You raise an interesting point. What you say may be true in most jurisdictions now, but it's a legal novelty unique to modern Western culture that bubbled up in recent decades. It's an absurdity when you think about it, because marriage is a continuous process both parties have agreed to in advance. The financial support and physical protection a husband is obligated to provide is not an individual event, but an ongoing privilege and responsibility. The same applies to the unique conjugal rights—they have traditionally been regarded as rights—that a man and wife have to each other's person. Talking about "rape" in this context is like bringing trespassing charges against you for trying to move into an apartment you've rented.
If you read the tomes from the 1960s and thereafter on the then-new idea of "marital rape," you quickly discover that, as legal theory, it was designed to undercut the privacy, unique legal privileges, and binding nature of the marriage bond. Your example is a classic case of the hard case that makes bad law. The benefits of marriage are inseparable from its irrevocable, total nature, of two people who own each other. Those intent on the destruction of marriage realized this, and designed their doctirne accordingly.
If ANYONE agrees to ANYTHING, and that contract is changed or breached, the original contract DOES NOT APPLY!
This is GANG RAPE no matter how you try to change that fact.
PROTIP: If you like your wife, never suggest this to her.
Re: The same applies to the unique conjugal rights—they have traditionally been regarded as rights—that a man and wife have to each other’s person. Talking about “rape” in this context is like bringing trespassing charges against you for trying to move into an apartment you’ve rented.
So IOW spousal rape is not possible in your opinion?
So many moronic posts.....so little time.
I am assuming, notice, that marriage has a nature ---that it is a something, and a something definite --- and is not simply an arbitrary or malleable creation of positive law.
My own Natural Law take on this (colored by Catholicism) is that sex is a Big Thing and (literally) embodies two Big Powers: the power to unite the sexes by means of certaiin affinities or attachments created by physical pair-bonding, and the power to procreate offspring and thereby extend human society into another generation.
Both of these powers are essential to society (that is, their significance, while intimately important to individuals and couples, goes beyond couples to society's physical and cultural survival itself) --- and are quite vulnerable to being weakened, subverted, or perverted. Therefore society has a legitimate interest in strengthening and supporting these powers in their most constructive form.
Catholicism also sees marriage as the "sincere gift of self" of the husband to the wife, and of the wife to the husband. This is another way of saying that reciprocal rights and duties exist; based, however, on "gift" and not primarily on barter or exchange. (Marriage is a contract, it is never less than a contract; but it is also more than a contract.)
Th gift of the bodies of the married to one another is rightly assumed to be irrevocable, but it is not unlimited.
The Catholic Church, for instance, says that the marriage partners, being rational persons, have a right to intercourse within reason.
Most moralists, traditionally, would say that a spouse has a right to refuse a sexual advance which is patently irrational. Examples would be: irrational by reason of perversion, drunkenness, profound mental incompetence, insanity, threat or likelihood of bodily harm. The list is illustrative, but not necessarily comprehensive.
Most moralists, traditionally, would also say that either spouse has a reasonable right to expect sexual intercourse, and offspring.
I would say that an irrational imposition of intercourse, even in marriage, constitutes rape morally. Legally, it would have to be an objective and provable irrationality. IMHO.