc. for what is essentially a transient and easily broken "commitment" that's barely even (in a legal sense) worthy of the word?

And what do we mean by "two people who love each other?" Karth pointed out above that the law is still old-fashioned enough to annul marriages where spouses are incapable of what used to be called "the marriage act" because the kind of love that was involved in marriage gave the spouses that specific right to engage in that specific act with each other. Gay marriage completely removes that property of marriage, since gay sex doesn't include that specific act of intercourse, so on what grounds do we tell the elderly spinster sisters who love each other non-sexually that their love isn't worthy of the name marriage--or the rights and privileges which flow from it?

The thing is, ideas have consequences. If the state--not the Quaker church, or any other religious body, but the state--defines marriage as "two people who love each other and say so publicly" then whole worlds, as you put it, follow. The love needn't be sexual at all, the people could include more than three, restrictions against marrying close relations are right out the door (especially since the marriage may be non-sexual, or if it is then any deformed children can be aborted easily early on, etc.)

And what does that mean for the whole of our culture? What effect does that have on the communities where fathers are already seen as needed only for their genetic material, and then not only unnecessary but a detriment? What does that mean for children?

I know we've gone round and round on this before, but this is the thing that frustrates me most--the shrugging over the idea that our hubristic tinkering with the foundational unit of society can possibly have any effect at all, let alone a negative effect, on the future of our culture and civilization.

Observer,

You're railing -- or rather flailing -- at some definition of "marriage" that is not the conventional one to which I hold, but is a strange and eccentric definition of your own, which I do not understand, and to which, therefore, I can't respond.

Much as I love Mr. Sig, I don't think he's a better husband than I "deserve." And he'd be the first to tell you that I've been the greatest source of well-being and happiness in his life, throughout our 38-year marriage. But I would never say I'm better than he deserved. Everyone deserves to be treated with honor, kindness and appreciation, and in the context of a love relationship, to be courted, desired, praised and supported. That should be the sine qua non of any relationship.

Marriage, as Franklin and others have pointed out, is a complex subject. I'm an expert on ONE marriage of long standing. I sometimes suspect I have no idea what other people are talking about when they say they "love" someone, because it doesn't seem to include most of the behavior listed above.

If I had to make a general statement, though, I'd say that most of our problems with family life arise from the construction of marriage in a patriarchal society. We pretend it's about love and/or children, when the reality reflects an arrangement designed to reinforce social hierarchies and esatablish male ownership of women and children. A family is a woman and her children, plus the kinship network she can mobilize for support. How a man fits into that natural system varies over time and culture. Our current system is an uneasy relic of a time when women were dependent on men for the resources they needed to support their children. In a traditional marriage like that of the Sanfords, seeing the man go outside the marriage for sex is a terrible threat to a woman and her children. The new relationship threatens to divert resources the mother needs for her children and herself, because she has made herself and them dependent on this man's goodwill. If he favors another woman, she loses.

His sexual activity outside marriage also threatens her self-esteem and social standing. Her well-being depends on her keeping a place at a man's side and partaking of his prestige. When he disrespects her for another woman, she is publicly humiliated and treated as a thing of little value. However she responds, she will be criticized and held up to ridicule.

If women were truly equal and able to support themselves and their children, a man would stay in relationship with a woman because he truly esteemed her and wanted to know and care for his own children. He would understand that if he disrespected the woman, she would have no incentive to cling to the relationship. Then it might make some sense to say that marriage was about love, commitment, and children.

Clinging to gender inequality and traditionalist power games, while spackling the cracks in the structure with hypocritical morality and commercialized romantic "love" is the best way to make sure there will be plenty of adultery and divorce for years to come.

Freelunch, I think you mistake my point. I was asking J to define what marriage ought to be in the secular, legal understanding. The answer was about Quaker weddings, and J's understanding of marriage based on that.

As a religious believer myself I have great sympathy for that. But the truth is I tend to agree with you, at least in the notion that marriage (secular) needs a definition that doesn't particularly talk about love, an unquantifiable state of emotion, will, or both that the state really isn't interested in at all.

So, again, what is marriage? What ought it to be? What does it do for a culture or society? Have we reached the point where civil marriage has completely outlived its cultural usefulness, since marriage does not mean permanent commitment or children or any of the things marriage used to be understood to mean?

I have a styrofoam clue-by-four, and I'm not afraid to use it!! ;-)

Observer: ...if it is a "beautiful thing" when heterosexual couples adopt children (especially "special needs" children, so normal children who have been abandoned need not apply) why is it so terrible when single parents or same sex couples perform those very same adoptions? [emphasis by FE]

That is such a patently false and straw statement that I'm sincerely shocked that you, Observer, would write such a thing. There are waiting lists for healthy-child adoptions. There is a list of special-needs children needing adopting. Don't take my word for it, look up the statistics.

If there are flaws in the system (there certainly are) and healthy children end up waiting for adoption (and they do) you cannot blame it on what Erin said.

Erin: ...and Franklin says meaning "C" is "both A and B together." Which is interesting in that it sees our contemporary state of tension between marriage's competing definitions as a permanent ideal--but again, history doesn't really show a healthy society in which that was the case for a long term. [emphasis by FE]

Would you please reread my post, my friend? I even bolded the part you misrepresented in your response; even the loosest semantic analysis of my words cannot support describing them "together". Indeed, "dynamic balance" is specific while "both together" is completely ambiguous given our context. Further the "state of tension" has been a fact of marriage customs forever. Some of our greatest art derives from it... dare I mention as a start Romeo and Juliet? What about the triangle of Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra? Actually, I'd expect you to be able to name more examples than I could.

Erin has cleverly, and from her position, wisely, refused to engage my questions about adoption of children.

Adoption in her view is bad bad, because the ability to adopt children compromises the reproduction nature of marriage. (I think that's her view. She's so incoherent it's kind of hard to tell.) On the other hand, she really doesn't have the nerve to say so in so many words.

MargaretE, I don't know Jenny Sanford personally, but I have read about her. It seems to me that everything you say of her is true. Why, then, did she place all her remarkable skills and talents at the service of her husband's political career, rather than working in her own right? She clearly thought that her support would be reciprocated--in fact, she bet the farm on it. Had she sought a career of her own, instead, she would now have her own investments, her own retirement plan, her own career path. She would not have needed to keep quiet about her husband's misbehavior because to speak up would jeopardize everything she worked for--without pay or official recognition. I think you are supporting my point rather than refuting it. I hope, for her sake, that what you say of her financial resources is also true, because she will need them when her husband is out of a job. Most women who take the path she followed end up far worse off.

I agree that she SHOULD have the respect of everyone who has watched her, and I hope that everyone who knows her will treat her with respect. But if you think that the general public isn't criticizing her, then you don't read much opinion on the internet. Her picture is being posted next to that of the Argentinian girlfriend, accompanied by commentary on which of them is more sexually attractive, plus speculation on what failings on her part may have "caused" her husband to stray. Perhaps that doesn't seem humiliating to you. I would not care to be placed in that position through no choice of my own.

In a traditional marriage like that of the Sanfords, seeing the man go outside the marriage for sex is a terrible threat to a woman and her children. The new relationship threatens to divert resources the mother needs for her children and herself, because she has made herself and them dependent on this man's goodwill. If he favors another woman, she loses.

Of course this is true in the general case, but all here will be relieved to learn that Mrs. Sanford is an heir to the family that founded the Skil Corporation of Chicago which makes power tools and will not hurt financially if the marriage ultimately fails.

As usual, Rod has shared with us a deeply emotional, slightly fey post from his own planet, which isn't exactly in the orbit where the rest of us live. Adultery is a bad thing; pretty much every culture accepts that, always has. I see no evidence that there is more adultery in the USA at present than in the past; there is unquestionably more open sexuality, plus endless talking about it, deviancy (all kinds, not just same-sex), cohabitation, and above all divorce.

Anyone who wants to confront the sordid truth of American quasi-private life in this century must look closely at the divorce-industrial complex, which is run largely for the benefit of women. The facts are easily available. No-fault divorce has been a dubious thing for women, a bad thing for men, and a catastrophic thing for children, across racial and economic strata. Before Rod and the other Church Ladies get too medieval on obvious dirtbags like Gov Sanford (and Sen Ensign, the list gets longer by the depressing day), I suggest they take a close look at WHY there are so many kids without dads around. Sadly,, many are men whose wives abandoned the marriage without real cause and left the men without their children; for all this their is little legal recourse in our "justice" system. Do not forget that any father who tries to take on the evil system and actually demand equal rights as a parent will quickly be labeled a "criminal" and, of course, "deadbeat dad".

Think about it, before it happens to you.

Jillian,

A beautiful post.

No one, myself included, is saying that love as a feature of marriage is unimportant or irrelevant, or even that it's not something that is very, very beautiful.

But again, I get back to this: marriage is a secular, state-licensed arrangement. How, pray tell, is the state supposed to measure a couple's love? How are our marriage laws supposed to reflect the notion that helping another person reach his/her true potential because we really, really care about him/her (sex, as some have pointed out, is as optional to marriage as children are) is the purpose of marriage? And is there any compelling reason for the state to limit such love-relationships to two people, to non-relatives, or in any other way so long as we're talking about consenting adults?

More to the point, and I've asked this many times: what is the state's compelling interest in interfering with people's loves, how they define them, how many or what gender people they wish to commit to, etc.? Why have civil marriage at all, if it serves no cultural or societal purpose whatsoever? I mean, why not have some legal state called "teamism" in which people can form teams, romantic or not, sexual or not, with as many people as they like for as long as they like, and be given some tax breaks, hospital visiting privileges, and an easy way to spell out inheritance rights that doesn't require or expect permanent commitment, child rearing responsibility, or anything else that no longer means much to our culture, and certainly has nothing to do with this thing we call marriage?

I like the idea of teamism's. We should be able to formulate teams, with tax breaks and legal hospital rights. That's a great idea! Let's leave the "sacred" and "holy" to Churches and then we can say we are married on Sundays and a team every other day of the week. I bet the divorce rate would drop drastically if we got rid the word marriage and replaced it with team.

In case anyone from the technical side is monitoring these boards, I can no longer access the BeliefNet blogs using Safari. I'm currently using Mozilla Firefox instead.

In Safari I got this message:

"Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

Apache Server at bnplblweb04.beliefnet.com Port 80"

(Sorry to clutter the board, Rod. I just figure some regular posters might be shut out if they don't have Firefox on their Macs.)

Before the 1960s the illegitimacy rate was much lower and in many respects the middle-class did better in the 1950s than they have in the last 20 years, but...

I don't think there's that much evidence adultery was rarer than. Child abuse certainly seems to have been much more common then. When people of that generation talk of their parents they pretty often seem to be much less fond of them than I am my own parents. And by "people of that generation" I'm not mean "whining liberal hippie" types. I'm meaning people born during WWII who think Vatican II was too liberal and that kids these days are spoiled brats.

Also illegitimacy was lower, in part, because when a teen got pregnant she married. The rate of teenage pregnancy was actually higher in the 1950s then now going by World Almanac.

And I'm going to stop there. I thought it had gotten better, but the site still kicks me off the Internet. I need to think if it's worth it.

Spambalaya, I had exactly the same problem! I could still access Beliefnet through FIrefox, but not with Safari. I couldn't figure out how to get around it. I tried Franklin's suggestion, but no one ever got back to me. Possibly you'd have better luck. What I did do, in the end, was delete all the cookies related to Beliefnet. Then it worked again.

>So, while I admit I reacted hotly and wrongly
>to the Sanford situation, declaring him to be
>unworthy of his wife and kids (something I
>can't know and oughtn't to have said), what
>that tells me is I need to be more prudent
>about posting my first reactions to these
>things, and ought to work towards being more
>merciful to those who have fallen.

What a kind and decent admission. You are a credit to your faith.

cheers,

Michael

What I don't understand is how anyone with kids at home even has TIME to engage in an extramarital affair??

I remember a former pastor at our church (Bruce Larson--r.i.p.) whose sermons I loved a great deal, commented to us all that "I haven't cheated on my wife...yet."

By this he was not saying that he ever wanted to. Or that anyone ever should. It was his way of staying humble about it; of acknowledging that he or anyone could fall into the trap if they weren't strongly on guard against it. I "got it". Because temptation happens (even Jesus experienced it). We were not to be prideful (after all, what happens before a fall....?)about not having cheated on our spouses; we were to be glad we hadn't and to remember to firmly guard our hearts against it in order to keep being able to say "I haven't cheated on my wife...yet." It was awesome.

Erin, Franklin Evans and Jillian have explained that the State is not recording marriages for the purposes of measuring the couple's "love" but for securing property rights - including inheritance and child support.

Could you please stop propping up that Straw Man whenever marriage is discussed?

Thanks...

Rod, I agree with you completely about how watered down the marriage commitment has gotten. It IS a big deal but people don't respect it. Very sad when kids are involved in divorce. Devastating. Sanford seems so totally foolish that of course our first reactions are scorn. Those emails are soooooooooooooooo bad. I mean, the guy is supposed to be the leader of an entire STATE and sneaks off to another country, turning his back on his wife and kids....this IS a very bad thing and is worthy of condemnation. It's ludicrous. His ego inflation is obvious in every sentence of the emails, his references to his high position in the GOP, his "sophisication" and world travels, the idea that he really DID have the world by the ass, and threw it away! It's just so damn stupid. You don't need to apologize for feeling indignant about this man's lousy behavior. It used to be that social disapproval like this helped to keep people in line; those were better days for obvious reasons. Now, there is no shame to keep people from doing stupid things. It's sad.

A societal rule or 'norm' is set by the common agreement of individuals with each other to form a group or 'guild'. Society has been living by the rules of the Marriage Guilds for far too long who put forth the benefits of marriage. The quid-pro-quo of marriage for the state and society is that people get married, raise children (providing cannon fodder and taxpayers and buying more houses) for the greater good, etc, and agree to abide by the same rules that have been in place for thousands of years and are influenced by how we pass on those rules. Now that the divorce rate is 50% or more, and adultery is even higher, then why do we not just change the rules a little and get over the sensationalism that the news media is using simply to sell cars (and other junk)? Let's simply say that what we need is not marriages at all, but families. The state should issue a family license for any two people who intend to take care of a third person or more. No more of these fictional agreements between two people in order to 'buy' the romanticism. Sure, people can continue to get married in sub-groups in churches and flowered fields, etc., but the main issue should be that a marriage agreement for two people to only have sex with each other is not a State issue, and it shouldn't be treated as a catastrophe when the agreement goes sour any more than when I buy something and try to take it back to the store or if I decide I want to ride two different motorcycles.
Look at the mileage obtained from this story, and you see that one person's all-too-human failings do not make a threat to the human race, and they should not be treated as such.
Moving on...

This post is about to drop off the bottom of the page and go into the "Archives", and people are moving on to talk about other stuff, but I wanted to reply to Erin.

J, all due respect, but as much as I appreciate that as a religious idea of what marriage is, what does the secular state have to do with it? [...]

The state cares about children (specifically, not ending up with the bill for children whose parents are derelict in their duties) and about legal notions like inheritance, etc. [...]

Now, though, with marriage becoming a very transient commitment with no *intrinsic* connection to children and parental obligations, why should the state get involved? What is the state's compelling interest in granting tax breaks, setting inheritance laws, etc. for what is essentially a transient and easily broken "commitment" that's barely even (in a legal sense) worthy of the word?

Does the state really need a "compelling interest" beyond the fact that families benefit from marriage and the state can provide that benefit at relatively low cost? Is there some reason why we need to go to great lengths to justify the existence of marriage? I still don't understand your view on this, which seems to imply that there's only a fixed quantity of "marriage" out there, we need to save it for only the most deserving people, and we can't afford to waste a drop of it on others.

But, if you insist, yes, providing for the support of children is one compelling state interest. Another is providing for the support of the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. Insofar as married couples are able to care for each other in times of need, they reduce the likelihood or degree of dependence on the community or the state.

If the state's only interest in marriage were supporting children, we'd let any same-sex or opposite-sex couple marry (if they were planning on having or adopting children) and there'd be no reason to let 78-year-old widower Sam marry his new fiancee, 75-year-old widow Jane. (Maybe we'd even revoke marriages for couples once their children are grown up?)

In any case, this is all getting further off the point. I'm not interested in a legalistic, persnickety argument about who we can justify allowing to marry and who should be denied.

I first commented in this thread (see comment on June 26, 2009 12:17 PM above) to make one brief point. Social conservatives (like Erin) tend to lump together all sorts of different issues and treat them as inseparable (see Erin's comment at June 26, 2009 2:20 PM, in which she perfectly illustrates this process). That's why Erin keeps citing the failures of opposite-sex marriage (divorce, adultery, etc.) as reasons to prevent same-sex couples from marrying.

But this argument makes no sense to other people. I don't see any plague of divorce or out-of-wedlock births in my very progressive, pro-same-sex-marriage community. I do notice that divorce rates are relatively low in "blue" states and high in "red" states, and I recall that 2001 Barna study showing that divorce rates are higher among conservative Christians than among more theologically liberal denominations or unbelievers. The statistics of this are complicated and I'm not actually arguing that social conservative views lead to divorce, but I am tired of being told by social conservatives that their values are so much better than the rest of ours.

"I need to be more prudent about posting my first reactions to these things, and ought to work towards being more merciful to those who have fallen."

Rod, you have 'needed' this for many years now. You constantly speak of the 'grace' you receive during the High Holy Week, yet you instantly revert to the nasty the moment Easter ends. Whatever means to make it 'take', you should pursue. Your uncharitableness does not speak well of your "Christianity".

Erin,

"I think traditionally adoption by infertile couples was *not* done because children were seen as objects or accessories, but because the longing for children was so strong a component of marriage that finding out one was incapable of having a child led to the discernment to raise someone else's child whose parents were not able or not interested in doing so."

This applies equally to homosexual couples, though I'm sure you would disagree, Erin.

If my wife ever committed adultery, under most circumstances (i.e., true contrition and repentance), I would hasten to forgive her, not only because I love her that strongly, but also because I would see it as my duty, in love, to do whatever I could to make our marriage whole again, for the sake of the children. That said, I honestly don't know if I could live with myself if I were unfaithful to my wife, nor do I imagine myself capable of receiving her forgiveness. I know that is disordered,...

Yes, it is disordered. And your willingness to give a pass to female infidelity is at least as socially destructive an attitude as the male genetic pre-disposition to polygamy.