Last Updated on February 6, 2022
Last week, I asked a question about marriage vows and whether or not having an affair or in any way breaking one’s marriage vows should be punished as a form of perjury.
If you didn’t answer last week, please do, here.
But as they say, it takes two to tango.
- First to play last week: Otowi of Otowi. Congratulations!
Here is this week’s “Monday’s Morals” question. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your blog…but either way, leave a link to your site so that everyone else can visit! If you repost the questions on your site, you must link back to this site as the source. Permission is not granted to copy the questions to message boards for the purpose of having members answer and play along there.
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Should the “other man” or “other woman” in an affair face legal punishment for engaging in an extramarital affair? Should such a person — whether they seduced the married person or were seduced by them — face any kind of punishment for participating in the dissolution of a marriage? Why or why not?
If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.
I think martial infidelity is very hard to prove legally in most cases, unless someone confesses, is recorded in the act (which might involve some other crime), gets pregnant and the child is proven through DNA not to belong to whom it is supposed to, etc.. But yes, it is immoral to participate in an affair with a married person in most cases, and if it is proven that someone does so, having some sort of legal consequence is within the realm of reason.
Absolutely not. How would you prosecute it, anyway? The third party would surely claim that the married person who was cheating on his/her spouse with them never admitted that they were married. It is hardly uncommon for a man to cheat on his wife and not even tell his girlfriend that he’s married. There’s a ready defense strategy there with enough common-knowledge history behind it that these cases would be just a huge waste of taxpayers’ money without even going anywhere.
That’s for the practical side. As for the rest of it, I think it’s the person who is married and took those vows that should bear the chief responsibility. Furthermore, let’s not use legislation to push forward a merely moral standard. Sure, prosecute immoral acts when there are victims involved – child molesters etc. While you could certainly make the argument that from a moral standpoint the spouse who has been cheated on is a victim, that is not how criminal law sees it. Civil cases are a different matter entirely.
While it may seem to many that using legislation to uphold marital vows is a good idea, it is not. For that to work, there would have to be considerably more weight placed on the contractual nature of a marriage, as opposed to any religious, moral, cultural, social, or romantic definitions of it. In other words, if we want the law and the criminal court to take a firmer hand, we have to in turn relinquish certain things into its domain. In the long run, I believe that these things, once entered more into the legislative domain, will be further and further removed from the religious one. I don’t think any of us really want to see that happen.