So you think it's "morally wrong" for the guy to act as he did. I trust you also agree it would be criminally wrong if the two people involved were not married to each other. So you're basically telling us that there's something about a marriage license that somehow turns this guy's actions from criminal to legal behavior....
That raises the obvious question: would you say that there's anything at all within a marriage with which government should get involved?
On the one hand, if you say government has no place in any activities between husband and wife.... Well, we've seen the results of that sort of logic over in the Islamic countries.
Of course I don't think you believe that -- I think you'd tell us that there are some things that should be treated as criminal acts, even within a marriage. For example, I think you'd probably say that it's criminally wrong for a man to beat his wife.
In that case, however, you've surrendered your "marriage makes it different" rationale that transforms this guy's behavior from sexual assualt to "wifely duty."
It's really a remarkable position to take.
I guess male/female issues strike a raw nerve here. Well, r9etb, since your post is the last one (at the moment I'm starting to type this), I'll start with that ....
So you're basically telling us that there's something about a marriage license that somehow turns this guy's actions from criminal to legal behavior....
A marriage license certainly does imply a major change in "rules". Obviously if your wife removes cash from your wallet without first asking - even if you have told her 30 times in the past year that this "feels like theft" to you, and even if you secretly taped her on the phone admitting to it (and yea, even if she has taken photos of the contents of your wallet while you were sleeping!) - that is still not sufficient grounds to send her to prison. But if I walk into your home and remove cash from your wallet, then that is grounds. So yes, certainly a marriage license - a mere piece of paper - can and does "turn an action from criminal to legal behavior," as you phrased it. And I think everyone here would agree to that.
OTOH, who here would claim that a marriage license gives one the right to murder their spouse? Or beat up on their spouse? Or bobbitize their spouse? Etc. etc. I think no one would here would argue that either.
So, in between the one end of the spectrum where we all agree on things that a marriage license serves to convert from being illegal to legal, and the other end of the spectrum where we all agree on things that should always be illegal regardless of a marriage license, we find the real problem is in the murky muddly middle with those behaviors that we cannot all agree on with respect to which side of the legal/illegal line they should fall on.
This particular story is a very difficult nut to crack, because there are so many missing details. So we succumb to the natural human temptation to try and fill in the missing facts based on the few known facts. And of course it's always fascinating to see how each Freeper's extrapolations are different, based on their different life experiences!
But what's far more fun than this game of trying to fill in the missing details of a sketchy news story (and arguing with everyone else's' analyses) is the game of trying to deduce the life experiences of our fellow Freepers based on their reactions to this story and their reactions to each other. Ha! How many educated / undereducated / uneducated guesses about fellow Freepers' marriages, sex lives, religious views, political views, psychological well being, and so on have you seen on this single thread? Too many to count.
OK .... so it's late and I'm lost on a tangent. Back to the article! The article never once mentioned violent sex, as in him pinning her down and forcing himself on her while she struggled back. If that had occurred, this would be a whole different story. Since that was not present in her affidavit (they mentioned an affidavit in the part about her secretly taped phone calls with him), it seems safe to say that whenever she did wake up to this going on and told him to stop, he must have done so. Right? Am I reading too much into it here?
And what about the part about her sleeping in the nude with her 28 year old husband? (implied by his taking nude photos of her, but that's not a 100% given, since she might have passed out and he then pulled her clothes off, I suppose?) Assumedly she is his age or a bit younger (statistically) and likely does not have what she considers to be an ugly body or else she'd cover it, right? Combine this with all the other facts. The 30 times in a year works out to around once every 2 weeks. So let's say once every 2 weeks he wakes up to see her like this and the sight makes him feel compelled to touch her. And one touch leads to more touching and that leads to more touching and so on. And then he's finally having sex on some level with her and she wakes up and says don't do that and he stops. And let's say he tries to respect her wishes but 2 weeks later (on average) he sees her like that again and can't (or won't) resist and does it again. And each time she wakes up and says no, he stops immediately.
In the meantime, if they're like any other couple I know, there are quite a few things about him that annoy her and have become longterm "issues" for them (like staying up wayyy late posting on FR, not that I'd know anything about that). To him, her behavior of getting mad at him for doing this one thing every two weeks is but one item in the entire package of ALL the things he does that make her mad - the things he does daily that annoy her, the things he does weekly and the things he does every few months that annoy her, and all the rest.
Yet in spite of all the things that annoy her, they're still living together and still sleeping in the same bed every night. And he has a long list of things about her that annoy him too, but he puts up with it and figures, well, that's marriage, I guess.
But let's compound the problem greatly here, let's speculate ...... what if, God forbid, she's one of those "if you love me than you'll know what I'm thinking without me having to explicitly tell you" type of women? In my experience there are a tiny percentage of women like this (far less than 98%, maybe even as low as 95%). Believe it or not, there are women who will tell you something once, maybe twice, and then never again. But they are unable to believe that you actually forgot what they told you so long ago, and so they're sitting on top of an ever growing annoyance inside of them that's due to their assumption that every time you continue to do this bad thing, you are fully conscious of the fact that it is in direct violation of their desires. What if she's one of these women, and told him she didn't like this several times long ago, but not recently, and so he sees it as, "maybe she's warming up to the idea" and she sees it as, "that jerk! I told him 3 or 4 times so there's absolutely no point in telling him again since he of course knows exactly what I feel every time he does this"? I mean, hey, what if this couple has communications problems, unlike the rest of us married couples?
This of course involves a lot of speculation, but the bottom line is that there is no way I can agree, given the facts in the newspaper, that this constitutes spousal rape. Perhaps more facts will come out that will tip this one way or another. If he really did always stop when she told him to, and he did this only once every 2 weeks, and she climbed back in bed with him every night sans clothing .... oh come on, gimme a break. This is rape? This is decades in the penitentiary for him? What if this turns out to be just her collecting useful ammo to use in an eventual child custody hearing?
OK, so I fully admit to going off the deep end WRT speculating to fill in the missing blanks of this story. But hey, JimRob kindly gave me a completely blank text box half a page wide with a bottomless-well scrollbar on the right that just keeps getting smaller and smaller without once complaining of being squeezed out of sight. So whattaya expect?