I can't help it if you won't emotionally accept the objective facts but martial rape of wives, who were voting citizens by the 1970s when this country began criminalizing it, was a real thing.
Decisions are made by whoever's in authority,
Which is decribing subjective personal preference of some ruler, rulers, law makers, governing body, tribal council, or whatever you want to call whoever dictates societies rules.
which comes down to who has the most temporal power.
So authority and the legal systems that underpin them are dictated by force. So far everything you're saying is in support of what I've been arguing. Subjectivity.
Not all decisions have lasting efficacy, and as I said somewhere, many cultures that permitted slavery profited in the short term but not in the long term. One can argue that those particular decisions did not prove to have logical necessity behind them, as do laws against rape and theft.
Again what is
logical necessity? You've yet to define what that even is. You can make a case this country profited greatly in the short term and the long term from slavery
and rape,
if you're making the case from the perspective of the slavers. The wealth this country was able to derive off the backs of slaves turned this county into a global super power and maintaing the slave population to fuel that growth took a lot of rape. You keep trying to argue that laws against rape are
logically necessary but the American Slave empire would of sputtered and stalled out without a whole lot of rape. Only about half a million slaves made it here from the trans Atlantic slave trade but nearly 4 million were here by the time we get to the civil war. That took a lot of rape. Its diminishing to call them exceptions as if these rapes dont matter but this distinction you're trying to make between citizens and slaves is meaningless because it's the law makers themselves who are deciding who's who.
But they weren't purely subjective either, since having (and selling) slaves confers objective short-term benefits to a society.
Benefits are
subjective since they are based on personal feelings, preference and sentiments be they the sentiments of an individual or a group of individuals. For a society
ruled by slavers the slavers might deem some benefit from slavery but the slaves don't and the slavers do no comprise all of society. The slaves are also part of any slaver society least you forget.
Your attempts to describe society itself as one singular entity rather than a collection of many individuals is not an accurate description of what society is even if it conveniently allows you to ignore the sentiments of the exploited for the sake of your argument. Why do you only see society through the lens of the exploiters and never consider the lens of the people they are exploiting?
Do you believe that the societies that codified laws on permitting nonconsensual spousal sex considered that practice to be "rape," just because you do?
No I do not but that's only further proving the subjective nature of
laws. Whether their laws subjectively recognized it as rape or not, forcing yourself on someone sexually against their will is objectively what rape is. Laws can can decide that when you force yourself on your wife against her will that isnt rape and they can call whoever they want citizen and they can call other people property and slave. These are reflections of
legal opinion rather than objective fact.
Obviously for those societies, the fact that the wife agrees to the union means that she agrees to male dominion, given that this would be the ideal put forth in such societies, whereas the victim being attacked at random on the street has made no such agreement.
For
those societies? How about for you? Does a woman agreeing to marriage mean she can't be raped? And doesn't the phrase,
ideal put forth by those societies, not suggest subjectivity to you? You're thinking of
legal consent which, again, is subjective, as opppsed to whether the wife is objectively consenting or not to sex.
