Savonarola rides again!

Canada's Supreme Court recently recognized infidelity as a form of spousal abuse. And this makes sense, as victims of spousal betrayal often feel deeper pain and take longer to heal than people who've been physically abused.

So, here's my proposal for Congress: You want to defend marriage? Let's first make it meaningful. Marriage presently confers many too many benefits with too few risks: redress the balance by imposing strict criminal penalties for adultery! With well-structured laws, just as people in a bilaterial abusive relationship can both be arrested for domestic abuse, both halves of an open marriage could be sent to jail for a long time. A side benefit is that middle-class adulterers are easier to manage and economically exploit, so prisons would stop being a cost center and become a source of government revenue (as they already are in China).

Selling this to the "moral majority" opinion-makers should be easy, and as the number of people seeking to be married starts to shrink, those Evangelical leaders might even start welcoming any gays foolish enough to risk matrimony. Blue-staters might find my proposal slightly draconian, but they could console themselves with the happy anticipation that regional differences in adultery rates would ultimately lead to an electoral rebalancing that would once again favor the North.

Everybody should want this, so why isn't it happening?