West Virginia governor signs law removing marital assault exemption

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 288 points –
West Virginia governor signs law removing marital assault exemption
apnews.com

Certain sexual assaults against a spouse will now be criminalized in West Virginia for the first time under a law signed Friday by Republican Gov. Jim Justice. 

The law removes marriage as a defense to first- and third-degree sexual assault.

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I'm sorry... why was marriage ever a defense to beat your spouse?

I'm guessing Jesus or something.

Its more just lack of respect for women, this is big in nations with low social development

Yeah, but lack of respect for a particular class of people is rooted in religion, which creates in-groups and out-groups beyond "this is the person in charge and the rest of you aren't in charge."

This is not about beating your wife. It's more about rape or forced sex. There are actually lots of places that marriage is still a defense to say you are allowed to force your spouse to have sex since you're married.

Good for WV for removing that. I think a lot of women will still not know they have options.

I don’t think Jesus would have been cool with you raping your wife. The religion and the people operating it on the other hand

1 Corinthians 4:7 The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.

To be fair, those weren't Jesus' words, they were Paul's. But as I said, Jesus hated divorce and women were not considered equal to men, so he might not have had much of a problem with it.

Doesn't he have final editorial control?

Considering the first "official" Catholic Bible was not assembled until over 300 years after his death, I'm going to say no.

I’ll follow this logic path. It was assembled 300 years after his death, but the Catholic Church claim(ed/s) to have God’s phone number through the Pope, so wouldn’t Jesus have been like “yo, pops, you gotta tell them to take out that rapey shit before I get me too’d”.

Mystery of mysteries.

He hated divorce and women were second class at the time, so maybe he'd be cool with it?

And just like that, West Virginia rockets into the twentieth century

Good, but... only "certain" sexual assaults? Fucking what?

It's rare that I see a state like West Virginia get one right, but I'll give them all the credit they deserve when they do.

I had to read this three times to make sure I understood that west Virginia was not doing the regressive thing.