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No one is proposing to do that.
No; kindly stow the strawmen, please. Sex is, however, central to the concept of marriage, historically.
You don't have to answer this, of course, as it is a somewhat personal question, but... are you currently a member of a marriage in which the higher-libido spouse refrains from forcible intercourse partially or primarily because it is against the law? Because, like, if you are, my condolences? But if you aren't, then where in the world would you pick up such a bizarre model of marital relations?
In fact I already briefly mentioned the (true, historical) primary driver of "marital rape" laws, which basically never apply to functional marriages. There were actual cases of H and W getting divorced. Enraged, H stalks W, rapes her, and then law enforcement responds "nothing we can do, sorry, it's not illegal to have sex with your spouse." This seems like a genuine problem! But there are many possible solutions, some of which do not have the same cultural drawbacks as introducing the "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model of sexual intercourse into private marital relationships, which should be mature and caring enough to negotiate such things without the assistance of a government cudgel.
Yes, that's true. The "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model isn't it, though.
Again--I am broadly in agreement. What you don't seem to want to discuss in a careful or nuanced way is the idea that maybe there are times when people should be socially pressured to stay in relationships they don't want to, and submit to sex they aren't enthusiastically interested in having. I can only imagine why this might be; I do think Western attitudes toward increasingly absolute "bodily autonomy" have generated some peculiar attitudes toward sex, for example. The treatment of marriage as purely a matter of romance, rather than a union that can sometimes be practical or beneficial in other ways, may also play a role. I'm not exactly opposed to everything the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has introduced into our culture.
I just think we're being deliberately obtuse if we try to pretend that Neil Gaiman, and others like him, are not also the fruit of that tree.
I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife. You're right of course that in a healthy relationship, there is no need to be constantly negotiating "consent" and boundaries. But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)
It is entirely possible to define marital rape as domestic violence(which could basically never be allowed) but not rape; this was the position of Alphonsus Ligouri IIRC.
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I mean, presumably there are other cases--that's just the one that I've actually seen in court, and the one I've heard used to justify the changes. I don't make a habit of following criminal prosecutions meticulously, but the overlap between "marital rape" and "divorce" proceedings parties appears to be damn near 100%, whatever the gory details.
I don't feel like I know any tradcons who would reject "physical abuse" as possible grounds for separation, but I suppose they're probably out there. But really--someone who puts their spouse in prison for marital rape must surely understand that it is tantamount to a divorce anyway? This seems quite analogous to "battered woman syndrome" to me--the law has rarely faced any shortage of ways to answer domestic violence of various kinds; rather, a host of influences (love, material need, desperation, actual insanity, you name it) bring women back to their abusers under a wide variety of circumstances. Whether that's a "systemic" problem or a psychological problem or whatever, revamping central tenets of the ancient institution of marriage to better serve outrageous edge-cases does not seem to have especially helped matters improve.
This is a pattern I see repeated endlessly in conversations about "moral progress." I could hand you a dozen different papers purporting to explain how we can reduce violence against women through various social engineering programs, but none of them really explains the evidence for their own effectiveness. As far as I have been able to determine, the biggest progress in reducing violence against women has been made through IQ gains resulting from the near eradication of malnutrition, combined with an overall increase in the absolute wealth of the average American. Outside of America and Europe, "intimate partner violence" remains stubbornly unaffected by cultural interventions (though that hasn't stopped anyone from insisting their programs just need more money).
Cases like Gaiman's are special. He obviously isn't an impoverished blue collar laborer, lashing out at his long-suffering wife due to poor executive functioning. He's damaged in a different way: he's a wealthy, powerful man living in a world where sex and marriage have been decoupled, to the primary detriment of the very women the sexual revolution so often purported to advantage.
This is the official stance of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran church, probably the most consistently tradcon major protestant denomination in the English speaking world.
On the other hand, I have seen tradcath priests admitting they counsel battered women to get a civil divorce(and remain celibate afterwards), despite theoretically stricter rules about divorce. So it's entirely possible that this is a theoretical doctrinal idea that isn't reflected in the breach.
If you're not willing to bite that bullet, you're not really in favor of traditional marriage.
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