http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDlhNDE2OTFmNWZhYzUzYTI3NTUxNDUwYmIzNjFkYTU=

I sincerely regret not taking a fellow Melchizedek priesthood holder to the Stake President and charging him with spousal abuse back in the early 1980′s. I didn’t understand the depths and depravity and life-long wounds of emotional/mental cruelty. A couple years ago, I learned he charged his wife with adultery and divorced her. In the meantime, I had gained a little more knowledge of human nature, and how to read people and situations, and I had learned how to interpret and understand the abusive event that I witnessed.

That he wouldn’t “let” her leave until she gave him ammunition to make her the “bad guy”, now makes perfect sense in light of what I witnessed long ago. Not that that was her conscious motive or reasoning.

But there is such a thing as “driving your spouse into the arms of another.” I’ve seen how it can be done. And in extremely cruel cases, my sympathies are with the victim of the abuse, even if she (or he) goes on to commit the sin/crime of adultery.

However, in the area of judgements and punishments, which your original post and comments delve into, I think it matters a great deal, along with motivations, mitigating factors, and even greater sins/crimes on the part of the spouse making the accusation.

I used to be of the opinion “why doesn’t she just leave him?” in regards to abused wives who go on to commit adultery. But as I learned more about human nature, and the dynamics of marital and family abuse, I realized it’s much more complicated, and that “just leaving” is not that simple, and in the eyes of the abuse victim, often impossible.

I’ve met a few severely abusive men who’ve made me think that their being cuckolded would be fitting.

On a related note about your Navajo friend’s statement, the death penalty for moral transgressions is not without precedent among aboriginal Americans. According to Garcilaso de la Vega, (one of the last of Incan royalty, and who was sent to Spain for education), in his book “The Incas“, their punishment for homosexual acts was burning at the stake.

If you feel an affinity for American Indians, I recommend reading the book.

And the cruelty committed against the “adulterous” spouse (prior to the adultery) may make the sin of adultery pale in comparison.

Similarly, I don’t think comparative sin is really a defense. That sounds like what my kids say when they get in trouble. Passing off what they did, based on what their sibling did first.

As I say to my kids, “I’m not talking to [maligned sibling]. I’m talking to you. I’ll address [maligned sibling's] with [maligned sibling].”

I suspect that choosing to commit adultery is a choice…even if someone else does something worse.

For some, I would also conjecture that adultery can be about needing to exert some kind of power over their lives.

More curiosity: what legally constitutes an emotional affair, anyways, or do the courts ignore that completely? Is an emotional affair actually falling in love, or is it simply confiding emotional difficulty in someone? Especially with the current cultural shift regarding gender and sex, how could lines be drawn between confiding in someone as a friend, and confiding in someone as a lover, if there is no sex involved?

Would that potentially mean that a married person must be afraid to associate too closely with anyone of either gender to avoid accusations of an emotional affair?

Sorry about all the questions, I’m just completely ignorant on how the legal system deals with these sorts of things, and I’ve never thought about it before.

[Ed. - Cool it, me hearty. I've asked KW to back out of the thread, so parting potshots are bad form.]