Dumbing down the Sixth Commandment (National Post, October 6, 2004)

Eight out of 10 Americans think it is "always wrong." Yet 25% of U.S. men and 15% of women do it anyway. It is fodder for both tragedy and farce in Western culture, grounds for execution in others. Everyone used to consider it a sin. Now many educated people actually prescribe it for emotional health. It's also the title of Richard Wright's latest novel.

If you have not already guessed what "it" is, read the sixth of the Ten Commandments.

Two weeks ago, B.C.'s highest court awarded an ex-wife ongoing financial support six years after her divorce because the "emotional devastation" she continues to suffer from the adulterous liaison that provoked the divorce has, she claims, prevented her from working.

I am struck by the court's uncommon compassion for the lasting pain infidelity inflicts on the betrayed spouse. I say "uncommon" not only because, as Anne Kingston noted in this space yesterday, the law explicitly instructs judges to ignore adultery, cruelty or other spousal misconduct when awarding support, but because, in today's cultural climate, to pass moral judgment on adultery, which the judges implicitly did, is politically incorrect.

I have a friend whose rage upon discovery of her husband's affair with a colleague's wife futilely consumed years of her life. From her case, as well as from conversations with marriage therapists and other victims of adultery, male and female, I have come to believe that of all emotional relationship abuses, adultery packs a uniquely powerful punch, inflicting pain at times comparable to that felt upon a loved one's death.

Before the rise of feminism, public condemnation of marital infidelity was proportionate to, and therefore validated, the anguish of those most affected by it. The suffering endured by betrayed spouses and children has not diminished from one era to another, as is clear from the B.C. case. But the popular perception of adultery's ethical gravity has diminished dramatically. Victims of adultery, who yesterday found comfort in the community's empathy, today often suffer alone.

One watershed blow in the "dumbing down" of adultery was the advent of no-fault divorce, which draws no moral distinction between the visceral impact of sexual betrayal and the trivial irritations of, say, conflicting consumer habits, thereby demoting adultery from the gravitas of sin to a prosaic symptom of incompatibility. The Monica Lewinsky affair was another watershed. In spite of widespread public moralizing, in the end, Bill Clinton discovered that his womanizing cost him little more than a temporarily contrite mien and some well-publicized visits to church. The inquiry and the media frenzy ran their course, and Clinton's popularity soared to new heights. Thanks to Hillary's calculated suppression of appropriate moral judgment in the interest of her political ambitions, adultery in America was subliminally affirmed at the highest levels as a consequence-free life choice.

And now some interesting research suggests that the practice of adultery has advanced from legitimacy to a position of actual prestige. In a Journal of Popular Culture paper, researcher Bonnie Zare tracks top-grossing Hollywood movies about adultery from 1947-2004. She finds that before 1990 adultery was associated with home-wreckers or villains, almost always ending with the transgressors' unhappiness. From then to the present, though, she says adultery has become "sentimentalized." She cites The Piano, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love as examples of movies in which adulterers are treated with sympathy, compassion and admiration.

But it is The Bridges of Madison County that best illuminates the sentimentalizing process. In this film a sensitive stranger brings sexual release and joy to a love-starved rural woman. Their affair is bathed in directorial approval and, Zare says, represents the breakthrough moment when adultery became officially associated with "liberation." In privileging the individual's right to passion over loyalty to the spouse, the film's message is that the rejection of moral duty is a virtue to be emulated.

This sentimentalization of adultery is more than a Hollywood or even an American phenomenon. Last winter a Toronto doctor wrote a column in another newspaper extolling the "courage" of her female patients in stable but sexually becalmed marriages who engaged in extramarital affairs. She urged them to ignore any attendant guilt -- because, she claimed, late-marriage adultery "sings with adventure and passion and joy."

This anti-social, anti-family interpretation of personal fulfillment is a damning gloss on the triumph of individualism over the values of fidelity and self-discipline that once hallowed the marriage contract. It's a shame, really. (Remember shame?)

© National Post 2004