Under a new law, France is to become the first country in the world to ban ‘ psychological violence’ within marriage.
The law would apply to cohabiting couples and to both men and women.
It would cover men who shout at their wives and women who hurl abuse at their husbands – although it was not clear last night if nagging would be viewed as breaking the law.
The law is expected to cover every kind of insult including repeated rude remarks about a partner’s appearance, false allegations of infidelity and threats of physical violence.
While it shouldn’t be the role of government to intervene in this, and the law looks unenforceable to my skeptical eyes (every kind of insult? Like, “your mother wears combat boots”?), let’s hope they enforce it against women. However, it’s unlikely it’ll be enforced against women perpetrators: The Express reports,
The law is aimed at protecting women who suffer the worst attacks of this kind, ranging from comments about their appearance to threats of violence.
While most reported domestic violence is inflicted by men against women, my educated guess going by experience is that the worst inflictors of psychological abuse are women – women who mock their men in public, and who cut them down at every opportunity they have, whether in the company of strangers or in private.
Professor George uses the ages-old process of human reason for his theological and moral arguments that retired Princeton professor John Fleming referred to in our conversation two years ago,
Fausta: And if I remember correctly, St. Augustine emphasized reason as a means of getting closer to God.
John Fleming: Absolutely. We’re used to the idea that there’s some great divide or conflict between faith and reason. This idea, in a sense, grew in the Late Middle Agesn when Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians of that period had to deal with the rediscovery in the Latin West of Aristotle and a system of moral theology that seemed to be totally independent of the Christian revelation.
But, say, for Augustine, and for most of the early fathers of the Church, there was no conflict between faith and reason because faith seemed, on the basis of their empirical experience, a reasonable proposition. So, although Augustine would never do what Thomas Aquinas did, which is to sit down and in academic fashion try to prove the existence of God, you find in the Confessions and elsewhere lines of argument that basically are doing the same thing: argument by design. Some of this is highly relevant to theological controversy even today.
The NYT article seems to miss that very important point. However, Ryan Anderson, writing at The Corner, points out
Without a doubt, George and the other so-called “new natural lawyers” are innovative, but their innovations are in the service of reviving and refining what Isaiah Berlin called the central tradition of Western philosophy, the tradition that runs through Aristotle and Aquinas. Rather than manufacturing novel philosophical theories, George and his colleagues see themselves as appropriating and building on the wisdom of the ages to tease out the purposes and meanings of various social practices. In other words, this is philosophically critical conservative thought at its best.
This is most apparent in George’s arguments over abortion and sexual morality. Few citizens could explain to a sophisticated skeptic’s satisfaction why all people deserve the equal protection of the laws, or why cold-blooded murder is wrong. When the question is put to them, their likely response is that “they just do; it just is.” The right to life for the adult is just one of those self-evident propositions. So, too, with equal protection. You either see it, or you don’t.
Philosophers like George help make explicit the implicit judgment of the ordinary citizen. We ought not to murder adults because they possess intrinsic worth by virtue of the kind of creature that they are — rational and free animals. They are beings possessed of a rational nature. We ought to provide equal protection of the laws to all people because while they may vary in their gifts and talents, at their core all people possess the same fundamental dignity; each life is thus equally worthy of protection and promotion. But what is true of human beings in mature stages of development, George observes, is no less true of them in earlier developmental stages. What is true of the adult is also true of the unborn child. Any basis for distinguishing the two would, his arguments show, be unjustly arbitrary and have abhorrent logical consequences. The conclusion is straightforward: No human being may legitimately be harmed or denied the equal protection of the laws on account of such morally arbitrary features as age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency. Championing the embryological science that conclusively demonstrates that the developing embryo and fetus is a whole member of the species Homo sapiens, George simply applies the same moral reasoning implicit in our Western legal and political tradition to the contemporary question of the dignity and value of unborn human life.
The same is true for marriage. Yet the Times is particularly keen to push the view that George has developed and sold a new conception of marriage. But a social practice such as marriage has its own intrinsic rationality, based on the nature of the human person and the goods that fulfill people. This rationality is usually only implicitly grasped, frequently thought to be common sense and self-evidently true. As a result, it becomes embodied in legal, political, and religious institutions. As George and I argued a few years ago in NRO, none of these institutions created marriage. Rather, they all recognized this pre-political (and even pre-religious) natural institution and provided it with legal support and religious solemnization. George’s philosophy seeks to articulate the implicit rationality in these social and legal practices to explain and make explicit why marriage — the moral reality that our traditions track — has the structure that it does and is relevant to the political common good in the way that it is.
While he certainly would not have been installed in one of Princeton’s most celebrated professorial chairs without having produced more than a few important insights and powerful original arguments, his contributions build on the wisdom of those who have gone before — Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Montesquieu, Coke and Blackstone. They are certainly contributions that justify the Times in calling him “the Conservative-Christian Big Thinker.”
Indeed, it is a philosophy for our time.
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In a lighter mode, the NYT also missed that Prof. George also plays the banjo:
Plato, Arisotle, and dueling banjos.
And…
Dr. Fleming is blogging at Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche, a wonderfully learned and entertaining weekly (Wednesdays) must-read.
For the holidays, the Daily News adds, Elin and her two young sons children will be in Sweden with her family. Tiger, in turn, will be licking his wounds here in the U.S. with “the boys.”
Little Miss Attila has a few choice words for Shine’s Jessica Ashley, who’s come out saying that Tiger Woods’s wife did the right thing by resorting to violence. Jessica says,
I am not going to opine about whether Elin should or should not stick with her husband (although early reports are saying she’s planning to stand by him, after a revision of the prenup). Instead, I say that she should do whatever it is she has to do. If that is taking the tool of her husband’s trade to smash the window of his Cadillac Escalade, so be it. If that is combing through his phone and dialing up any suspicious numbers, go to it. If that is trying to work through it (hopefully, with help of a professional), then help yourself. If that is to handle it behind closed doors, then do that.
And I also get that no one can push anyone’s buttons like his or her spouse: intimacy can be a rage-producing machine. But adults try to use their words.
Because unlike Jessica Ashley, most of us have graduated kindergarten. I hope Ashley’s husband doesn’t rip her blankie up next time he gets pissed off.
Had Tiger been the offended party, would Jessica be saying that it’s OK for him to take his golf clubs and smash his car?
Maybe Jessica’s all for a double standard; Dr. Helen explains,
Or maybe what you are really saying is that you are for female privilege. If so, just say it out loud so everyone can know where you and your fellow sadistic “crowd” stands, not for equality between the sexes, but as a proponent of violence against men.
Yes, it’s the morning after Thanksgiving Day and there’s a list of things that need to be done, Dubay’s gone broke, the Latin Americans are a mess and rude people are crashing White House parties.
What better way, then, to procrastinate than to visit Wedinator, which will not only bring a (sometimes R-rated) chuckle, but will shine a new light on any wedding plans anyone you know may have?
Laura Munson writes about how she overcame a marital crisis:
This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.
Vox Popoli calls it the “Lao Tzu-inspired approach.” I say it’s more Epictetus than Lao Tzu.
On the other hand, he never moved out.
Vox Populi is also skeptical hat this would work for a man dealing with a wife determined to leave – and I agree.
Update
Meanwhile, over in Wisconsin, three women who never heard of Epictetus…
Alberto Cutié walked away from a Coral Gables court early Tuesday morning, marriage license in-hand, according to a record posted on Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts website that lists 35-year-old Ruhama Buni Canellis as the bride.
The couple was legally married by a judge, but sources say they still will have religious ceremony within the next week in an unnamed Episcopal church. The Rt. Rev. Leo Frade, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida, will officiate that wedding.
Moral arguments aside, I can not for the life of me, begin to imagine why anyone would want to make a lifetime commitment to TWO, not one, simultaneous spouses. Images of endless whiiiiiny arguments at the dinning table come to mind.
Look, if everybody involved is
a. twenty-one years or older
b. acting of their own free will and not coerced
c. there is no violence
d. making sure their financial assets are protected
e. there are no children involved
and you want to indulge in whatever perversion floats your boat, that’s your decision.
Of course, there’s at least one good statistical reason to urge people to wait on the wedding. Getting married at a young age remains the No. 1 predictor of divorce. So why on earth would I want to promote such a disastrous idea? For three good reasons:
First, what is considered “early marriage” by social scientists is commonly misunderstood by the public. The best evaluations of early marriage — conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and Penn State University — note that the age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume.
Second, good social science pays attention to gender differences. Most young women are mature enough to handle marriage. According to data from the government’s National Survey of Family Growth, women who marry at 18 have a better shot at making a marriage work than men who marry at 21. There is wisdom in having an age gap between spouses. For women, age is (unfortunately) a debit, decreasing fertility. For men, age can be a credit, increasing their access to resources and improving their maturity, thus making them more attractive to women. We may all dislike this scenario, but we can’t will it away.
Third, the age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.
Regnerus hits the bulls-eye next:
Too bad real life isn’t like that. Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth,” added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.
