Adultery versus DWI Laws

Shere Hite bragged on the Phil Donanue Show:

"Seventy percent of all American women have committed adultery within five years of marriage".

Now, this is inconsistent with most studies, but let's follow her argument through to it's tragic consequences.  Let's assume that 70% of the 46 million American women who have gotten married over the last two decades committed adultery within five years of marriage.  This is 32.2 million acts of adultery.  Barbara Rothman,  "Recreating Motherhood", page 225, another radical feminist whose "studies" can hardly be trusted, but who provides the following interesting factoid, helps to fill in the picture:

"Some physicians doing tissue typing for organ donations estimate that maybe 20% of people are not genetically related to the men claiming fatherhood."

If Barbara is correct, then 7 million of the 35 million children born in the last two decades to *intact families* were conceived in adultery and are not the genetic offspring of the husband.  This would imply that 22% of those acts of adultery resulted in pregnancy and child birth.

During that time, there were 24 million divorces, which 32.2 million acts of adultery are more  than sufficient to cause.  It does not take pregnancy or child birth for an act of adultery to destroy a marriage.  The other 8.2 million acts of adultery which did not   lead to a divorce certainly caused a lot of stress in marriages which is difficult to assign a cost to.

But it's easy to assign a cost to a divorce, because numerous sociologists have examined it from many  different perspectives.  Women who are divorced have a premature mortality rate twice that of married women, and the mortality rate for divorced men is even higher.  It would be conservative to estimate that the overall cost to divorced people, to the children of divorce whose mortality rate increases 50%, to society which must pay the bills for the increased delinquency and  crime and reduced education quality, is a millon dollars per divorce.  If you are one whose life expectancy was reduced by 10 years, you might argue that this is a small number, but let's be conservative anyway.

This leaves the cost of adultery in America over the last two decades at $24 trillion.

Compare this to DWI (driving while intoxicated) laws.  It is estimated that a very *maximum* of 2% of all traffic fatalities are *caused* by drinking and driving, which is 820 lives per year and roughly 16,400 lives over the last two decades.  At one million per life, this is a cost to society of $16.4 billion--except--that the cost of the law enforcement effort is more than $20 billion  per year, and over the  last 2 decades now exceeds $400 billion.   This is a case of the perfect bureaucracy--it costs 24 times as much to operate it than it benefits society, it makes the original "problem" even worse, and it's used as an excuse by "liberals" to continue the destruction of the US Constitution.  Perfect.

In order to make some kind of a comparison between the cost of adultery and the cost of drinking and driving, let's ignore the extraordinary cost and focus only on the lives supposedly saved, which means that adultery is 1,463 times more damaging to society than drinking and driving.

Conservatively.

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