In his recent column, Paul Cruse III writes of Hillary Clinton: “…she couldn’t make an easy decision to leave a man who cheated on her.” I find this comment outrageous. Marriage, as a foundational institution of human society, is most seriously threatened by divorce and to promote divorce for light and transient reasons is to undermine marriage itself.

Divorce is, at the best of times, a necessary evil. There are very legitimate reasons for divorce including longstanding physical, mental, or emotional abuse of one spouse. No one should fault anyone for escaping these terrible situations. What is less clear, however, is that sexual infidelity should be, as Paul Cruse III appears to think, a legitimate reason for a (near-unthinking) choice to pursue divorce.

To be fair, sexual infidelity is a social evil that deals serious damage to the trust between spouses. I do not, in any way, support it. It seems, however, that to seek the dissolution of what is, ostensibly, a lifetime commitment designed to withstand all manner of ills indicates a gross misunderstanding of the marital commitment.

Relationships damaged by sexual infidelity can rebuild trust between partners if those partners are sufficiently willing and, indeed, those partners have a social obligation to be willing as part of their marital commitments.

Perhaps those who enter into marriage should think carefully about whether or not they are willing to live up to the marital commitment.

There is something seriously wrong with a society that claims to value marriage and families when the repairable problems caused by sexual infidelity are “obviously” accepted as legitimate grounds for divorce.

Dan Parente

Senior in LAS and Engineering