To be fair to myself
eek
, I did attempt to run where you were going for a bit but you left one question unanswered. You were talking about the government dissolving a marriage if there was violence between spouses and then possibly press criminal charges depending on the situation.
Yes, that is my personal opinion on the matter and I really have no clear scriptural support for my opinion that the marriage should be dissolved by the government when the two spouses end up on opposite sides of a criminal trial.
If this happens, I believe it is common sense to recognize that the marriage is too broken to be considered a marriage, and the dissolution of the marriage will either lend closure or lead to a real reconciliation.
I was asking why you don't include rape/forced sex in that. If someone forces sex on their spouse it's going to include some level of violence. Maybe not bloody and beaten but the offender would be using force to overpower and restrain them. Why isn't that grounds for dissolution if the wife goes to the state like you would for other forms of violence?
I believe I addressed it sufficiently with the bodily harm examples provided in that previous post.
If the wife needs stitches, a cast, is missing a tooth or an eye, etc. then whatever the husband did to her to cause the bodily harm is grounds for dissolving the marriage and criminal charges against him.
The sex part does not even need to be a factor.
The main reason sex should not be grounds for dissolution is the redefinition of rape from "A carnal knowledge of a woman not one's wife by force or against her will" to "The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."
In the story you keep refusing to look at, a man was very tired and already asleep when the woman climbed into bed with him.
His actions could easily be explained by their prior sexual relationship and the fact that he was too sleepy to control his actions.
I can understand his actions since my first wife told me one morning that she didn't get much sleep because I kept trying to have sex with her that night, but I couldn't remember any of it since I was sleeping at the time.
We ended up modifying our sleeping arraignments to prevent that from happening again.
I do not know if there was any penetration, no matter how slight, from the new definition of rape.
If there was, I could have been charged with rape, even though I had no ability to consent to the sex that I was apparently very willing to have.
Do you see someone forcing sex on their spouse in the same way you'd view them forcing their spouse to watch a movie they don't like or go somewhere they don't want to go or sweep the floors when they don't want to clean?
What a novel idea. :think:
I never thought of it like that, but you may have a point.
There is an obligation on the part of both the husband and the wife to engage in sex on an ongoing basis for the rest of their marriage, within the limits of some health issues and other factors.
However, the obligation ends with each person, and each person bears the sole responsibility to comply with that obligation.
One person is not justified in attempting to force the other person to comply with the obligation.
