Lex Anteinternet: Something in the wind, part 3 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. Getting what you wish for.

Lex Anteinternet: Something in the wind, part 3 of 3. The rise of th...: 

Something in the wind, part 3 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. Getting what you wish for.

Part Three of this series is brought to you by Giogia Meloni and Clarence Thomas.

Meloni and Thomas.¹

Thomas?

Yes, we'll explain down below, sooner or later.

In the first two parts of this three part series, I've looked at the election of Giorgia Meloni and the reasons for her rise. In the last episode, we tried to sum up the source of her popularity, and how that relates to a now, semi-fawning, American far right.  Italy has now gone down this path.  Others, now more than ever, are urging the United States to do the same.

Which bring up the dread Law of Unintended Consequences.

All of us probably heard our mothers, or somebody, give us the warning "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!"  Probably, few stop to realize that this warning was delivered by non-other than Aesop as far back as 260BC.  His sage advice has hung around for a good reason.  The danger of getting something more than you asked for, in terms of secondary effects, is always pretty high.  Nobody tends to think much about that, however.

Far right admirers of Meloni, or Orban for that matter, are disgusted with the "woke" drift of American progressivism and goals that it has, some of which have been quite successful, which seem to offer promise to countering that.  These folks, in many instances, are horrified by progressive efforts that seek to remodel every institution of society and even our basic natures, if they can, and they likely really cannot, which doesn't mean that they can't do a lot of damage in the effort.

But others, and indeed most, of the Americans who are on the Trump train are on it only for one or two reasons.  Some are there for economic reasons, upset by the export of American jobs overseas for decades and a rising tide of immigrants.  Others are horrified by the seeming triumph of the woke and the redefinition of marriage.  Probably most have a vague sense that this ain't the way things ought to be.²

And I agree.

This ain't the way things ought to be.

But, I'm a dreaded intellectual Catholic, the very sort of people that the founders of this Great Nation abhorred and dreaded, and which many in the culture still do. 

Some feel that this era has passed, and such distinctions no longer matter, but I wonder, and I'm not the only one.  Ross Douthat, regarding current American Conservatism, has posted the following on his Twitter account within the last few days.

Current American conservatism: a low-church nondenominational Protestant mass movement trying to exert influence via intellectual Catholics strategically placed inside hollowed-out/secularized institutions of high-church denominational Protestantism.

If you dig deeper into this, you'll find that folks like Douthat, and Catholic intellectual circles, are concerned that ultimately they are there to be used, but when the time comes, they'll be dumped.

Now this may be surprising in an era when the real intellectuals on the Supreme Court, for example, are all Catholics.  All of them.  And its no surprise that this is the case.  By their training, both in their Catechism, and in their profession, they have to be, and were probably always inclined in that direction.  It used to be, however, that this was also true of others of different backgrounds, and while saying it is definitely dangerous, as it can be so easily misunderstood, it's still true of observant Jewish individuals, such as the recently departed Justice Ginsberg, which is part of the reason she was so widely, and justifiably, admired.  

It's getting pretty hard, however, to find serious intellects of the same type who are coming out of what's become of mainstream American conservatism.  Yes, they are there, to be sure.  Mitch McConnell is one, no matter what you think of him.  He's a Baptist. John Hickenlooper is a Quaker. Ben Sasse is a Presbyterian who was once a Lutheran.  And I don't mean to suggest a person has to be Catholic, or even religious, to be a heavyweight intellect by any means.

Rather, what I'm suggesting is this.

A lot of those in the Trump populist right are basically adherents to a sort of intellectualism lite, and often participants in the American Civil Religion, which claims Protestant Christianity as its foundation, but which advances it in a very lenient fashion, omitting, in its current form, darned near all of the New Testament list of behaviors between male and female, and indeed between male and male, and female and female, of a certain category, that were listed as sinful.³

So again, if we're turning the clock back, as Chesterton says we can, who will be comfortable with that and who won't?

Let's get back to voting and what you get, in the end.

In the German elections of the early 1930s, some people really did want to elect a radical racist party into power that would kill the Jews and hopefully, in their line of thinking, punish the French and wipe out the Bosheveks whereever they could be found.

But most voters who went to the polls probably didn't really have sending their sons to freeze to death at Stalingrad or being asked to put a bullet into a rabbi's head, or crush the skull of a Jewish infant in with a rifle butt, in mind at the time.

Observant German Lutherans, over half the county's religious community, didn't imagine that they'd have to fight off an attempt to consolidate them into a state approved variant of their faith.  German Catholics didn't imagine they'd be hiding impaired children from thinly disguised euthanasia programs.

Italians, in the 1920s, didn't imagine, for that matter, that some twenty years later they'd be sending their sons to fight one of the best armies in the world in North Africa, and others to fight the Red Army in the East.

Benito Mussolini.  He was the authority.  All you would have to do to verify this would have been to ask him. . .

Oh, I know, some will read this (among the few who do) and dismiss it as wild hyperbole.  And, for that matter, I'm not saying that anyone is going to be freezing in a few years on the Volga.

What I am saying is that a lot of right wing populist truly talk the talk, but don't really walk the walk, and probably don't want to either.

I'm also saying it's hard, when you go shopping for really radical political movements, to buy just part of the pie.  I.e, it's hard to say "I'll have a think slice of immigration reform please" and not get "here's your populist pie, including a complete set of family values you aren't following. . . "

Which takes us back to Clarence Thomas and more particularly his dissent in Dobbs.

Now, the Dobbs decision is 213 pages long in the original reporter, and we can't expect everyone to have read it.  I haven't read it all, either. But Dobbs, we know, got the abortion topic right.  Roe v. Wade, as most constitutional scholars long ago admitted, just made stuff up that wasn't in the Constitution, and it had long prior become completely unworkable.  Dobbs just sent things back to the states, where they belonged in the first place.

The Dobbs majority was quick to point out, in the text, that it was in no way shape or form seeking to expand the holding in Dobbs beyond the opinion itself, and it in particular it was no threat to Obergefell.

Well, baloney.

That's the same thing Justice Kennedy said in Obergefell. At the time that decision was handed down, the Court indicated it wouldn't expand into anything else, and those advancing the cause that prevailed in Obergefell likewise promised they had nothing else on the agenda.  Obergefell was, as noted, in our opinion on it at the time, a judicial coup, one preceding the attempted January 6, 2021, coup, and one basically fed into the other.

Kennedy was wrong in his declaration, and those 

I write separately to emphasize a second, more fundamental reason why there is no abortion guarantee lurking in the Due Process Clause. Considerable historical evidence indicates that “due process of law” merely required executive and judicial actors to comply with legislative enactments and the common law when depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. See, e.g., Johnson v. United States, 576 U. S. 591, 623 (2015) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment). Other sources, by contrast, suggest that “due process of law” prohibited legislatures “from authorizing the deprivation of a person’s life, liberty, or property without providing him the customary procedures to which freemen were entitled by the old law of England.” United States v. Vaello Madero, 596 U. S. ___, ____ (2022) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 3) (internal quotation marks omitted). Either way, the Due Process Clause at most guarantees process. It does not, as the Court’s substantive due process cases suppose, “forbi[d] the government to infringe certain ‘fundamental’ liberty interests at all, no matter what process is provided.” Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 302 (1993); see also, e.g., Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 125 (1992).

As I have previously explained, “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.” Johnson, 576 U. S., at 607–608 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); see also, e.g., Vaello Madero, 596 U. S., at ___ (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 3) (“[T]ext and history provide little support for modern substantive due process doctrine”). “The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only ‘process’ before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 811 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also United States v. Carlton, 512 U. S. 26, 40 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). The resolution of this case is thus straightforward. Because the Due Process Clause does not secure any substantive rights, it does not secure a right to abortion. 

The Court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrine’s application in other, specific contexts. Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965) (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives)*; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), are not at issue. The Court’s abortion cases are unique, see ante, at 31–32, 66, 71–72, and no party has asked us to decide “whether our entire Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence must be preserved or revised,” McDonald, 561 U. S., at 813 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). Thus, I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66.

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7), we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 9). After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amdt.  14, §1; see McDonald, 561 U. S., at 806 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). To answer that question, we would need to decide important antecedent questions, including whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution and, if so, how to identify those rights. See id., at 854. That said, even if the Clause does protect unenumerated rights, the Court conclusively demonstrates that abortion is not one of them under any plausible interpretive approach. See ante, at 15, n. 22. 

You get the point.⁴ 

So here's the deal.  Thomas would strike down an entire series of substantive due process cases.  And indeed, his logic on this is infallible.  He's correct.⁵

And that's why I wonder, quite frankly, if rank and file populists have thought this out.

Once you board the logic train, you have to go where it goes.  It's like going on a transcontinental railroad trip. 

Once you board the logic train, you have to go where it takes you and you can't get off early.  It's like going on a transcontinental railroad trip.  You buy your ticket, and you can't pretend the train doesn't run all the way across the country and just stops, and turns around, in Denver.  You'll go through Denver. . . but the train will keep going.

The string of cases that Thomas mentions are in fact in peril now, and they likely also ought to be.  But Thomas didn't mention Loving v. Virginia.  Now, I think Loving v. Virginia can still be defended, and it undoubtedly can be on Natural Law grounds.

Loving v. Virginia was, you will recall, the case that determined that states couldn't ban interracial marriages.

Now most people, and certainly any decent people, would find that concept horrific.  Of course states can't ban interracial marriages. But they did, in some instances, up until that time.  It was Loving v. Virginia that struck that down.  Not too many people want to go back to that.

As critics of Dobbs have mentioned, as the state's can and have litigated in all of the areas that Thomas mentions, it's odd, sort of, that he omitted this one.  Well maybe not.  There's another way to address this case too, but it's still worth noting that this is the one area that would personally impact Thomas in a very direct way, and which is contrary to his personal worldview.

At the Wyoming State Bar convention, this came up during a speech by a constitutional scholar who also publishes in the Tribune. At some point during the speech, I don't know where, Harriet Hageman left the room, and she was apparently pretty disgruntled with what the speaker was saying, although I don't know that it was this. An email that circulated among Wyoming State Bar members later claimed that Hageman "heckled" the speaker, and the speaker perceived it that way, although many people disagreed with that characterization.  If nothing else, this all goes to show how uncomfortable people on the far populist right are with where this all leads.

The backdoor out of this is, as noted, Natural Law, but most populist really don't want to go there either.  

Natural Law has come up in American law repeatedly over the centuries, although now it is official eschewed. At one time it was not.  We've dealt with both of those themes here before, with the most interesting example of it being the case The Antelope, which we've written about at least twice.  That was the case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that slavery was contrary to the natural law, but allowable under the law of the United States as countries could legislate contrary to the natural law, to wit:

That it is contrary to the law of nature will scarcely be denied. That every man has a natural right to the fruits of his own labor is generally admitted, and that no other person can rightfully deprive him of those fruits and appropriate them against his will seems to be the necessary result of this admission. But from the earliest times, war has existed, and war confers rights in which all have acquiesced. Among the most enlightened nations of antiquity, one of these was that the victor might enslave the vanquished. This, which was the usage of all, could not be pronounced repugnant to the law of nations, which is certainly to be tried by the test of general usage. That which has received the assent of all must be the law of all. 

Slavery, then, has its origin in force; but as the world has agreed that it is a legitimate result of force, the state of things which is thus produced by general consent cannot be pronounced unlawful. 

Throughout Christendom, this harsh rule has been exploded, and war is no longer considered as giving a right to enslave captives. But this triumph of humanity has not been universal. The parties to the modern law of nations do not propagate their principles by force, and Africa has not yet adopted them. Throughout the whole extent of that immense continent, so far as we know its history, it is still the law of nations that prisoners are slaves. Can those who have themselves renounced this law be permitted to participate in its effects by purchasing the beings who are its victims? 

Now, if somebody is wondering how this gets us out of this mess, it doesn't.  Under the holding in The Antelope, outlawing anything not mentioned in the Constitution, no matter how shocking, would be okay.

But following this, on more than one occasion, the Court referenced Natural Law in order to support a decision. At least as recently as the 1980s, the Court found that laws addressing homosexual conduction were allowable, as homosexuality was contrary to the Natural Law.  A Wyoming jurist found that laws banning adoption by homosexual couples were allowable for the same reason, and more recently than that.

Now, some are going to find that really shocking as well, but once again, if we're on the populist train, this is where that goes, and frankly most of those on the hard populist right, are okay with this.  I.e., that would cure the Loving v. Virginia problem, as banning marriage between heterosexual couples based on race is contrary to the Natural Law.

But the ancient law of humanity also tried to make sure that the same impulses that gave rise to marriage assured them.  Hence, the creation of the Common Law's common law marriage.  How many on the Trump train want to return to the days of the Heart Balm Statutes?

My guess is not many, and certainly not Trump himself, who is a serial polygamist.  

Now, I'm not here to judge people's morals by any means.  But this is a topic worth considering.  In the current political world we live in, we have a Senator who is divorced and remarried and at least one extremely right wing politician entering the legislature has a wife who was married before as well.  You can be guaranteed that some of those now running have openly lived lives involving cohabitation outside of marriage, as it is so common.  Are people really comfortable with a return to the old law on all of this?

Well, sincere Catholics, like me, might be. But this is a Protestant nation.  Here in town, there's a huge Protestant church that I think is "non-denominational" (I'm not completely certain).  Somebody I know who attends it is on their third marriage.  In the American Civil Religion, that seemingly doesn't cause problems, and I don't doubt that person's sincerity in attending.  But in American law, prior to the post World War Two Supreme Court trip that Justice Thomas complained, of, it would have.

Do people have this in mind?

Looking around, I really doubt it.  People seem to believe that the Constitution applies only to other people, not to themselves, or worse yet, they have a false belief about what the history of our laws and the Constitutional law really is.  In reality, at one time marriage was solely the province of the states, and they could allow or ban whatever they chose.  Restricting firearm carrying was pretty common, and the concept of "open carry" around town nonexistent.  Prohibiting members of certain races from certain neighborhoods through restrictive covenants completely allowable and in fact the norm.  The only way around that is the Natural Law, but the Natural Law brings in concerns that most Americans aren't really prepared to deal with, even remotely.

And if you are dabbling with concepts of Natural Law, you sooner or later are going to stray into concepts of Subsidiarity and the like.  Those concepts make most Americans squirm in their seats, at least if they aren't of the left.  Vest the economy entirely downwards, accept a lower standard of living for the middle class and the wealthy in favor of vesting the economy in families and elevating the poor.  Nobody too rich, and nobody too wealthy.  An economy that favors sustainability forever over one that does not.

Chesterton would have been comfortable with all of that.

Jefferson might have been.

Giorgia Meloni is probably comfortable with all of that.

Most Americans now. . . definately not.

Footnotes:

1.  Okay, Meloni's photo here, taken from a Reel, is unfair.  She's an effective speaker and clearly highly intelligent, as is Thomas.  This illustrates, however, how Italian politics isn't American politics, gushing from Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene aside.  Meloni is an intellectual, if perhaps a somewhat scary one, compared to Cruz and Greene, and Thomas is definately an intellectual.  Greene and Cruz certainly dont' seem to be, and frankly some or perhaps a lot of their positions wouldn't square with either Meloni's or Thomas'

Added to that, Meloni is a politician in a  unique Italian environment where things are done, said, or portrayed that definately would never be here.

2.  This is the source, I think, of the lot of election discontent.

It's also the source of a lot of election denialism. The thought is that "people can't have really voted for Biden, as people can't really be for. . . ".  In another form, which isn't the same, its "votes for Biden can't count, as what he stands for is vile, and therefore. . . "

Almost lost in all of this is the fact that Trump lost the popular vote twice.  His first election was only legitimate, and it was legitimate, due to the artifact of the electoral college.  Of course, this causes people to unthinkingly babble "we aren't a democracy" (we are) "but a republic".  I've addressed that elsewhere, but using that as an argument shows that the person advancing a point is largley ignorant of what they're trying to advance.

3.  It might be worth noting here that fully 1/3d of American Evangelical Protestants believe the United States Constitution, which never mentions God, was inspired by God.  The newly appointed interim Wyoming Secretary of State has publicly taken this position in his campaign material.

For reasons that are partially addresssed in this essay, that's a fairly startling and scary proposition.  Traditional Christianity holds that inspired texts cease with the end of the Apostolic Age, at which point there were no more general revalations.

4. It should be noted, and will be later in the text, that even if Thomas' logic is correct on the cases he mentions, he's only commenting in regard to procedural due process. For that reason, his comments have been read to probably mean more than they should be.

I'll address Loving v. Virginia below, but Griswald v. Connecticut is another such example.  Even if Thomas' criticism of the case in a procedural due process context are correct, it doesn't address Federal Supremacy might mean that the Federal Government has completlely dominated the field here to the detriment of indivdual states through the laws pertaining to pharmacueticals.

5.  But see footnote 4.

Prior Related Threads:

Something in the wind, part 1 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Something in the wind, part 2 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . maybe.*

Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . m...: 

The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . maybe.*

Monroe's third marriage, Miller's second (he'd go on to a third).

The other day, I had a thread discussing the youthful (16 years old) marriage of the then Norma Jean Baker to James Dougherty.¹   It was this post, here:

Friday, June 19, 1942 . James Dougherty and Norma Jean Baker marry.

The marriage didn't last.

We know the rest of the story, of course.  Norma Jean would divorce Dougherty while he was serving overseas in the Navy so that she could sign a modeling contract.  She changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, became a famous actress, married and divorced Joe DiMaggio and then Arthur Miller, and then died from a sleeping pill overdose in the early 1960s.  Her life, really, was fairly tragic.² 

She's still regarded, justifiably, as one of the greatest beauties of all time.

It's tempting to sort of sum up her early marriage history, the first one, as a wartime phenomenon.  Youthful marriage, followed by long separation featuring wartime female employment, followed by divorce.

And then followed by societal expansion of divorce.

And certainly there's some evidence to support that.

Indeed, the Monroe story is hardly unique.  Bill Mauldin provides us another example.  

Like Monroe, his early years were a mess, with messed up parents and a lack of parental supervision quite frequently.  He also didn't finish high school, although a large percentage of men did not at the time.  And he also ended up married three times.

He married his first wife, Norma Jean Humphries (Jean) in 1942, before he deployed overseas.  Neither she nor Mauldin would be faithful during his wartime absence, and they quickly divorced upon his return.  Indeed, the length of their marriage was nearly identical to the Dougherty's and Monroe's, although infidelity did not play a role in the latter's divorce.³

The phenomenon of wartime marriages followed by marital trouble was so common that it became a film trope.  It shows up in the great immediate post-war drama The Best Years Of Our Lives, with the Fred Derry character's marriage falling apart immediately after the war.  Indeed, divorce is portrayed as the solution to Derry's problem, with a youthful female character played by Teresa Wright actually plotting to break his unsuccessful marraige up.  Infidelity shows up in The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, although divorce does not.

Well, just the way wars work, right?   Maybe World War Two is responsible for our current situation regarding marriage, shacking up, and divorce?

Maybe.

And maybe not, and this might not really have quite the story that it might seem at first.

The current state of the law regarding divorce is a "no fault" regime. This wasn't always the case.  Indeed, an entire highly developed set of laws existed regarding marriage, promises of marriage and divorce prior to the second half of the 20th Century.  No state had no-fault divorce until California adopted it in 1969.

That development came about in no small part as divorce was becoming more common.  But note, that was 1969.

Not 1949.

And I had never read, nor could I find, a recitation of a post World War One spike in divorces.  Although, while working on this entry, the following showed up from 1922 on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit:

So apparently there was a perception of divorce rates really climbing.  I posted a query on that, and a respondent noted that it had in fact climbed from a tiny 1 for every 1,000 to 1.7 for every 1,000 marriages by 1928.  It was around 2 per 1,000 in 1940.  It was 3.4 by 1947, but dropped back down to about 2.2 by 1960.  It started t climb in the early 70s, and really started to jump by the late 1970s.

Given that, World War One didn't seem to have much of an impact.  If anything, the war caused a spike in post-war marriages as American doughboys brought home French, English and Russian (yes, Russian) brides home with them.  For that matter, a few who had served in the brief post-war occupation brought German wives home with them, although fraternization between Americans and Germans was extremely heavily discouraged for a variety of reasons.    One British study noted:

Unmarried motherhood increased during the war, probably because the absence of men at war prevented marriages following the woman’s pregnancy. There was continuity before, during and after the war in levels of unmarried cohabitation and parenthood, mainly due to the restrictive divorce laws in England and Wales, though not in Scotland. Liberalization of the divorce law in 1925 and 1937, mainly due to pressure from newly enfranchised women, increased divorces only to a small degree because divorce remained difficult, expensive and stigmatizing for women. Deaths of men at war perpetuated but did not create a female majority in the population – women had long outlived and outnumbered men – and it had only a small effect on marriage patterns. The demographic effects of the war were limited, most significant was reduction in infant mortality due to government efforts to replace men killed in the war. The war permanently expanded employment opportunities mainly for middle-class women, and, after gaining the vote in 1918, women were more active in campaigning for social and legal reforms to increase gender equality and improve social conditions.

And, for example, this article from Colorado discussed Russian war brides coming into Colorado.

Leadville Herald Democrat, June 16, 1920.  I've seen others discussing French war brides coming in, in numbers, to South Carolina.  

Clearly, the war brought about a lot of marriages of couples who hadn't known each other all that long, and who weren't from the same cultures.  No gigantic corresponding spike in divorces seems to have occurred at any point.

And for that matter, while World War Two did result in a spike in divorces, it was marginal.  Divorce rates had climbed to 2 per 1,000 by 1940 and were up to 3.4 per 1,000 by 1947, but they fell back down to around 2.2 for a long time thereafter, and it wasn't until the 1970s when they began to climb.

So, what are they now?

2.3 per 1,000.

So what gives?

Indeed, is there a story here at all, or is the "skyrocketing divorce rate" just a long, really persistent, myth?

Let's start with the status quo ante.

Prior to the second half of the 20th Century, divorce was obtainable in the United States and most English-speaking countries, Ireland being the exception, together with Newfoundland in Canada.⁴   Indeed, we might note that divorce was obtainable in most of the protestant countries of Europe, something that isn't surprising if we consider the history of the Reformation.⁵   Be that as it may, however, there was no such thing, generally, as no-fault divorce pretty much anywhere until Soviet Russia introduced it in 1917, something which is quite telling, really.⁶

The body of law that governed male/female relationships, to obfuscate it a bit, has been collectively referred to as the "heart balm laws", but frankly, there was nothing romantic or warm and fuzzy about them. They were very serious statutes that bluntly took into the account the realities of those relationships and biology.  Indeed, they were much more realistic on those topics and the fundamental nature of marriage than the law today, including recently evolutions in the law that Obergefell has brought about. On that, they were wholly unconcerned with love.  They were pretty concerned, however, with sex, and what sex could bring about.

And indeed we see that, albeit in a disturbing way, in the story of the nuptials of Chester Linkfield and Ernestine Burnett.⁷  But not only there, we see it in one of the retained sets of laws that remain in effect.

Because this has taken me so long two write, I read of an even more youthful marriage than the one involving Marilyn Monroe just the other day, on Reddit.  It was this one.

Yikes.

The news story was apparently regarded as an odd human interest story, so it made it all the way to print in New Zealand, where it actually gave more details:

Yikes again.

FWIW, for most of Western society, including American society, marriages involving very young couples, let alone teenagers, were uncommon.  Marriage ages change a lot less than people generally think, as we reported here:

Let's take a table that somebody else has generated and see if it changes things at all:

Year --- Men --- Women
2015 ----29.2 ----27.1
2010 --- 28.2 --- 26.1
2000 --- 26.8 --- 25.1
1990 --- 26.1 --- 23.9
1980 --- 24.7 --- 22.0
1970 --- 23.2 --- 20.8
1960 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1950 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1940 --- 24.3 --- 21.5
1930 --- 24.3 --- 21.3
1920 --- 24.6 --- 21.2
1910 --- 25.1 --- 21.6
1900 --- 25.9 --- 21.9
1890 --- 26.1 --- 22.0

But what a strange story.⁸

Obviously there was more to this story than the press reported, although there are hints at it.  Fighting a duel for the affections of a twelve-year-old is exceedingly odd under any circumstances, however.  Linkfield was shot in the duel, but apparently only Carpenter was locked up.  Why? Dueling was illegal under any circumstances at the time.  Did getting shot suffice for Linkfield's punishment, or was Carpenter regarded as the aggressor?

Also hinted at, Linkfield and the young object of his affection obviously met back up, as she was almost certainly a pregnant 13-year-old when they married, which is more than a little icky.  As the young husband, married to a true child bride, apparently had no means of support for a family, they moved in to his parent's home.

It's hard to imagine this story developing this way today.  Almost impossible, in fact.  And that it was treated somewhat as a love story in the paper is a bit hard to fathom.

If you look at the Reddit entry, you'll see that by and large people were pretty shocked by the 1922 story, and I can include myself in that group.  As always with such stories, you get a minority who will come in with the "well, back in the day everyone married young", or "at one time child marriages were common".  Nope, they weren't, and they haven't been since the Church decreed that marriage could only occur with consent and in particular with the consent of the bride.⁹

Burnett did marry Linkfield, as noted, which gets us back to the law, as noted when we took this diversion. The retained set of laws, and we'll get more into the law in a moment, are those dealing with "statutory rape", the concept that below a certain age people cannot consent to sex.  How this works varies by state, and indeed it changed in my own state over time.  I haven't kept up with it as it's outside my area of the law, but all US jurisdictions and probably every Western World jurisdiction has a law that essentially says that below a certain age, consent doesn't matter, it's rape.  Some modify this with age provisions, such as if the couple is both below the age of consent but close in age, or if the couple is close in age, etc.  As noted, I haven't kept up with it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up.

All states also have provisions that hold that below a certain age, you can't consent to marriage.  Again, I'm not going to see what it currently is here, but at least when I was first practicing law, you had to have your parent's permission if you were younger than 18 years of age, and the court's permission if you were younger than 16 years of age.

As noted above, I have known some people who were married younger than age 18, but frankly the youngest of them would be about 60 years of age now.  This isn't common at all, and it hasn't been at any point in my lifetime.  It hasn't been for eons, frankly, and it's a super rarity now.  The very few people I know, outside of one example, who fit in this category would be up in their 80s or 90s now, but for the fact that they're dead.

Save for one example I know of in which a couple, originally from Louisiana, were married when he was 19, and she was 13.

That's strange, to be sure.  She wasn't, I'd note, "in trouble".

Anyhow, I digress. The point here is that if you read the story of Linkfield and Burnett, it's pretty clear that she was "in trouble" and the options that were left were to marry her off to the father or send him to the pokey.  Marrying her to the father relieved, at some point, the parents of Linkfield and Burnett and provided some sort of family for the child.  Sending Linkfield to reform school or jail would have left her in desperate straights, along with the child, and would have imposed a financial burden on her parents and probably a hostile financial burden on his parents.

Not as romantic as the news stories made it appear, but then they were written at a time when the readers understood all of this without having to have anyone explain it.

Which brings us to shacking up, or um, cohabitation.

These laws changed over time, but if you combine the civil law and the statutory law, generally what you find is that cohabitation was illegal in some places, or it resulted in common law marriage in others.  A promise to marry, an engagement, was legally enforceable and "calling off an engagement" could result in a civil action by the party that had not sought to call it off (breach of promise).  Divorce was generally allowable, but there had to be a cause, such as abandonment or cruelty, to justify it.

So what was the thinking?

It's pretty straight forward, actually.

Rather than the current mushy thinking about male/female relationships, our ancestors knew that at a certain point in time in our development, once we passed our childhoods, we were male and female, and attracted to the opposite, and at some point that could lead to children.

We've dealt with this before, so I won't go into it in great detail here, but laws regarding men, women, marriage and divorce, and everything related to the topic, was, in some way or another, related to that.  Cohabitation was illegal or brought about "common law" marriages, as the law didn't want society to be responsible for any children that came about by way of the relationship.  In other words, the law operated to attempt to force men to comply with their obligations to their offspring, and to protect the long term economic best interest of those offspring.

Breach of promise type actions existed, as there was a general assumption that a single woman who had accepted a proposal of marriage might now be "damaged goods" that other suitors would avoid.  In a world in which female employment was harder to come by, particularly good paying jobs that didn't involve manual labor, there was a fear that a woman who had been engaged, with her fiancé backing out, would be left "ruined".  Burnett, for example, certainly would have been and likely would have had to face life as an extremely young mother basically alone, her moral status irreparably tarnished, and her child a problem for any potential suitor that wouldn't have existed had the father been absent due to death, rather than disinterest.

And this all ties into another set of statistics, part of which involve cohabitation, and part which don't.

Let's go back to the "divorce rate".

Frankly, the divorce rate was probably never as high as people imagined it was, and according to even a news story that has it a lot higher than Census Bureau reports, it reached a fifty-year low last year.  Not that this would be great, as 1972, fifty years ago, is when things started to climb.  

Percentage of divorces per 1,000 is one figure, but the overall number of marriages that end in divorce is quite another.  

When we look at the start of the 20th Century and the overall low divorce rate, that equated pretty well, without really looking it up, with a generally low overall percentage of the population that divorced  I.e., some marriages ended in divorce, but they were few, and the implications were pronounced.  Being tagged a "divorcee" wasn't a good thing. This remained the case up until the 1970s really, although to less of a degree than had previously been the case. 

Indeed, by way of a couple of examples, when I was young there was a neighboring couple that my parents really liked, but it was noted from time to time that they'd both been divorced prior to their current marriage. My parents didn't hold it against them, but it was sort of a mark against them.  It was an odd character defect, if you will.

As another example, my mother was friends with a woman who had at one time worked for a friend of my father's.  My father's friend was divorced and remarried, which was likewise regarded as a bit of a character defect.  My mother's friend held it bitterly against him, her former employer, even though she was herself divorced.  She may have felt liberty to criticize as her divorce from her husband, whom I understood to be an alcoholic, may have left her raising their son alone, but she never remarried. She remained faithful, in essence, to her marriage by not remarrying.

Or, as a final example, two of the kids I was friends with in grade school lived in homes in which their mother's had divorced their fathers and remarried.  It was regarded as so unusual it was a topic among parents, and we were all very conscious of it.

Now, meeting divorced and remarried people are very common.  I'm sure hardly anyone can't list several friends or associates that haven't been divorced, and some have been divorced and remarried.

It may be just me, but I think I see a bit of a trend here as well.

I know several people that have been married multiple times, but interestingly, this seems to be something that applies mostly to a generation that cuts off at age 50.  I may be wrong, but I don't really see younger generations getting serial divorces.  Part of the reason for that may be the rise in cohabitation.  I'll go onto that in a moment, but of those whom I know who have had serials marriages, a couple of them probably fit into that category of too immature to marry when they first married, and maybe when they married a second time, but the third time it really stuck.  On the other hand, some just seem to have a light attachment to the meaning of marriage, or they have bad skills in regard to whom they have chosen to marry.

Some would now claim that the rise of cohabitation has caused the drop in the phenomenon noted immediately above, but there's no evidence of that.  On the contrary, statistically it's been shown cohabitation does not in any fashion make subsequent marriages more stable. Quite the opposite is true, it increases the instances of divorce.

And indeed, cohabitating men in particular never quit looking.  It's been shown that by not being bound, they really don't regard themselves as bound.  Quite a few, to at least some degree, still are heding their bets just a little.

And in someways this takes us to what we might call "stealth divorces".

As we noted above, cohabitation was generally illegal, certainly in the 19th Century, and in some places in the early 20th Century.  It was societally regarded as absolutely scandalous.  That taint began to wane with the Sexual Revolution.

Now, we don't want to fall into the error of claiming that before 1968 everyone's behavior was absolutely correct.  Having said that, studies in more recent years have shown that the groundbreaking sexual studies of the late 40s and early 50s were erroneous to a whopping degree.  Indeed, well into the 1950s, most men and women had no sexual relations with anyone until they were married.  This was the societal standard, and it was very largely adhered to.  Not absolutely, but fairly well.l

The Second World War clearly made some inroads into that, and frankly the Great War had dented it as well, but after both wars the standards revived, even if they'd temporarily eroded during the war.  They started to steadily erode starting in 1954 following the December 1953 release of Playboy magazine, and that definitely had a cultural impact that's apparent in films of the late 50s and early 60s.  The 1960s, however, bust things wide open, which exploded all over the 1970s in the form of the Sexual Revolution.

It's a fairly short line from sex outside of marriage to cohabitation, but here again it didn't happen instantly.  Even as late as the 1980s when I was in university, cohabitation was regarded as semi scandalous society wide.  People really didn't know how to take it, and where it occurred it was pretty uniformly regarded as a temporary arrangement.   Again, by way of personal recollections, one politically highly liberal friend of mine was scandalized by the conduct of a female roommate who, well, we will skip it, but this is in the mid 1980s.  Of my college friends who married about that time, only one had "lived with" his girlfriend prior to their marriage, although their story presents an interesting one in terms of trends.

By the late 90s things were really changing in this regard, and you started to run into couples, for the first time, that seemingly cohabitated with no thought of getting married.

Having said that, some of this trend, like much in the way of widely reported social trends, may be exaggerated.  Nonetheless, the trend is there, and in 2019 the Census Bureau found:

In 2018, 15 percent of young adults ages 25-34 live with an unmarried partner, up from 12 percent 10 years ago.

It further reported:

Fifty years ago, in 1968, living with an unmarried partner was rare. Only 0.1 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 0.2 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds lived with an unmarried partner, according to the Current Population Survey. 

The measurement of cohabitation from 1968-1995 was less precise. The estimate came from an indirect measure of opposite-sex partners sharing living quarters, and the late 1960s through the early 1970s had particularly low reports of cohabitation. 

Also, when comparing 2008 to 2018, years in which the Current Population Survey asked a direct cohabitation question, cohabitation only increased for 25- to 34-year-olds and slightly decreased for 18- to 24-year-olds. 

So, although cohabitation has increased for young adults over the last 50 years, it is important to note the limitations in measurement and that certain periods of time did not produce increases in unmarried young adults living together. 

In contrast to the rising rates of cohabitation, the proportion of young adults who are married has declined over time. 

Today, 30 percent of young adults ages 18-34 are married, but 40 years ago, in 1978, 59 percent of young adults were married.

So, what the Census Bureau found was that, basically, cohabitation had jumped enormously for young adults in fifty years, but was decreasing for other sections of the population.  Also of note 59% of young adults, if we run the "young" criteria up to age 34, which is a questionable way of doing it (at one time 34 was actually considered "middle age", and not all that long ago) were married.  Now, 30% of the population in that age range is, although it's still the case overall that the majority of Americans live in married households.

That is quite the change, but I'd also note that it actually sort of, but only sort of, replicates a situation that had existed in the 19th Century when "common law" marriages came about.  That legal creation was created by the courts to deal with the byproducts of just such unions and to handle the legal problems they created.  And in looking at that, we an find a surprising number of notable common law marriages in the United States in the 19th Century, particularly in the wilder regions of the country.

Indeed, looking back even further, it's hard not to recall that it was not until well into the Middle Ages that marriages needed to be witnessed at all.

Some of the current cohabitation going on is basically in the nature of common law marriages, even if not recognized as such.  This is particularly true of the ones that use the extremely irritating word "partner" to describe the putative spouse.  Others are just examples of people playing house, and there's everything in between.  We note it here, however, as these couples do split up, and often without any sort of intervention of the law at all, and therefore they create a sort of stealth divorce.

Some of how this works overall, as a social observer, is interesting.  Some of these couples get around to marrying later, some never do, but with some it's almost impossible not to view them as common law marriages.  It speaks in part, however, to the breakdown in standards in society, but this thread is already broad enough without going there.

So what is going on here?

It's actually pretty hard to say.

When I started this thread off, I had intended to look at the often claimed link between "marry in haste" marriages during World War Two leading to a breakdown in marriage itself, which isn't a theory that I came up.  However, much like the popular theory that "World War Two caused women to enter into the work force forever" claim, it really doesn't have the facts to back it up.  There was in fact a jump in divorce rates after the war, but it wasn't titanic, and overall societal divorce rates returned to what they had been just before the war and remained there into the late 1970s.  And frankly, attitudes towards divorce, while they changed, didn't change all that much until the 80s.

So if the war played a role, it was indirect.

What does seem to have played a role, however, was the combined impact of increased wealth and a big focus on materialism, and we're still living with that, although it seems to be breaking down in recent years, with a boost in that from COVID 19.

For most of human history marriage played a variety of roles, but the big societal one was making sure that children were protected, and then widows were. This doesn't mean that marriage doesn't have an important religious aspect to it, particularly in Apostolic Christian churches.  It does.  But societies, and by this we mean all societies, regulated male/female interactions for the reasons noted above, as society didn't want the tribe, the village, the shire, or whatever, to be stuck with the burden of raising children or taking care of widows.

There was really no thought at all to doing so until the post-war era, for the most part.  "Mistakes of nature", as children born out of wedlock were sometimes referred to, were a disaster, for the most part, for the economic well-being of the mothers, save for the instances when the fathers were well-to-do.  Contrary to what progressives like to claim, however, the overwhelming majority of women took the children to term.  Giving the children up for adoption was a very common option, particularly for teenage and early twenties mothers, who were often "sent away" for a time until the children could be delivered in hopes of trying to salvage some element of the girl's reputation.  Quick marriages, or the proverbial "shotgun marriage", were also solutions, and there's some question of whether the Linkfield marriage described above may have been one of those.

Anyway you looked at it, abortion and living with heavy public support were not options.  As readers here will note, I don't feel that abortion should be now.  But its undeniable that public money to aid the mothers of unwed children, and the children, came about following the introduction of the Great Society.  Indeed, the often heard claim of people for sympathy about a protagonist that "she's an unwed working mother" just would not have been made prior to that time, and probably not until the 1990s really.

What also came about was a change in sexual behavior due to the Sexual Revolution, with the Quartermaster of the Revolution being pharmaceutical birth control.  We've dealt with that before here as well, but the overall mix of birth control combined with Playboy's separation of the concept that sex can result in children really hit in the 1960s, right at the time that a youth rebellion was underway.  None of the results would have been possible without that combination, and added to it was the post World War Two massive increase in societal wealth.

The huge increase in societal wealth meant that it was possible for government to imagine, if erroneously, that it could address the desperate plight of unmarried mothers and their children, which came partially, but only partially, true, just at the same time that the Sexual Revolution broke down sexual mores. 

And added to that was the change in people's views about what their own lives were for that accompanied the backside of the youth rebellion.  

As we've noted here before, prior to the 1960s, and very much prior to World War Two, the United States may have been a capitalistic society, but it was also one which, for most people, was actually family oriented.  When the authors of I'll Take My Stand assaulted the New Deal, they in part emphasized that, as it was so much the case.  I.e., they expected a sympathetic audience to the argument that Rooseveltian capitalism/liberal government was super pro business and was destroying familial leisure.  A person can take that for what it's worth, but in the 1970s that really became true.  As late as the 1970s and 1980s, you'd still occasionally hear parents encouraging their children in post high school academic careers on the basis that "you'll get a good job, so you can support a family".  

I haven't heard that argument made for decades now.

Now, people are urged to get a good job as it'll produce a high income and that means lots of stuff. And that's the real difference between then and now.

People now routinely leave friends and family for their careers, and in doing so abandon their spouses and "others".   Since the 1970s, and very much since then, societal propaganda has been full of "fulfilling career" arguments, arguing, particularly to women, that their path to a meaningful life and a sense of self-worth is solely linked to their careers and completely internalized.

Of course, another concept that didn't exist is that people had to approach something really serious, sex, as entertainment and that they were doing something wrong if they weren't acting like alley cats in heat in at least a certain point in their life.

The basic psychology of sex is pretty well known in our species, and it does in fact vary enormously by species.  As we've gone into that before, we'll not plow into it again, but sex serves more than reproductive purposes in our species, which is one of the reasons we're one of the few mammals that will act sexually in spite of a female not being "in season".  Cattle, for example, don't act that way.  If a cow isn't in season, they're perfectly content just lying around doing nothing, and they don't hit on the cows.

The basic reason has to do with our evolutionary biology, which has a child-rearing strategy that entails along childhood. Given that, children need a long period of nurturing and protection, and that means that both of the parents need to be involved.

Interestingly, that also forms a certain basis for why women and men are not the same in regard to sex drive.  Once a source of 1950s and 1960s style ribald jokes, women, particularly if they have children, are less interested than men, which doesn't mean disinterested.  Anyhow, according to evolutionary biologists, the deal that nature imposed on our DNA is that men would stick with their mates and secure them food and protection, with the biological bargain being struck in favor of sex.  

Now, modern social critics, who often have a poor understanding of biology, fail to note one thing and miss another entirely here.

The missed one is that it's well demonstrated that psychologically sex trips a trigger in our psychology and that what it does to us, in terms of the opposite, is to create a bond pretty much instantly.  That bond never goes away.  Indeed, old romantic tales of people pining for a "lost love" or somebody that they met decades ago are probably related to, or barely disguised depictions of, people having this intimate bond very early and then moving on for some reason, but not getting over it.

The thing social critics bring up about this is "what about cheating men", etc…, but that says something, once again, about wealth.

And survival.

As early in our species' history, by which we pretty much mean up until last Thursday, women died at a high rate, in part because of child bearing, men tended to outlast them.  As recently as the early history of the United States, this remained so much the case that an average "middle class" or "upper class" man was presumed likely to have at least two or three marriages during a lifetime.  It's grim, but it was accepted that women stood a fairly high chance of dying relatively young.  Indeed, not only was this the case for women, but children struggled to make it past about age seven.

A good example of this is provided by Martha Jefferson, who was just 33 years old when she died.  Her health was wrecked by multiple exposures to disease and bearing very heavy children.  But the example doesn't stop there.

Martha Jefferson had been born Martha Wales.  Her father was John Wales and her mother, Martha Wales, née Eppes.  Her parents were married just two years at the time of her birth,   Eppes was a widow when they married, when she was 27 years of age.  Her first two children were born stillborn and the third, the woman who would grow to adulthood and marry Thomas Jefferson, lived, but she died five days latter, essentially a casualty of the birth.

Her father then married Tabith Cocke, who died sometime prior to 1860, meaning that they'd been married six to ten years (her date of death isn't really known).  Martha, her stepdaughter, didn't get along with her.  Her father then married Elizabeth Lomax, who was a widow, and who died but a year later.  Martha didn't get along with her either. Her father then took his slave Betty Hemings, who was "half white" by descent (her father was an English sea captain) into a sexual relationship, producing more children.

Martha Jefferson make Thomas Jefferson promise not to remarry, as she didn't want her children to endure a stepmother.  Jefferson didn't, but then took one of the Hemings as his concubine, or what have you.   This relationship was fairly widely known of, but less well known today is that Sally Hemings was, according to the way Americans account "race" now, 3/4s white and 1/4 black.  Indeed, it was often noted that she bore a resemblance to Martha Jefferson.

Now none of this is meant to be a charming story.  Some of it is downright creepy.  But what we see from it is that people were dying left and right all the time, and women were particularly likely to die young.  Men usually remarried within a couple of years.  In this instance, the perversion of slavery made it easy for both of the men involved to end up taking enslaved concubines, with whom they actually shared a close cultural connection.  Jefferson upheld his promise to Martha not to remarry in that fashion, but only in a deeply weird and sort of technical way.  What this shows us overall is that a biological imperative operating in nature basically regards men as incompetent to raise children on their own and then, death having intervened, they're off and running looking for new female help.

Now things have dramatically changed, and life is about self fulfillment and the like, and if people get in the way of that, even if they are infants, they are to be dumped.

Prior to the 1970s people didn't really have that concept.

Because its not true.

And therein, more likely than not, lies the answer.

If its all about you, after all, leaving them, whomever they are, is not only easy, its the right thing to do.

Of course, it isn't.  And there's some indication that the generations Post Generation Jones know that. As we noted the other day, they're Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat. And there's some indication that they're groping back to social conservatism as well

The Wayles and Jefferson story provides additional illustration of a fundamental truth.  We live in a fallen world, so this area of our lives, like all of our basic genetic instructions, can be set to run off kilter, and sometimes in a very destructive way.

Just as the imperative to eat can go awry in some people to their ultimate demise, the sexual one can get pretty fouled up, and fouled up society wide, as well.  In Wayes and Jefferson's day, that was obviously operating, in that they'd defeated the basic human rights of women to say yes or no to a married relationship. We can't know what conversations Wayles and Hemmings had with two different generations of Hemings women, but we sure know that they were at a colossal disadvantage.  Both women were born into bondage, and saying no was going to be pretty freaking difficult for them.  We don't really know if they ever had said no, as slavery silenced their voices.

So there we have a massive perversion, although certainly not one without a historical precedent.  Arab raiders took Irish women for sex slaves in raids designed just for that purpose, for example.

We benighted souls, of course, endure no such horrors in our modern lives.

Or do we?

In our live the grand perversion, already referenced, is the divorce of sex from reproduction and sex from reasons.  As a super rich society, we've reduced everything to entertainment.

This corruption came first in those parts of our society with the most money and the most free time.  The lives of noble aristocracy, for example, reads like a novel sold that should be sold in a brown paper bag.  Even such a figure as Czar Nicholas II, who was fiercely devoted to his wife and who lead a very conventional moral life as the Russian Emperor, no matter what else we might think of him, had a mistress early on who went on to be his brother's mistress.¹⁰   In North America, real libertine behavior or hit first in Hollywood where there was a large surplus of cash, time and superficiality, leading to scandals of all sorts, but more thing that simply never became scandals.  Indeed, even in pre-1945 North America the commonality of divorce amongst celluloid entertainers, when it was fairly rare for everyone else, was blistering. 

Mathilde Kschessinska, Czar Nicholas II's mistress prior to his marriage, who survived the revolution, moved to Parish, and died at age 100.

The association here with Hollywood is important, actually, as the entertainment industry became an agent for the pornographication of the culture and an ally of the destruction of standards during the Sexual Revolution. Why wouldn't it have been? Sex sells, as everyone knows, and in many ways when Hollywood portrayed something in an "avant-garde" fashion, it was merely portraying its own moral standards as practiced behind the movie screen.  People have a long history of normalizing their own conduct, no matter what it is.

And that went on to convert the culture from one in which sex was in fact relegated to marriage as a standard and in reality, to one in which such shows as The Big Bang Theory or Friends operated to tell people there as something wrong with them if they didn't engage in sex readily and casually, and with multiple partners.

Which is a corruption of the basic genetic roadmap nearly as profound as that of Wayles and Hemings taking enslaved women to bed.

And this has had the impact of wearing the trigger.

Even in the early history of the country, in which more than one wife was common, we're really just looking at men who had a handful of "sexual partners".  For Jefferson, it was basically two.  For Wayles, it was four.  It's extremely unlikely there were anymore.  And there is no evidence that the triggers were pulled again until their first "partner" had died.

Playboy, on the other hand, came around and told American men that women should be putting out constantly as women were sterile ditzes and male urges were all that mattered.  The Sexual Revolution came about and changed the standards, and it was really women who were made to suffer.  Their trigger falls, if you will, on a much harder hammer, and they are accordingly much less likely to move on, not having the same evolutionary drive to the same extent as men, as in antiquity, while they might need to move on, they were less likely to. Additionally, choosing wisely was always more of a concern for women, biologically, as they were going ultimately end up with the product of the relationship, children, no matter what.  Single fathers exist, in other words, but not at the same rate as single mothers.

Added to that, the study of pedophiles has shown that one of the statistical factors in their backgrounds is having had five or more sexual partners.  I.e., the risk factor that somebody will become a pedophile increases when they reach that level, which makes sense as by that time the natural unifying aspect of sex is pretty clearly breaking down to yielding instead to urges.  If a person can, in other words, defeat their DNA to the extent that satisfying the base urge, it seems to break down other barriers to satisfying it. When we realize that when we started off looking at this, most Americans did not have sex until they married, and now the average number of "partners" in the US is seven.

This matters to our story as it demonstrates another part of this story.  If the "there's something wrong with you if you aren't doing it" view can break down a person's ingrained inclinations to view the opposite gender as potential lifelong mates and allow some people's eyes to turn to children, it's pretty clearly going to weaken the inclination to stay together at all.

Now, for most people, this isn't going to be the factor leading to a divorce.  It's only one of the background factors in society at large, and that's the overall story.

Most people live according to societal standards pretty much, and accept societal standards pretty much.  Indeed, even in areas as substantial as the ones we're talking about, people will tend to live up, or down, to societal standards.  More than that, they'll tend to comport with them and incorporate them into their own views.

We've already noted some of this. When the standard we're addressing here, that regarding divorce, had a pretty high bar, society at large also had one.  For example, there were real questions on whether or not Ronald Reagan could be elected President, as he was a divorced and remarried man.  In contrast, this didn't even come up with Donald Trump, who is a serial polygamist.  

In other words, all that we've discussed above operated to weaken the bounds of marriage in general and make divorce more common.  It also operated to change the nature of marriage in American society in particular, and in the Western World in general, different from what they had been, which made the obligation to enter it to in a somewhat grave fashion, or enter into it at all, lighter.  

Indeed, due to the latter, a lot of divorces might really be compared to that oddly disused means of separation, annulment.  People tend to think of annulment solely as a religious procedure, but it isn't.  Wyoming, for example, has statutes covering legal separation, annulment, and divorce.  Annulment is rarely used, and legal separation has fallen into disfavor as well.  People simply get divorced. 

But things may seem to be slowly changing, at least by observation.

That the Sexual Revolution was a complete and utter disaster is clear.  It turned out that people didn't go on to happy lives a la Friends or The Big Bang Theory.  Their lives tended to end up a mess.  And over time it seems that younger, post Boomer generations, or at least those that followed after the forgotten and trapped Generation Jones, have tended to grope back, although largely in the dark as all the lights are off, to the prior standards.  Average sexual partner figures were dropping, albeit slightly, for those between 25 and 49.  A separate figure for those now in their teens so surprised the figures at the highly conservative and religious First Things that they did a podcast episode on it noting, in their (rather odd here) view, that teens were abstaining in record numbers for recent times, but for the wrong reasons, giving us once again the odd Boomer view that Gen X,Y, & Z can't do anything right.

Now, it's probably not safe to assume that we're going to return to the standards of the middle 20th Century anytime soon, but by the same token, things are changing.  And in terms of what this blog serves to do, we've certainly seen an interesting long term trend that's important to appreciate.  Starting with the 1960s, fictional depictions of past eras tended to present them with modern, or rather Hollywood modern, mores. But that what things were like.

Which were never accurate, actually.  Divorce rates were never as high as thought to be, and experienced a rise, and fall.

Where we are now, is not where we are going.  Having experimented, it seems younger generations are deeming the experiment a failure, and looking, at least to some extent, for a way back.

Footnotes.

*A thread like this really runs the risk of some people thinking "you are picking on divorced people", or just the opposite, "you are endorsing divorce".

I'm doing neither in this thread.

This is a social history, just trying to track a trend.

To the extent that I'd make any observations on the topics above it would be this.  As standards have changed, the view society takes of divorce has changed also, and as we'll show below, that means that people may be (but in actuality might also not be) more likely to get divorced.  

People generally hold the concept that "marriage is forever", and in the Christian religions it is, although it's really only in the Catholic Churches that this remains a hard and fast rule.  Out in society, and the US is a Protestant country no matter what people might otherwise like to claim, this remains the ideal but with large exceptions, although perhaps not anywhere near as large as commonly imagined.

Societies adapt to even existential changes amazingly rapidly, but often only temporarily.  It's an interesting aspect of our character as a species.  Often, when some big huge change and society is introduced, if it's somehow enforced either through laws or societal standards setters, it'll gain widespread acceptance, sometimes nearly overnight. But the interesting thing on this is that long term views can turn back, particularly if not grounded in our evolutionary makeup.  There are multiple recent examples of this.  

Without adding a thread to the thread, divorce gained widespread acceptance as a concept after 1970, and it retains it, so much so that even a lot of Catholics divorce and remarry, though the Church absolutely prohibits it.  What this means in terms of members of the Apostolic Faiths in general, and Catholics in particular, is one thing (you can't be adherent and ignore these concepts), but what it means out in the larger society at large, which is what we're discussing, and how average people in the statistical majority view it and act up on it, is another.

1.  Well not really the other day, it's now quite some time ago, actually.

This is another post I started some time ago, and then ended up not finishing.  This is unfortunate as, in part, I don't quite recall where I was headed with this, but given as it's an interesting societal topic, I’m going to blather on anyhow, in part because I sort of remember where my brilliant insights were going, and in part because this tied into something completely different that I started writing about, or sort of completely different.

2.  During her marriage to Miller, Monroe was heavily addicted to prescription drugs, both to sleep and to wake up.

I'm really mystified by Monroe's marriage to Miller.  Her marriage to Dougherty makes sense in the context of the times and her, frankly, desperation.  So does her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

But Miller?

Why?

Frankly, the divorce wasn't surprising either, and in a different context, or perhaps this context, this marriage likely could have been anulled.  She was only 16 and in pretty desperate straights when they married.

3.  The Mauldin story has a surprising end, however.  Bill and Jean Mauldin never lost touch with each other, and towards the end of his life when he became incapacitated, she moved into his house and took care of him.  In the end, therefore, she resumed the role of a wife in a really deep sense.  The couple, in spite of their early rocky start, may have been truly well suited for each other after all.

4.  Outside the US, most English-speaking countries had some variant of an 1857 English law.

5.  Note, however, as a religious matter, the Church of England, like the Catholic Church, disallows divorce.  Be that as it may, since the Second World War the churches of the Anglican Communion have very much diluted their adherence to this expressed belief.

6. We should note here that prior to the Russian Revolution Russia had, of course, a state church in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, part of the churches that separated from the Catholic Church during the Great Schism.  Eastern Orthodoxy, like Catholicism, is an Apostolic Church, and it holds largely the same set of beliefs, even though a reunion of the two major branches of Christianity has not occurred.  One of the differences between the two branches, however, is that the Orthodox actually allow up to two divorces and three remarriages under some circumstances, although it's a little difficult to grasp what governs this for the non-Orthodox.  It's basically regarded as a concession to human nature.  The Church, that is the pre Schism Catholic Church of which the Orthodox were then part, very clearly did not allow for divorce early on and so this is a development in Orthodoxy which has occurred since the Schism.

7.  So how did this all work out?  Like the protagonists in Chuck Berry's Teenage Wedding?

Not hardly.

According to the Reddit follow up, Chester Linkfield was in and out of jail for the rest of his life, which wasn't all that long.  He worked as a repairman and died of TB at age 32.   At that young age, he'd literally been married to Ernestine for half of his short life.

She remarried less than a month after he died, which is peculiar. She would have known that his death was coming, of course, as TB was a slow but sure killer. Her new husband was Denzil Swan, who died in 1950, and who was listed as divorced at the time, although that doesn't mean that the devorce was from Ernestine, she may have predeceased him.

Their son, born in 1922, was named William Chester Linkfield.  From what little I can tell of him, he served in the Second World War and moved to Pennsylvania at some point.  As odd as it is to realize it, he would have been 16 years old when his father died, the same age his father had been when he married his mother.

8.  Or was it?

To some extent, a person has to wonder if this was just an Appalachian story for the time.  

Appalachia is a region of the country which has remained culturally distinct, and poor, for a very long time.  In most poor cultures, poverty operates against early marriage. A good example of this would have been pre Celtic Tiger Ireland, where generally marriages occurred late due to circumstances, and indeed a fair number of men remained unmarried their entire lives.

As history certainly rhymes, if not repeats, part of what we see now in current late marriage trends may be due to something similar.  The press likes to imagine that young college educated couples are busy pursing their super glamorous careers, 1970s/1980s career propaganda wise, but in fact many are stuck in jobs that pay relatively poorly and can not find a means of actually getting married economically.  This same trend reflects itself in the current trend of multiple generations living in the same household, or older children returning home ot lvie with their parents, all of which are norms of the past.

At any rate, two teenagers dueling over the affection of a young girl isn't hugely surprising in a region where generational feuds had persisted into the late 19th Century.  Her age remains surprising, and icky.

Consider, however, Alvin C. York, the great hero of World War One.

Alvin York after World War One, his mother and younger sister are in the photo.

York was a wild youth who had been involved in violence prior to his profound conversion to Christianity.  He was one of eleven children.  His wife Gracie was 19 at the time of their marriage, almost immediately after his return from service, and they had obviously planned the marriage before he entered the Army.  He'd entered the Army almost exactly two years prior to that.  He was twelve years older than she was.

In other words, York, a Tennessean Appalachian, was from a huge rural family and his wife was relatively young in context, alhtough certainly not twelve, at the time of their marriage. . . but, wait. . . .

Honest compels me to admit here that my wife was 21 when we got married, and I was 31. We became engaged when she was 20.

9.  This is one of the many areas in which the Church, by which we mean the Catholic Church, was an enormously liberalizing force, in spite of what modern day self-appointed pundits like to think.  Up until Christianity giving away girls at a fairly young age was in fact common. The Church put a complete stop to it by simply providing that women couldn't be married to anyone they didn't consent to be married to, a radical, and frankly very protofeminist, position.

10.  Depending upon where you wonder to in social media, sooner or later you'll stumble upon modern monarchist, an exceedingly odd group.

By monarchist, I don't mean English citizens who want to keep their constitutional monarchy.  No, I mean people who really believe in monarchy.

They tend to be highly traditional and often radically Christian traditionalist (never mind that today's real ruling monarchs are Muslims).  They have a variety of reasons they cling to the now long dead body of monarchy, sometimes saying that God has decreed it the ideal form of government, but one of the primary ones is that the monarch is there to set the moral standards.

Which leads me to believe that they've never looked at the lives of real monarchs.

The sexual mores of monarchs, quite frankly, tended to be like something out of Playboy long before Hugh Hefner though it up.  If you read the lives of Kings, for example, its surprising when you find one that didn't have multiple mistresses.

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