And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun.
The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close.
It wasn't. And that means something. How did the nation elect a convicted felon who hung out with a procurer and who is a creepy serial polygamist, who also is likely sliding into dementia, as President of the United States?
Well, there are a lot of views out there. We offer ours, including some things we noted early on.
1. It turns out that we were correct that Biden shouldn't have run in the first place, and that Harris shouldn't have stepped into the breach.
Biden was supposed to be a caretaker President. "Go with the Joe you know" only made sense as long as it was just one cup of coffee. People didn't want a refill. Biden was supposed to carry on for four years while the nation got back on its feet from a traumatic Trump presidency and figured out where to go next.
Biden's diehard insistence on running again doomed that, and in some ways, the Democrats chances in 2024.
Biden, in his defense, was dealt a bad hand right from the onset. Left with an economy impacted by COVID, he had to deal with it, and he did a good job. The inflation that caused was not of his making, and he actually pulled off a soft landing. In the future, he's likely to be regarded as having pulled an economic rabbit out the hat.
And his rallying to the cause of Ukraine is singularly responsible for the country not being overrun by the Russians.
But people are stupid about economics, and stupidly believe that once inflation slows, prices return to the pre inflation norm, which actually required deflation, which generally causes a depression. That tar baby is now Trump's, as Trump won't be able to pull that off either.
More than that, however, Biden's advanced age was showing, whereas its seemingly not as noticeable with Trump. It was real hubris of Biden to run for a second term, and he shouldn't have done it. That set the Democrats behind.
When he finally stepped out, I noted that the time that Harris shouldn't step in. She did. She actually also ran a much better campaign than I initially thought she would. Frankly, I don't know that I can blame her for running, or blame the Democrats for running her. She proved to be too easy to tag with the issues that had hurt Biden, however, which did not make up the reasons that I thought she should not have run.
2. It's actually the social issues, stupid.
El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.
Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.
El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.
People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above. But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.
Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution. The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality. That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time. Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons. Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.
At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality. In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored. It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.* A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.
The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed. That's a big part of what occured. Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear. It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.** This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.
You have to know the times you live in.
3. What we repeatedly said about abortion being a hill to die on was correct.
Hell Courtesan by Kawanabe Kyōsai.
Part of the solid evidence of the Democrats being marooned in a post Vietnam War liberal past is the absolute adherence to swimming in a sea of blood.
I warned earlier that grasping tight to abortion was a critical mistake for Democrats, but they saw it as a great issue, one that would turn women out to vote in favor of infanticide.
Instead, what it did was to force truly adherent Christians to vote against them, even if not to vote for Harris. I was one of them. I voted for the American Solidarity Party. I would have anyhow, but in a state that was close, this cost the Democrats votes. It may very well have cost them the election.
Ironically, and the Democrats failed to grasp it, Donald Trump's wishy washiness on this helped him. Lots of Evangelicals and even Catholics could rationalize voting for him as he seemed to be against abortion, sort of. Hadn't his court brought Dobbs around? And Republican women who otherwise adhered to the American Civil Religion could rationalize voting for pro abortion ballot measures while voting for trump, essentially voting for the things they were comfortable with from the 1970s, like abortion and birth control, while voting against homosexuality and transgenderism.
Indeed, the entire religiosity of the Trumpites is much like this, although not of the National Conservatives. They're okay with cheating men, up to a limit, premarital sex, and divorce, as long as the plumbing matches. They aren't okay with homosexuality. Truly religious voters were never supportive of abortion, which Harris leaned deeply into.
Democrats should have known that and figures out a way to deal with it. Even simply taking the same position as Trump, let the states deal with it, would have leveled the choice for many. Or they could have just remained completely silent in the election on abortion and transgenderism, which would have caused some votes to swing their way.
If the Democrats don't modify their position on abortion, they're not going to do better in 2028.
4. What we noted as long ago as 2016 about ignoring rust belt issues is still true.
We noted a long time ago that Trump's 2016 victory was brought about in part due to a massive discontent over immigration issues and American jobs going overseas. Both Democrats and Republicans were complicit in this for years.
The problem here is that this festering sore has become infected, and crossed from discontent into malevolence. Basically, its much like small town Germans thinking that a local Jewish butcher was odd, to thinking he's in league with evil. This has been downright scary.
Democrats woke up to the problem of decades long mass illegal immigration, but too late. Now, it appears, we're about to engage in a mass immorality.
This one was a hard one for the Democrats. Biden screwed up early in his administration on this issue. Harris was tarred with it. It would have taken a different candidate to distance from it, perhaps, quite frankly, a Hispanic one. There are solutions, but some of them are quite out of the box, very pre 1940, and a bit drastic.
Likewise, Trump introduced his absurd tariffs concept. The idea is underdeveloped and economically flaccid. But Rust Belt people don't care as in their minds if electric vehicles don't come in from China, 1965 Chevrolet Impalas will come back. This won't happen, and this will rapidly prove to be incorrect.
Dedicated in 1902 as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, this cathedral was renamed the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe in 1977, when another aging Dallas church dedicated to the Lady of Guadalupe was torn down. This cathedral has the second largest parish congregation in the United States.
Democrats in the 1960s abandoned white Southern racists in favor of the minorities of the time, much to their credit. Up until that time, African Americans had been Republicans. Democrats remembered that Italian American and Irish Americans had been, and were, theirs.
But they failed to notice that Roe v. Wade shattered the Catholic immigrant retained vote of earlier eras. For some reason, they didn't grasp that retaining abortion and embracing transgenderism and abortion would come to offend large groups of American, and even immigrant, Hispanics, who had a similar Catholic morality. And they didn't grasp that at the pew level, this was also true for the Black Church and many African Americans, who came to resent having their cause compared to ones based on sexual orientation or practice.
They also forgot that minority adherence to patronage only lasts as long as poverty does. Once a demographic moves into the Middle Class, it begins to disappear within a generation or two. Irish Americans and Italian Americans were once solidly Democratic. This hasn't been the case for a long time. Hispanics have been moving out of poverty, and so have African Americans.
And Hispanic Americans, which are a diverse group to start with.
This left the Democratic party a party of old Boomers, and the white upper middle class, and lower upper class, white, effete, elites. They're aren't enough of them to win an election.
Footnotes
*The Nazis ended up sending homosexuals to the death camps. They were highly resistant to women working, and only relented on it as the war began to go very badly. They'd also encourage pregnancy, including out of wedlock, by German women, which was definitely contrary to traditional Christian morality.
This is of note, not because there will be death camps, but because Germans voting on morality issues didn't get what they bargained for at all. Americans doing the same in the 2024 election are likely to find they may be surprised.
**As an example, while at the county courthouse to vote early, I encountered an elderly man wearing a MAGA hat who was informing people that transgenderism "wasn't invented here", whatever that would mean, and that this was a reason to vote for Trump.
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.
As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for hert to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
So husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.
“For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.
St. Paul, Ephesians, Chapter 5.
As the old phrase goes, fools rush in where angles fear to tread, and my commenting here is, I am well aware, completely foolish.
I know next to nothing about domestic law, and even less than that. I've never experienced any aspect of it myself personally, I don't delve into it regularly at work, but on odd occasion I, like every lawyer, must.
I don't like it when I have to.
When a civil litigator takes a look at domestic law, he often tends to be shocked. I was that way when I looked into the topic of grandparent's rights some years ago. The opponent was also shocked when I started treating the case like heavy duty civil litigation. What the heck? Well, the case ended up changing that area of the law after years of the domestic practitioners just doing the "well, that's the way we do this".
Not anymore.
Recently I've been looking at divorce law for a tangential reason, and once again I'm shocked and appalled.
Wyoming uses "no fault" divorce, like most states.
Or maybe it doesn't. More on that below.
No fault was the biggest insult to the law ever created and a knife to the gut of society.
Illustration of No-Fault Divorce. The petitioner is taking a blade to the gut of a helpless defendant.
The legislative stupidity in this area, however, started some time before that. As such things often do, the story has a "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" aspect to it.
Let's go way back.
At least during the state's territorial days, court's would occasionally order a cohabitating couple to marry. This led me to assume that cohabitation of unmarried couples was illegal, and perhaps it was, but I've not found any statutory basis for that. I haven't researched it in depth, either. Fornication was a crime in many states, however, and it might have therefore been one in Wyoming. Additionally, Wyoming imperfectly adopted the Common Law upon statehood, and for that reason court's may have felt they had the authority to address cohabitation, which normally would result in a marriage by fiat (Common Law Marriage). At least right around the time of statehood there was a statute that addressed this topic in the "statutory rape" context, but the fairly shocking provisions of it were that the ages addressed were 10 years of age for a girl, and 14 for a boy. I.e., a 14-year-old boy was expressly prohibited by law from having intercourse with a ten-year-old girl, and would be tried for rape if he did. Apparently the scriveners of the law in the Dakotas, which is where we obtained our first set of statutes, felt differently about very tender ages than we might. Having said that, the bill in the legislature last year which provided:
(a) At the time of marriage the parties shall be at least sixteen (16) years of age except as otherwise provided.
(b) All marriages involving a person under sixteen (16) years of age are prohibited and voidable, unless before contracting the marriage a judge of a court of record in Wyoming approves the marriage and authorizes the county clerk to issue a license therefor.
(c) When either party is a minor, no license shall be granted without the verbal consent, if present, and written consent, if absent, of the father, mother, guardian or person having the care and control of the minor. Written consent shall be proved by the testimony of at least one (1) competent witness.
Surprisingly, this bill was met with opposition. Before that, ages below age 16 were allowed with the Court's consent, and amazingly, there had apparently been a few instances of that occurring over the last decade.
The change, anyhow, was in my view, a good one. Most people would agree.
Up until 1941, Wyoming had a set of "heart balm" statutes providing for common decency, common sense, protection of the common good, and which were fundamentally grounded in the laws of society and nature. In that year, just months before the Japanese would cause the balance of human decency to be to exaggerated towards oblivion, the 1941 Wyoming legislature eliminated them, stating:
The remedies heretofore provided by law for the enforcement of actions based upon alleged alienation of affection, criminal conversation, seduction and breach of contract to marry, having been subjected to grave abuses, causing extreme annoyance, embarrassment, humiliation and pecuniary damage to many persons wholly innocent and free of any wrong-doing, who were merely the victims of circumstances, and such remedies having been exercised by unscrupulous persons for their unjust enrichment, and such remedies having furnished vehicles for the commission or attempted commission of crime and in many cases having resulted in the perpetration of frauds, it is hereby declared as the public policy of the State that the best interests of the people of the State will be served by the abolition of such remedies. Consequently, in the public interest, the necessity for the enactment of this article is hereby declared as a matter of legislative determination.
1941 Wyo. Sess. Laws ch. 36 § 1.
Horse shit.
The thing about the "heart balm" statutes is that they heavily weighted the importance of the male/female relationship in a legal and cautionary way. The causes of action were varied, but all of a similar nature. There was 1) breach of contract to marry (breach of promise), 2) alienation of affection, 3) criminal conservation, and 4) seduction. This mean that there were real consequences for failing to seriously undertake the relationship from the onset, and in failing to take care of it. Rarely noticed on this, the penalties fell more often on men, than women, but protected both.
What were these causes of action?
We'll take a closer look.
The proposal.
Breach of promise.
Breach of contract to marry, or as it was more often called, "breach of promise", was a unilateral broken engagement. The non-breaching party was entitled to receive damages that included the benefits were that were to be had from the marriage and specific injuries to the plaintiff, including humiliation and psychological injury.
In the view of us moderns, this seems Victorian and quaint, but it was anything but. Prior to birth control, relationships between men and women were, we might say, deadly serious. While the social standards, based on Christian concepts and morality, meant that sex before marriage was frowned upon, and while it was also the case that a high percentage of people, particularly women, did not engage in sex before marriage, things began to break down when couples engaged and people knew it. This does not mean to suggest that people behaved like they do now, as they certainly did not.
Engagement periods seem to have lasted a year or so, although there wasn't any set period. One period etiquette book provided:
There are exceptions to the rules which govern engagements, as well as other things; but as in other cases, the exception only proves the wisdom and justice of the rule. There have been happy marriages after a few days' or even hours' acquaintance, and there have been divorces and broken lives after engagements which have existed for years. The medium, therefore, may be considered the best plan to pursue; namely, an engagement which is neither too short nor too long, but just sufficient to make a broad and easy stepping-stone between the old life and the new. The result of a very short engagement depends upon the strength and genuineness of character in the individuals, while the haste with which they have consummated so important a step says but little for their wisdom or prudence. A hasty and ill-advised marriage is a bad beginning in life. A very long engagement, on the contrary, is an eternity of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and it is much harder for the engaged girl than for the engaged young man who is "a laggard in love". She has to wait usually, while he works actively, bringing himself into new relations, obtaining new experiences, and in many ways living a life which she can not share, and which is more than likely to interpose a barrier between their mutual sympathy and confidence, and cause them to drift apart from each other.
Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette, Martha Louise Rayne, Detroit: Tyler & Co., 1881.
There was more to it than that, however. Close contact of this type was going to lead to something with some people. Therefore, with a broken engagement, the female participant would be potentially at least slightly tainted in some fashion, either regarded as "ruined" or regarded as an obviously difficult and unmarriageable person. There was a flip side to this, which we'll address below.
Additionally, in an era in which women had limited career opportunities, getting engaged set a woman on a certain financial course whose sudden end could be devastating economically. It was assumed, naturally enough, that during the engagement she'd sworn off other suitors, many of whom would have moved on in the meantime. Indeed, amongst the very old even now you'll frequently read stories of very elderly "first loves" reuniting, showing that whatever went wrong early on had forced them into other paths, even if they obviously retained affection for each other.
Seduction
The flipside of breach of promise, this tort sounds obvious, but in practice it was less so. The tort allowed an unmarried woman's father - or other person employing her services - to sue for the loss of these services when she became pregnant and could no longer perform them. We recently saw an example of this being played out on the Canadian World War Graphic History blog in an entry concerning Lieutenant Colonel Charles Flick.
As that entry noted, Flick and one Kate O'Sullivan engaged in some sort of sexual act. What occured isn't clear, but it seems pretty clear that Flick seduced Kate, or perhaps raped her. In any event, Flick, then an officer in the British Army, was sued by Kate's father. As the blog notes:
Seem harsh (assuming it wasn't rape)? Well, it really wasn't. Kate, at age 25, was reaching the upper limit of her marriageable age at the time, and now she had a daughter to take care of without Flick. Whether Flick tried to make it right (which was common) by marrying her or not, we don't know They didn't marry, however. Mr. O'Sullivan was left, therefore, with the financial burden of his daughter, who could now no longer work, and his granddaughter as well.
While this may all sound pretty harsh, it reflected an economic reality that still exists. Seduction continues to exist as a legal principle, even if we don't recognize it. It exists in the form of child support laws, which achieve essentially the same thing, but through the partial intervention of the state. At the time, it was up to people to take care of this on their own, which was not a less just system.
Flick, by the way, went on to a career in the British Army, serving overseas, and ultimately in the Canadian Army. He was an opponent of Japanese internment in Canada, so no matter what his early story was, he wasn't entirely a terrible person.
Alienation of Affection.
This occurred when someone interfered with the marriage, causing a spouse to lose affection, mostly often through seduction, but not always. Indeed, meddling third parties could be liable for interfering with a marriage, including objecting in laws or even clergymen. In the Wyoming case of Worth v. Worth, 48 Wyo. 441 (1935) a daughter-in-law suited her in laws on just such a claim, recovering the amount of $35,000 in damages. The damages in such cases were for emotional distress and mental anguish, shame, humiliation, and economic loss, including financial contributions toward the marriage and potentially punitive damages.
The elimination of this tort created a situation in which unrestrained interference in marriages can and frankly does arise. Amongst women, it tends to come up in terms of the "support" of female friends, many of whom have broken relationships themselves, or in some instances feel that a friend married beneath herself. I've seen this happen first hand, with the women who don't have to live the consequences harping on tehir friend to divorce.
The flipside of this is that men do the same thing, but it tends to be over other issues, with those issues often being sexual. In spite of they hypersexualized era in which we live, or perhaps because of it, it's frequently the case that couples enter a marriage badly damaged in this area and ultimately that impacts the woman much more. Women with multiple sexual partners before marriage are almost statistically incapable of living out their marriage. Women who have abused, on the other hand, tend to withdraw from the "marital debt" at some point leaving their husband's stunned. In that case, the men will tend to get the advice from their fellows that they should dump their wives for a more willing, and often younger, partner, or they'll simply begin to engage in adultery and excuse their conduct.
Criminal Conversation
Criminal conversation was similar to Alienation of Affection, but involved sex, so the last item noted here had arisen.. It was the tort of sexual intercourse outside marriage between the spouse and a third party, with each act being a separate tort, and the liable party being the third party. Damages included emotional harm, mental suffering, loss of support and income, and loss of consortium.
Not surprisingly, this tort changed over time to something radically different, and it then allowed an unmarried woman to sue on the grounds of seduction to obtain damages from her seducer, if her consent to sex was based upon his misrepresentation.
The unifying thread in all of these is that they took marriage, and beyond that, the male female relationship extremely seriously. For want of a better way to put, they took sex very seriously as well.
One of the things that the Sexual Revolution proved was that people were incredibly naive about sex, but not in the way that the revolutionaries imagined. In fact, the pre revolutionary condition proved to be the wise one, as it grasped the nature of sex. While perhaps not the best way to set it out, we'll quote here an item from Quora, which is always a somewhat dubious source of anything, which was on a thread on whether premarital relations should be illegal, which in a few countries they still are. Some commentator noted:
Sex absolutely, deeply and irreversibly transforms
You
Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.
It transforms abusers and the abused,
It transforms actors in porn,
It transforms friends who do it casually,
It transforms one-night standers,
It transforms johns and the prostitutes,
It transforms gays and lesbians,
It transforms the masturbater,
It transforms viewers of porn,
It transforms people who only do it orally,
It transforms those who use protection,
It tranforms unmarried couples,
It transforms married couples,
Sex is a language of the body.
And it is a langualge that has a definitely fixed meaning.
It communicates an absolute message.
It says I AM YOURS, FREELY, COMPLETELY, FAITHFULLY and FRUITFULLY.
After sex, you will either be made or ruined
Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.
We can think that nothing in us has changed,
But we will never the same as before.
We can tell ourselves that sex is pleasurable and healthy exercise,
And that we will be worse off denying ourselves from the pleasure it gives.
But, we will still have trivialised the message our body has communicated.
When we add meanings to the fixed message of sex,
The message of our mind is not aligned with the fixed message of our body.
We are no longer integrated. We have lied.
Sex in forms that detract from its fixed message is an abuse of the body.
It is cripplingly addictive, simply untruthful, absolutely unfulfilling and very ruinous.
If you have not done it. Don’t begin.
If you have done it, learn from this and do your best to cease.
Be hopeful. Every Saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.
Remember, the purpose of sex can only be properly fulfilled within and after
Marriage.
Written almost like a poem, the writer is absolutely correct. Psychologically, biologically and chemically, sex changes everything. It binds the people, whether they wish to be or not.
Indeed, in the area of odds and ends, one of the commentators on Catholic Stuff You Should know once noted this in that he was with a group of friends who wished that he could still see women the way he had, before. He remembered having done that, but the change was too profound to allow him to do again. That's likely nearly universally true, at least for men.
On a scarier note, in an interview I heard some time ago from a very orthodox Catholic source, a person who assisted with exorcisms noted that in some cases the possession had come about during intercourse, the metaphysical nature of it being such that license existed due to the marital act for the possession to transfer from one person to another.
Now, people like to wink and note that even amongst members of Apostolic faiths, premarital sex is common. But prior to birth control, it was much less so. It was not, however, nonexistent. Part of the breach of promise recognized this. But part also recognized that once couples head down this road, there's no real coming back, ever.
Ever.
And that, in no small part, is why "no fault" divorce works an irreparable and unconscionable injury to marriage, the married, and men and women in general.
It should not be allowed.
Before we look at that, or rather before we carry on directly, however, we'll take a big diversion. The reason is that we happened, in an unrelated fashion, upon something tagentially related to this topic and started a post on it, but then decided that it would really be better set out here.
And that involves two videos from The Catholic Gentleman blog.
Normally I'd be very hesitant to post a video of this type, probably out of cowardice as much as anything else, but these are so well done, if not really titled correctly, I'm making an exception.
They're really insightful.
Having said that, I'll retreat into cowardice a bit. The mere title, "What women don't understand about men", can raise hackles and eye rolls. And the fact that it's linked in from something called "The Catholic Gentleman" will immediately provoke cries of "rad trads" and patriarchist, and the like.
Well, actually, this is much more in the nature of informed evolutionary biology.
And, to note it again, they're mistitled. That's because these two videos could just as easily be "What men don't understand about women, and what women don't understand about men, and why that's the case.
Now, these do take this topic on from a semi religious prospective, but only semi, which is really interesting in that this is from The Catholic Gentleman blog. They creep right up on, and even cross deeply into, evolutionary biology, again in really insightful ways, and frankly if the religious aspects of these videos were omitted, they'd still be highly valid. In the first one, in fact, the religious elements are hardly mentioned.
Now, a few warnings about these insightful videos.
About half of the first one is about sex, sort of, but not completely. Rather, it's more accurately on how men perceives their relationship on a primary basis, which is heavily based on sex, which is part of the reason that they're so insightful. It also means that they touch on a topic gently, but much more graphically, than has ever been discussed here before.
Crud? Yes, but more accurate in some ways than we care to imagine once certain lines are crossed.
But the times call for it.
Put simply, and grossly simplifying it, we're an animal whose evolutionary biology is really odd, and that's not a societal thing. Of all the mammals, we belong to the group that has the highest degree of sexual dimorphism. And of every animal in our group, the primate, we're at the top of the scale, indeed, over the scale, on it. It defines a lot of who and what we are as an animal, and how the two sexes react with each other.
This is not, I'd note, unique to this analysis. The first time I recall reading this was actually a discussion on Homo sapiens evolution in The National Geographic decades ago. The thesis to explain it is that in one of our homo ancestors, quite a few ancestors ago, the dimorphism began when the species intelligence advanced, resulting in an unusually long period before we're mature adults. That meant that our mothers, or rather their mothers, had the responsibility of dealing with and taking care of the infant and child human for a long time. . . years in fact. That caused the dimorphism. Females evolved accordingly in one direction, and that direction emphasized security and relationships. Males evolved in another, and those involved a set of things we have otherwise discussed here, but also, and we really haven't discussed hit here, sex. The National Geographic author's assertion, and it seems well-supported, is that the evolutionary trade-off is that human males became basically ready, if you will, all the time and traded intercourse with human females, who are receptive, unusually, in varying degrees all the time. Females received food and protection.
That is, we'd note, a gross over simplification, somewhat.
As we're a very complicated species, with our big brains, it became more involved than that, but the basic elements remained. Humans do look for lifetime mates. Males are highly oriented towards connecting love of their mate, ultimately, with intercourse, and if it's absent, severe problems typically begin to arise. Women place little importance on that, however, past the initial stage of the formation of the couple, and instead place an enormous focus on relationships and feeling safe. Women really don't understand that for a married couple, or perhaps we should say one in a real union, that for the male, if the physical aspect of it is absent, he'll feel frustrated, insecure, and unloved. Men really don't get that women can simply omit this to some degree, or even entirely, and not feel the same way at all. On the other hand, men don't grasp that if a woman feels insecure, it's relationship threatening.
The first video does a really good job of explaining that. If you want to look into it, and do to my autodidactic nature I did, you can actually find a pile of stuff supporting what they're saying.
The second part of the first installment is on how men yearn for respect and equate love with respect. Women do not. Women expect support. You can find lots of stuff on this as well, although you need to be careful. One thing that is mentioned barely here, but which showed up in a net search, is that a female insulting a male, well, in a physical fashion in this arena can actually be devastating. There's an entire Reddit thread where a married man mentions this occurring in an argument which seems to have largely resolved on its primary point, but which seemed overwhelmingly likely to result in a divorce, even though the woman had repeatedly apologized. Even other women were counselling, "dump her".
A couple of notes, before moving on, one that's touched on in the video, and another not. The video makes a really good point, which has to do with male adolescence and how males develop. The context of it is in regard to transgenderism, and the point is made that the sort of crisis that males go through at a certain age, as things turn on, would be wholly absent for those claiming to be transgendered. Without that, however, you really aren't male. And no doubt the reverse would be true for whatever it is that women go through.
Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs
Not nearly as touched on, but a major problem, is that not only are men highly oriented in this direction, but at the point at which its realized its like flipping a switch that men can't get back from. This is mentioned in the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know. Men really can't' get back from where they started off, once they go down this path (and yes, I'm not going to fill it all in). It's sometime wondered "how" Catholic Priests can endure their celibacy, and it should be noted that St. Paul advised that unless the person had the grace and call to do it, they shouldn't attempt it. Most Priest who are truly called not only have that calling and grace, but they've likely never gotten to the point where the breaker was switched. Once it is, enduring the celibacy would be difficult in the extreme, and we note that in fact not all have endured it.
The second video is on three different topics.
The first is how men handle insecurity and stress, which often is very aggressive, or at least some form of aggression. The other way tends to be through addictive behavior.
The prior set of statues took the relationship so seriously that it was somewhat difficult to contract in the first place, had very serious implications from day one, and was very difficult to break. By being difficult to break, it protected first children, but then it protected the married men and women themselves.
This is not to say that all marriages were always rosy, but truth be known, the majority of marriages that break up do so due to transitory matters. That's why divorce originally required proof of something serious. Critics of the old statutes claimed that this forced people, and they usually mean "women" by people, to make up lies to obtain a divorce, and lying did indeed occur. Missed in that is that the fact that lying was occurring mean that what was being claimed, such as mental cruelty, didn't really exist. It was all just a matter of feelings.
That it is a matter of transitory feelings is borne out by the evidence. At a bare minimum, it's reported that 27% of women and 32% of men regret their divorces, or are willing to admit that they do. Given the nature of such reporting, we can probably easily assume that the real percentages approach at least 40%, if not higher.
Taken out of that, of course, are the percentages of those who divorce who simply kill themselves. Suicide being a risk due to divorce is very well established, although statistics associated with the percentage that take this tragic route are hard to come by, with men being nine times more likely to kill themselves following or during a divorce than women. That last statistic is particularly interesting, as there's something about men that causes them to take that approach at a much higher rate than women, although suicide is an increased risk for men and women due to divorce. Men, it is well known, tend to lose their social structure upon marrying, and it tends to devolve, over time, down to their wife. Again, looking back to old wisdom, the Old Testament informs:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
They do indeed, and this does indeed become the case. It's really easy to find examples of a wife's family essentially becoming the family of her husband, but it's much less common the other way around, in spite of what many people assume. Men getting divorced tend to lose their entire families as a result, their wife, their children, and their wife's family, with nowhere to go. The failure is so existential, they'd simply rather die. Women suffer to, but the classic "going back to her parents" is an option for them. Men don't "go back to their parents". They go back to new dwellings alone.
Suicide is now so common with divorce that its frequently discussed in various divorce related circles, including legal ones. Interestingly, the tragedy frequently is followed by the comment that if a person is edging towards this during the divorce in an open way, it should basically be disregarded, as that's manipulative. At some level, that's an incredibly self-interested set of views. Self-slaughter if never the right answer, and from a Christian prospective, it's a mortal sin. But the people who state "I feel guilty because my spouse killed himself" often really should feel just that. They abandoned their vows and the other person fell into despair, so yes, you should feel guilty, and moreover, you in particularly should not "move on" into another relationship having helped kill, quite literally, your prior one.
All of this is also why the death rate associated with men is also falsely low. Some go home and kill themselves sooner or later, but some simply drink themselves to death, or purposely engage in a lifestyle that will shorten their lives. Some just die, broken-hearted. Indeed, a bona fide medical condition, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs in a certain percentage of otherwise healthy people, killing 5% o those who obtain it, and causing long term health effects for 20% of those who aren't killed by it but survive. In extreme cases, a related psychological condition results in a mental collapse in which a healthy person just gives up the will to live and ceases all efforts to do so, resulting in death coming within the span of a week unless people catch it and intervene.
Oh well, right? We've moved on to the brave new legal world where the facts are made up and the answers don't matter, and just have to live with it.
No we don't. There are things that can, and should, be done. But what can be done?
Be honest about the relationship between men and women.
It's ironic that in the age of freely available information, and great advances in society, that what people have learned is the mechanics of sex, but nothing about its existential nature. This is a root part of the problem.
And I'm using the term "sex" advisably, not "marriage".
If the defenders of Catholic annulments are to be credited, the reason that so many are granted is that people just don't grasp the nature of what they're getting into. As noted above, I'm pretty skeptical on that, but there's at least something to that. Women don't seem to realize that once they become sexually active with a man he can't go back to the status quo ante. They also, in many instances, don't realize (and again, Reddit is full of this stuff) that once the vows are exchanged and the presents opened, they can't really expect a return to the days of care and cuddling. For that matter, once children are born they're not getting back there either. They will have achieved exactly what the New Testament provides, literally:
That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.
He's not going to get over the
"clinging".
If the authors of The Catholic
Gentlemen are correct, women need to grasp this. But there's a lot that men
need to grasp as well. And before we depart on this topic, we'll note, at
least in undamaged women, and a lot are damaged, the psychological union that
this creates exists too.
When I was looking up stuff for this
post, one of the things I just ran across was a post by a woman who had
initiated a divorce. Still convinced that she was correct in doing so, she was
baffled by why she was repeatedly thrown into lamenting the divorce and the
loss of her husband. Of course, the Redditors came in with all sorts of
"grieving" statement, and in a way they were right. But the reality
of it is that she tried to cut something down that was within herself and
killed it so it didn't die a natural death. As that attempt at murder,
and indeed it’s a type of self-murder given the nature of marriage, is
ineffective, her DNA was telling her what society could not. Her divorce
is false. She wasn't the person she was before she attempted to divorce.
It's here where the videos linked in
can do a real service. Societally, we lie about sex all the time and have
damaged people enormously as a result. What we've essentially done is to
encourage people to get on the perversion and decay train, and a lot have
boarded it. Then we're surprised by the result. To give an odd example,
everyone was surprised when "America's Dad" Bill Cosby turned out to
be a serial sexual pervert. But why? We knew that he hung out at the
Playboy Mansion and everything associated with Playboy ended in perversion,
long term.
This obviously goes beyond marriage,
of course, and gets towards being honest about our psychology as a species,
which we aren't. We can pretend that the old standards went away, but the
old DNA is still there.
What can be done under the current law
Part of the reason, indeed a lot of the reason, things have gotten so bad is that divorce lawyers, have failed to really examine the law much, with rare exceptions.
They should.
Quite frankly, it'll probably take conventional civil litigators to do it.
But what can be done?
Domestic lawyers really don't look at the law much. They have just gotten used to "this is how things are done". An example of that is Wyoming's "no fault" divorce statute, which isn't really no fault. The Wyoming Supreme Court required proof on irreconcilability in a case for the first time this past year, which means it took somebody fifty years to wake up to the fact that the law requires the proof, although the case was very unique, however.
Going back to the old law
We remind people of this:
People constantly imagine that when a mistake is made, and absolting hte old law here was a mistake, you "can't go back".
Of course you can go back.
There actually is a movemen in the nation to move away from no fault divorce. But to get back to the old law society will have to go a bit further back indeed.
It should.
Divorce laws requiring fault should be reestablished, and the "heart balm" statutes brought back. It's those latter causes of action that, as far as I'm aware, which nobody has preposed to restore.
They should.
A societal reaction.
Finally, in order to really take this on, there needs to be a societal reaction, and this makes people very uncomfortable.
Very uncomfortable.
Part of the reason that we have so much divorce in our society is that we've allowed the conditions creating it. We've badly damaged the psychological makeup of our society over a seventy year period by losing what we knew about sex and the relationship between men and women. That's hard to come back from, but it needs to occur. It'll have to start occurring on an individual basis.
Even when I was a college student in the 80's it was still the case that people living together without being married was frowned upon, even if it was no longer really societally prohibited. Doing that on a non-married basis toys with the programmed in nature of sex and the relationship between the sexes in a major way. Indeed, in many societies earlier on, to do that was simply to create a married relationship that the couple was then stuck with. Even in early Christianity, as is so often forgotten, there was no marriage ceremony early on. The couple simply agreed to be married and moved in with each other.
Couples that "live together", as its now politely called, are creating a proto marriage whether they wish to or not, at least within themselves. If this is not going to be frowned upon, it ought to at least be acknowledged for what it really does.
Beyond that, and it would have to start there, the easy separations that have come into being should not be so easily tolerated. Couples break up and divorce, as we know, but it really doesn't have to be accepted by a party that didn't wish to, and if they didn't wish to, they should stand their ground in their status. And this is true, in my view, of religions annulments as well. To go against these, in Catholic terms, is regarded as absolutely shocking and subject the person who does it to attack. Well, proclaiming that you view the other party as engaging in a fraud won't make a person popular, but standing for what is true often doesn't.1
Footnotes:
While I'm aware that it will be a very unpopular thing to say, another aspect of this would be not to tolerate the divorce industry.
Like almost everything that plagues our society, there's a strong industrial element to all of this. The corruption of marriage in the first place, by which we mean the corruption of the relationship between men and women, was brought about in no small part due the pornography industry, which is a subset of the sex trade industry. As it took root, the entertainment industry, the medical industry and the legal industry became highly involved with it.
Law in American society has become an industry, and as noted, it's very tied up in it. Law, like medicine, was a profession, but the corrupting influence of money has very much corrupted it. Divorce litigation is its own industry. There's no reason to respect it, or those involved in it, including lawyers involved in it.
Reinstated the death penalty and brought in no-fault divorce.
What a bunch of boofadors.
Oh yeah. . . that's also the year we turned out Gale McGee for Malcolm Wallop around here.
Well, that was two years before Coors introduced Coors Light, and you could still drink and drive legally in the state at that time. We must have been doing too much of it.
Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947). One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.
This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:
It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.
And hence, I guess, my comment.
While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.
And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.
Do we have no shame?
Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.
And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now. And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.
That's truly not how it was.
I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post. When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited. I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful. And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach. Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.
But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.
Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left. Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.
Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.1 Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.2 Homosexuality was shameful.3 Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful4 . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.5
Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.6 Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful.
Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.
While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.
Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.
All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age. The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.
Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results. The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family. That this has ended is a good thing.
But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive. The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society. The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.
And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post. It's all sort of the same package. If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality. The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.
Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else. It all just goes together. In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.
Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is. But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something. You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad. Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad.
We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign. The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been. At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful. While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically. Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.
But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.
Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains. And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.
So here we now are. Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.
So is this a "everything was better in the past" post? No it isn't.
But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.
Footnotes.
1. People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine. It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either. They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.
2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s. It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered. I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died. As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.
Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common. You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't. This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred. Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed". In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often. And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.
3. This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.
4. It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.
The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era. In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion. That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open. In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.
There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false. I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true. Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.
5. But not just in these areas. Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.
Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level. Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.
"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.
6. Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".
Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.
and folks like Robert Reich wonder why we aren't providing government housing and free lunches to children all over the country.
A sandwich and a HMARS. These are not the same.
Well, that's fairly easy. "Provide for a common lunch" is actually not a logical equivalent to providing for the common defense.
Indeed, as hard as it is for people to accept it, that really isn't an obligation of the Federal government, providing an army to defend the country is, and if we can fund somebody else to fight a war, so we don't have to, all the better.
And if a foreign war is in the national interest, existentially, as it's a contest between our values, and those of something we're deeply opposed to, well, we should support them and only the Federal Government is well situated to do so.
The added part of this is that by and large, social programs tend to become social rights and then social failures. In much of the country the school districts in fact provide free lunches, which morphed into free breakfasts, which as morphed into a societal right for people to refuse to feed their children, as the districts have to.
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