Fornication And Adultery

John Ball writes:
A lot of people seem to think that adultery is sufficient grounds for divorce, especially if the adulterous spouse is the woman. Indeed, our Lord said that 'whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery.' Most people like to equate fornication with adultery, but they are not the same thing.
It does not matter how many sexual partners a woman may have, the children she conceives are her husband's responsibility.
Such a situation would no doubt cause some friction in some households.
In traditional autonomous society a man married a woman by lying with her. Whoever a woman lay with first was her husband. There was no need for a priest or the state. Copulation led to the birth of children and men needed to be brought into the process, otherwise there would be a situation of irresponsibility and sterility and the tribe would die out.
So, in the Bible we read that a man cannot divorce his wife except for the case of fornication. In other words the wife has already had sex with another man, so her first lover is in reality her husband.
If a woman has sexual relations with other men after she is married, it is indeed, adultery, but it is not grounds for divorce. Her husband must still provide for her and her children.
Marriage is for the benefit of women and children. It is only with the introduction of relations of power and domination that these eminently sensible social arrangements have been twisted. With the growth of institutionalised violence and a hierarchy of priests, women have been reduced to the level of commodities. Thus, the patriarchy of violence introduces measures to control women's sexual activity. In hyper patriarchal Moslem societies we see extreme forms of violence against women such as female genital mutilation, but even in Christian Europe, amongst the military bureaucratic classes, we see women turned into eunuchs, their natural libidinous nature made a crime.
However, in early autonomous societies, societies that were not hyper sexualised, societies in which people were not yet commodities, societies in which the act of love was not yet mere appetite but a holy ceremony, the sensible arrangement was that a woman's first lover was to be her husband. After all, women have children, and children need a father.
By mixing up the concepts of fornication and adultery, the purveyors of power entirely change the equation. It is the laws against adultery that are at the heart of the oppression against women.
Fortunately, we peasants are quite practical about these things. It is hard to find a peasant woman who would trade her freedom for the restrictions suffered by the women of the officer class. It's not surprising that women born into a class that bases its relationships on domination have turned their backs on marriage and children. It's a shame they don't know how to be free, and it's a shame they want to spread their disease.