Peter Hitchens Handled First Ten Minutes Very Well (My Comments Start at 11:08)

Peter Hitchens Handled First Ten Minutes Very Well (My Comments Start at 11:08) · Just in Case Anyone Confuses me with Derrida

Peter Hitchens DESTROYS Pro Ab0rt, Adam Rutherford
25th of May 2022 | Pints With Aquinas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyffzNR2R5U

11:08 "teenagers are gonna have sex"

Some definitely are. In the century of St. Thomas Aquinas, most teenagers who had sex were married, and most teenagers who had sex and weren't married tried to get married. In some cases, however, they financed child-rearing by prostitution. Please note, here, if Alessandro Serenelli and Maria Goretti had lived under the Papal State rule, Alessandro could have simply asked Maria to marry him a few months later.

His attempt of seduction (which led to the murder when failing) was probably meant to exploit an Italian Monarchy exception for pregnancy. Because the Italian Monarchy was the first country (or second after Prussia?), even before the Soviet Union (second or third), where marriage was legally delayed to 18 for both sexes.

11:17 "I'm saying people shouldn't have sex outside marriage, that's my belief"

Mine too. Relegalise teen marriages where they have been made illegal, that should save some unborn babies from abortion!

11:30 "To a large extent, yes it will"

The ages of faith with a (fairly) strong moral system (though not Calvinist or Jordan Peterson strong, please!) were ages specifically allowing for teens to marry.

They were very definitely not times when marriage was legally delayed to 18 and socially well beyond and when a strong moral system helped millions and millions all over the board, all classes and social subcultures to avoid having sex before that. If that's what Peter Hitchens and Matt Fradd dream of, they have a problem.

I Cor 7:[8] But I say to the unmarried, and to the widows: It is good for them if they so continue, even as I. [9] But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to be burnt.

And note, in Supplementum Tertiae Partis, the impediments for marriage are in these Quaestiones : IMPEDIMENTS: The impediments of marriage in general (50) and in particular: error (51), slavery (52), vows and orders (53), consanguinity (54), affinity (55), spiritual relationship (56), legal relationship by adoption (57), impotence, spell, insanity, incest, and defective age (58), disparity of worship (59), and wife-murder (60). Impediments which supervene marriage: A solemn vow (61), which affects an unconsummated marriage; and fornication (62), which affects a consummated marriage..

And the key one to this question is Question 58. The impediments of impotence, spell, frenzy or madness, incest and defective age, and the key article is Article 5. Whether defective age is an impediment to marriage? and here I cite the whole corpus:

I answer that, Since marriage is effected by way of a contract, it comes under the ordinance of positive law like other contracts. Consequently according to law (cap. Tua, De sponsal. impub.) it is determined that marriage may not be contracted before the age of discretion when each party is capable of sufficient deliberation about marriage, and of mutual fulfilment of the marriage debt, and that marriages otherwise contracted are void. Now for the most part this age is the fourteenth year in males and the twelfth year in women: but since the ordinances of positive law are consequent upon what happens in the majority of cases, if anyone reach the required perfection before the aforesaid age, so that nature and reason are sufficiently developed to supply the lack of age, the marriage is not annulled. Wherefore if the parties who marry before the age of puberty have marital intercourse before the aforesaid age, their marriage is none the less perpetually indissoluble. [my emphasis]

11:53 The "horror and dislike" for premarital sex was in Catholic societies very different for the case if the man married the woman after making her no longer a girl, or if he refused.

Read El Alcalde de Zalamea. The nobleman refuses to marry the "mayor's" (Alcalde's) daughter, whom he has seduced. She isn't noble, you see.

The Alcalde (let's recall that the Spanish administration had "mayors" who were also judges, like "kadis" in the Muslim world) then executes the noble. Not for personal vengeance, but for keeping seduced girls in the capacity of getting married to the seducer!

Two playwrights wrote on it, both Calderon and Lope de Vega. It was a real event. So, "El Alcalde de Zalamea" is equivocal as to what literary work, but non-equivocal as to what event.

The reason why Paris had prostitutes was, partly, to allow teen boys (but also husbands on business journeys away from wives) to make babies with harlots, who legally got a vacation with pregnancy and childbirth, instead of doing it with virgins, where the duty would be to marry her. And yes, I mean in the century of St. Thomas, in the century of St. Lewis IX.

12:03 I agree the Middle Ages had a better society, but I am (as Umberto Eco would be) somewhat more aware of what this better society was, than I think Peter Hitchens is.

If he thinks Puritan gone Victorian and just prior to the sexual revolution was better, yes, in a way, but also not in a way. It was better as fewer were aborted, but worse as making things unnecessarily hard on an as yet unwed mother.