Marital rape and marital duty

Over the centuries when Christian morals were accepted and enforced by society and the state, though details varied, sex outside of marriage was illegal and actually punished.

Both adultery and fornication were crimes.

Divorce was impossible or, where Protestants controlled, allowed only for adultery proved in open court with a publicly identified correspondent.

Lawsuits were possible for alienation of affection.

The only moral and sometimes only lawful purpose of marriage and sex being procreation, and both parties to a marriage having quite literally forsaken all others as possible partners in marriage, procreation, and sex, marriage could be annulled for male impotence or established infertility of either party.

And of course contraception as well as sexual practices that could not result in pregnancy were viewed as profoundly corrupt, immoral, and sinful, and so were illegal, as abortion was.

Marriage itself was considered a moral, if not a legal, duty for all who did not elect religious celibacy.

And sexual availability within marriage was a moral and legal duty of both parties, sometimes coercible by civil or ecclesiastical authority.

All of this, of course, was reflected and supported by a very thorough, intolerant, and repressive moral censorship of culture, high and low, elite and mass.

When the state, the church, and the public truly and profoundly share those beliefs and attitudes, there can be no such crime as marital rape.

Just another glimpse of what the culture war is all about.

And what conservatives have defended as "upholding marriage," over the centuries and even quite recently.

All of this was reality throughout the Occident as recently as the first half of the 20th Century.

And so in living memory.

That was the reality of "The Greatest Generation," for example, and the generation of The Great War.

Imagine that.

P.S.

It is notorious that, at least through Stalin's reign, communism in Russia vigorously enforced laws regarding sex and marriage, and taught a suitable morality, not far at all from Christian tradition.

Likewise, the Enlightenment did not attack any of this.

On the contrary.

From Voltaire to at least the mid-20th Century, liberals themselves, at least publicly, accepted and supported not just Christian morality but its enforcement by society and the state.

O tempora! O mores!

P.P.S.

In the news lately has been an Irish home for unwed mothers run right into the 1960's where a mass grave containing several hundred corpses of illegitimate children was found.

Homes for unwed mothers were all over the Occident right up to the mid-20th Century.

Perhaps not all such places of horror.

The Irish reporter who broke the story clearly had problems with the existence of such a place and dissaproved of the "society of shame" that produced it.

Despite decades of forthright liberal and feminist efforts through public onslaughts of organized fury and various other devices to turn ours into just such a society of shame regarding thoughts and deeds they disapprove.

P.P.P.S.

Before the middle of the 20th Century, in movies and pop culture holy water and crucifixes were a perfectly efficacious defense against vampires.

Not any more.