Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form. It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.
Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation. There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form. The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it.
Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do. The legend was that he did it on this day. No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are. Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.
At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it. It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.
Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years. Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction. The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.
With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country. The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay. They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today. Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.
So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024. Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
A saint, in many ways, for our times. Her feast day was yesterday.
Martyred on January 21, 304.
It struck me at the time that I should have posted more on St. Agnes and how she's become so contemporary.
It's hard to know all the details of her martyrdom give as it happened in 304, but what seems clear is that she voluntarily declared herself a Christian at a time that meant death, and that she steadfastly refused to yield her virginity. She seems to have had many suitors, which at that time exposed a young woman to being turned over to the authorities if they felt sufficiently jilted. It is clear that she was tortured. She may have actually been turned over, as part of that, to a house of prostitution where, according to one account, she not only did not yield, a desirous patron of the house actually fell dead upon propositioning her.
She seems to have been executed by the sword.
Her relics, including a skull that is visible through a window, remain in Rome.
What makes her so relevant today is her steadfast refusal to yield to the spirit of her age, choosing to go to her death rather than surrender her virtue. She's a patron saint of chastity.
In an age, in the West, which almost has no other interest other than the carnal, and the individual carnal at that, she speaks to us through her example as loudly as she did in 304. Likewise for her example to refusing to yield to the false and convenient, no mater what it meant.
Terry Mattingly's Get Religion blog, which have linked in here on the side, states something that we've already stated, but in a more in-depth article.
Or maybe it's something we've posed as a question.
Christianity is not a European religion. Indeed, Europeans, in the form of Romans and Greeks, at first opposed it.
Christianity, and certainly the original form of Christianity, Apostolic Christianity, of which all the Orthodox and Catholics are part, came out of the Middle East and in fact it never left it. The first Catholics, which is to say the first Christians, were at the very first all in the Roman province of Palestine. Pretty soon they were in Syria, where they were first called Christians, and Egypt. In the Apostolic Age Christianity, which again is to say Catholicism, made it all the way to India, and of course it also made it to Rome. Rome was the early site of the head of the Church, because it was the center of the most powerful secular entity in the world, the Roman Empire, but other localities were major diocesan seats as well. The last Apostolic Christian church in North Africa prevailed until the 1400s, the same century that the Moors were expelled from Spain, and the same century that the Church was established in Sub Sarah Africa. Catholicism was so strong in Angola that pre Revolution slave rebellion in the Southern English Colonies of North America saw a Catholic Angolan band rise up and bolt for Catholic Florida.
So why, some of us have asked, is there so much attention on homosexuality in today's Church?
Seem unconnected? It isn't.
Homosexuality is relatively rare in the world, but it is most common in European cultures. There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, the Western world is rich, and it's used its wealth in pecular ways impacting living arrangements. Basic aspects of adult life common throughout human history and in every culture have been badly warped in post World War Two, or maybe post World War One, or maybe as part of the Enlightenment, European cultured world. While consumption of food, working, and the basic reproductive nature of humans is the same at an elemental level for people everywhere, and at all times, in the rich society of post 1945 Western Culture, there's an entertainment element to all of it. People do these things to be "fulfilled", which in the end often tends to mean that their reproductive organs pretty much play the same role as a Nintendo joystick. People have completely lost the connective and reproductive aspect to sex itself, which naturally leads to all sorts of bored playing with it. We have, in this context, all become characters on MXC.
Additionally, as the West developed it got into warehousing of men, and sometimes women, for various reasons. In the movie version of Pasternak's classic, Dr. Zhivago, the Orthodox Priest, in taking Lara's confession, warned her that sex was strong and that "only marriage can contain it". As we've built societies that postpone marriage by operation of social pressure and economics, we can't be surprised that premarital sex became common. Likewise, as we warehoused young men in various fashion. . .all male schools, all male institutions, etc., a certain percentage seek relief where they can find it. Like most disordered behavior, the initial inclination probably isn't really very strong, but once people find relief in it, that takes over. People don't take up drinking a quart of Jim Beam all in one setting.
So at this point the rich West has a pretty messed up relationship with sex in general, and for that matter, with nature and life in general.
And it's in a rocketing decline.
So why so much attention to the Fr. James Martin's of the world? Why does the Papacy address this small demographic rather than, so far, addressing the effective schism of the German church, which has gone even further?
Mattingly notes:
"The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple and the small," wrote Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, the former head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. "It has the task of announcing the Word of God in front of Western Christians who, because they are rich, equipped with multiple skills in philosophy, theological, biblical and canonical sciences, believe they are evolved, modern and wise in the wisdom of the world."
Mattingly also notes:
Catholic debates over LGBTQ+ issues are crucial, he [ Rev. Chris Ritter] said, "because if you want to spot low-fertility, low-faith cultures in Europe and elsewhere, you look at how and when they legalized and legitimized same-sex marriage. That will give you a good idea of what is happening. … Just look for large numbers of secular old people."
And that gets back to what I noted the other day. The West, in every fashion, is in decline. By mid-century that will be more obvious than it is now, and that's not long. In our feebleness, we've become self obsessed and lost a grasp of the existential.
This won't last forever. Our self extermination by confusing entertainment with living is assuring it will not. And, by extension, the unique tragedy of homosexuality, and the related plagues that endorsing rather than sympathizing with that tragedy has brought on, won't last long as major issues much longer either. Society really doesn't need to be wringing its hands so much over this.
For that matter, we can suppose it won't be long until the occupant of St. Peter's Chair was born in Africa once again. . .and that will not be a bad thing.
I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. No more childbearing. You are invaded, still, by other cultures, other peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and completely change your culture, your convictions, your morality.
Cardinal Sarah
I guess because I'm a big reader, I'll get advertisements for books and also book reviews in email form. One that I get is the New York Times book reviews, which I've come to barely notice. A big part of that is because as the Times itself has declined, and it very much has, its book reviews are focused on whiney self-indulgent narcissist who write whiney self-indulgent narcissist memoirs that nobody reads and which are soon forgotten. Stuff like the struggles of a middle class homosexual 1st generation Pakistani American in the big city whose extended Islamic family doesn't get him. M'eh, get over yourself, dude.
Anyhow, I got more than one email on Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, More on her sexual immorality. The first time I disregarded it as it was a New York Times review (of course), but the second time I did take brief note of it.
Basically, she and her husband, who do have children, like to f*** other people than their spouses and for some reason their licentiousness is to be shared with others, making them both not only sexually reprehensible, but exhibitionist as well. They'd define this as being "polyamorous", but that description does violence not only to nature, as we'll see, but to "amour". Polylicentiousness would be a better description, but licentious would simply do, although they apparently (I haven't read it) keep their affairs down to one person at a time. Indeed, one item I found she wrote in an op ed was about her sneaking out to her "boyfriend" during COVID and lying about it to her mid teen son, whom she must think is really dense, so she can screw her paramour in his household while his wife, whom he is trying to get pregnant, is out.
Like all books in this area, this will be read only by people, probably mostly women, who want either 1) a peak into somebody's Fifty Shades of Grey lifestyle or 2) are thinking of cheating on their spouses and want to learn what that's like while being encouraged to do so. I'm not going to bother with that, but instead make an evolutionary biological and medical observation.
Setting aside morality, this sort of conduct can only occur if you've carpet bombed your system into sterilization and have a platoon of antibiotics ready to come to your rescue.
In other words, while the promoters of this sort of thing like to claim it as sort of natural, it's the opposite.
We've dealt with it elsewhere, but the bargain of our species was that the male in a couple got the female. . .you know. . . that way, for his life, and she got food and protection, which she couldn't provide once she had a child or children. Slice it anyway you want, but that's the evolutionary basis of monogamy and that's why our species exhibits it.
People will talk about affairs etc. and the degree to which they've been historically common in our species, but they really miss the history of it. By and large, while they do occur, amongst the masses, which were most people, who lived close to the economic bottom line, or who were aboriginal, or pastoral, or nomadic, the Old Law provided that such offenses were punishable by death, by and large.
People like to claim, "oh that was just for the women", but that's simply not true. Yes, women adulterers were killed, as we all are well aware. The underlying logic of it, as brutal as that was, is that a man shouldn't be forced to raise the offspring of some other man, and death put an end to the chance of that occurring, and perhaps to the offspring as well as the offending woman.
Grim.
But death was the common punishment for men as well, and it was typically directly meted out. The man discovering the offense very often simply killed the other guy, and that was regarded as okay.
Indeed, as late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code provided:
Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided that the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance or assent to the adulterous connection.
In other words, if husband came home and found Jim Bob Diddler in bed with his wife, he could kill him.
And we should note that yes, that's completely contrary to Christian morality. You can't run around killing people, even those in bed with your wife.
But the old, pre-Christian, law allowed for this.
Black Buffalo Woman.
Indeed, a famous example of this is given by the example of Crazy Horse, whose early affections had been towards Black Buffalo Woman. In spite of his known feelings for her, she married No Water while Crazy Horse was on a raid. In 1870, he carried her off while No Water was out on a hunting party. The next day, No Water caught up with him, shot him in the face with a revolver (hitting his nose) and breaking his jaw, his shot being misdirected due to a third party attempting to intervene. Crazy Horse was laid up due to his injuries for months, but had escaped death. The blood feud was ended by No Water giving Crazy Horse a horse in compensation for his injures, which must have been galling to No Water knowing that Black Buffalo Woman and Crazy Horse had spent one night together, but which was deemed justified in light of there being questions about Black Buffalo Woman's long term marital intent. Crazy Horse was stripped, in turn, of his position as a Shirt Wearer.
No Water in later years.
I've known, FWIW, of one killing here which was pretty much under those circumstances and I personally know a fellow, who was an FBI agent, who came home to find a coworker of his in bed with his wife. In the latter case, he gave the guy one hour to clear out with the stated intent that when he came back in an hour, if they were still there, he was killing him.
His instructions to his spouse were to clear out as well.
They did.
Anyhow, Ms. Winter's behavior is only possible, as noted, due to chemistry. We've used chemistry to defeat our biological functions, but not our psychological and psycho-biological ones, and at least for the time being, we're not close to doing so. Indeed, if we do, it'll be the end of the species.
Let's go back to Black Buffalo Woman.
Several months after Crazy Horse's attempt at taking her, she gave birth to a light skinned child. That must have been all the more galling to No Water, as Crazy Horse was light skinned as well. Indeed, while people aren't supposed to speculate on such things, his light feature and aquiline nose have lead to some speculation that he descended from a French trapper a generation or two prior to his birth, and I'll just go out on a limb and say it's likely so.1 Anyhow, this gives a biological example of why this is so deep in our DNA. No Water wanted his wife and knew what the relationship between men and women meant. He already had three children by her. Her departure with Crazy Horse was a massive act of betrayal as well as resource disaster. Some nine or ten months later, he likely ended up burdened with the child of another man, but sucked it up and carried on.
And here's a second reason.
Disease.
Whatever the multiple partner of this type has been common in any form, venereal disease has been absolutely rampant. There's really no exception. Indeed, that's probably all the more we need to say on that.
Now, on this, a person might wonder for a second about polygamy. I'm not a defender of polygamy, but polygamy and polygamous behavior aren't the same at all. The wives of a husband in a polygamous society are his, not for sharing. Pretty obviously, if they were shared in any fashion, with our without his knowledge, the disease spreading opportunity is really enhanced.
This shows, once again, how prophetic Humanae Vitae really was.
Consequences of Artificial Methods
17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.
What was warned of here has now happened on a large-scale, with not only men regarding women as mere instruments of satisfaction, and vice versa, but a modern Western society obsession with our lower regions, even basing entire "lifestyles" on it.
None of which is capable without a complete chemical sterilization of our natural systems in a manner that we'd not tolerate on any other topic. It's unnatural on an epic level.
Footnotes
1. One of Crazy Horse's two wives, Helena "Nellie" Larrabee (Larvie), was half French.
History has strangely not treated Larrabee well, seemingly because she influenced him to basically settle down. That's really unfair, quite frankly.
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.
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