Throwing out the puzzle and keeping only once piece.

From Twitter:

Julia Ioffe

@juliaioffe

· 21h

If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone? /end

Oh, Julia, you naive feminist victim a lack of historical knowledge.

Santayana warned us, of course, that “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it."    Would that more would remember the sage's maxim that

 Old standards existed for a real reason.

Not every standards that used to apply to human behavior and institutions needs to be retained for all time, but it's a mistake to believe that they existed at whim.  There's trend, fashion, and fancy, and then there's long term standards.

From time to time, almost every society throws off a bunch of old standards.  When they do that, they usually declare them to have been irrelevant for all time, but they hardly ever are.  They were there for a reason.  Sometimes, they no longer apply, but that's because something deeply fundamental has changed.  Other times, the underlying reason keeps on keeping on and the reason for it tends to be rediscovered, slowly, as if its a new discovery.  People fail to think about the deep basis for standards, the really deep ones, at their behavior.  Again, that doesn't mean that some shouldn't be changed, or should never have come into existence, but even in those rare instances careful thought should be given to the matter so that the basic nature of the underlying error can be understood.

Yes, old standards exist for a reason.

Of course, in this era in the Western World, which we might add makes up less than half the human population. . . and which the largest culture on earth is firmly convinced is crashing into obsolesce. . . and which is declining in population and relevance every day. . we've forgotten why standards exist as we're at the point where we no longer regard ourselves as any part of the natural world, even while everything else has to be natural.  Now framed in law, in which the Supreme Court issued a George Carlinesque like opinion on marriage being about "love", and firmly rooted in our culture, we've forgotten, as Ms. Loffe clearly has, what the law was.*

So a primer for the benighted forgetful.

Let's repeat the question:

If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone? /end

Well, Ms. Joffe, we did.  Up until the same "progressive" line of thought that gave us nationwide abortion through Roe v. Wade had the law changed.

Let's go through that.

Throughout the United States, up until the mid 20th Century, the state of the law was as follows:

• It was illegal for a male/female couple to cohabitate without being married.  When brought to the law's attention, it was common for the Court to order the couple to marry within a short time frame or face incarceration, or;
• The state simply recognized their cohabitation as a marriage, that being the "common law marriage".

Why?

Well not because the law took the Kennedyesque view that it wished for a thousand rose petaled marriages to bloom or something.  It didn't want to pay for kids or the old.

Eh?

Yup.

Here's how that worked.  The logic of the law was:

• Cohabiting male/female couples have sex.
• Sex produces babies.
• Somebody has to pay to feed, clothe and educate the babies.
• The state wanted that to be the people who made them, not the state.

Hence, a whole host of laws, sometimes somewhat mockingly called "heart balm" laws, that were designed to force people making babies to pony up for them, so the state didn't have to.

And, before the state, society, when societies weren't very mobile and all made up of members of the same culture, took the same view.  I.e, you weren't going to easily get away with getting somebody pregnant and not paying for it back in the day. . .any day. . . up until now.

Added to that, here's another set of shockers.

• People get old and die.
• Most couples don't die simultaneously.
• The young have to at some point pay for themselves.

And these concerns also brought us marriage laws, in that they provided that one spouse died:

• The surviving spouse, who had to keep paying for themselves, needed something, and that was usually farm ground, to keep on paying for themselves; but
• Children needed to be able to pay for themselves too.

So the surviving adult inherited half the estate, and the children usually inherited the other half.

Anthony Kennedy, who never had to look at the rear end of a mule while working behind a plow, may have had the luxury in his life to believe that marriage is all about "love".  But that's bullshit.

Now, it's the case that most married couples do love each other.  It's also the case that the divorce rate is much lower than generally believed.  And ideally people come together because of love, as the only romances that are free of pain of some sort are those that are Shakespearean brief and infantile.  No matter how you slice it, humans fall in love, and that's all part of this picture.

But in the modern world, somehow, that picture has become like a picture made into a puzzle, and then legal progressivism throughout the entire puzzle save for one piece, the "love" one.

Well, sorry, love is part of that puzzle, but the entire picture is more like a classic Baroque or late Medieval one in which love is in there, but so is sex, and so is death.

And so is the state.

So the old law provided, "hey. . . if you guys are going to . . . well you know, go ahead, but we're binding you to each other".

Then the legal reformers came about and held that things were just too tough on the minority of couples whose relationships fell apart, and further reasoned that the state was making it too hard on the minority of couples whose relationships had gone really bad to separate.  

No-fault divorce came in.

And the Supreme Court discovered that in the fading print of the Constitution there was a double secret implied "right to privacy" that the framers hadn't known about, and it was about sex.  Who knew?

And while that was going on, Masters and Johnson created their S.L.A. Marshall research quality fantasy, and Hugh Hefner followed with his big boobed tarts.**

And we were on our way to creating absolute sexual license, . . . but for men only.  And now we're in the situation where we wonder:

If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone? /end

Like the Me Too movement, the irony is so think you'd have to cut it with a carbide reinforced industrial saw.  We've reached the point where the progressives, looking at the mess of progressivism, openly ponder if a standard can be created, with that standard being the one they dismantled.

*A reference to Carlin's "Hippy Dippy Weatherman".