Shattering the home should come at a cost

Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is making the news again lately. It’s not as a 2028 presidential hopeful, but rather for far more intimate reasons. Sinema has admitted to having engaged in an affair with one of her former bodyguards, Matthew Ammel, while she was still in office. The reason that salacious detail is known to the wider public comes in light of Ammel’s wife Heather filing a lawsuit against Sinema that moved to federal court this January. The case itself is going forward on the basis of the legal concept of alienation of affection, but it is more commonly referred to as a “homewrecker law.”

North Carolina, where the Ammels themselves hail from, is one of seven U.S. states that still legally recognize these kinds of lawsuits. Typically, evidence must be provided from plaintiffs that paint a concrete picture of an otherwise happy and healthy marriage until the involvement of the accused individual. Anyone from clergy to in-laws perceived as encouraging the breakdown of the union can hypothetically face such a lawsuit. Yet it is almost always the affair partners of those cheating on their spouses who face the legal action. Defendants found guilty can meet with hefty financial penalties. Brenay Kenard, a North Carolina-based TikTok influencer, is staring down $1.75 million in damages after being successfully sued by the ex-wife of a man with whom Kenard engaged in an affair and later married.

Some moral progressives contest the laws that allow for these trials on the grounds that they come from a bygone era. In a strident majority opinion from the Supreme Court of New Mexico, in a decision that struck alienation of affection from state tort law, Chief Justice David K. Thomson declared: “[B]eneath the legal progress of the last one hundred years is a sweeping undercurrent of social change that robs the tort of any lingering justification in the law.” Citing the law’s origination in English common law, Thomson goes on to tout New Mexico’s standing as “the first state to adopt no-fault divorce on the ground of incompatibility” in 1973.

Since such lawsuits “demand disclosure of a couple’s most intimate and painful choices in search of causation, all while treating one spouse as a passive, helpless bystander upon which the defendant acted,” Thomson concludes that “the legal recourse for lack of affection in a marriage is dissolution of the marriage and alimony,” not something that effectually “treats affections as property.”

We should thank Justice Thomson for his honesty in depicting his court’s decision as part of the inevitable march of modern enlightenment, for he has made the moral stakes of what is really going on here abundantly clear. Abolishing alienation of affection torts has nothing to do with dismantling the remaining vestiges of patriarchy but everything to do with limiting the immediate consequences of divorce as much as possible.

No-fault divorce has had a negative effect—indeed it’s a double negative. On the one hand, no-fault divorce discourages spouses from working on likely quite reconcilable differences between them, particularly when any children they might share together aren’t being given the consideration they deserve. On the other hand, easy divorce reduces marriage itself to a fleeting barometer of how two people romantically feel towards each other at a given point in time, subject to constant change thereafter.

At the very least. homewrecker laws force would-be affair partners to count the cost of beginning an extramarital relationship. The possibility of having to stare down a person’s spouse in front of a jury can help to give those considering adultery some needed pause. Keeping the laws on the books helps the law to do its rightful part in promoting virtue over vice.

Sin’s encroachment into our everyday lives is unavoidable, perhaps most of all in our marriages. Whether it is by means of abuse, infidelity, or abandonment, spouses ought to be mindful of all that can take place should they willfully choose to be a cause for dissolving what God declared should never be torn asunder. Laws that reveal and affirm the costs of adultery can’t be a bad thing.