Why I Defend North Carolina’s “Home-Wrecker” Law—And Why Children Belong at the Center of the Debate

Friday, January 16, 2026.

When a North Carolina civil lawsuit invoked the state’s so-called home-wrecker law against a former Arizona senator, the reaction was swift and dismissive.

The statute was labeled archaic.
Puritanical.
Hostile to adult sexual autonomy.

I understand the reflex.

But I am a quiet friend of laws like this—not because I want to police desire, but because they are among the last places in American law where children and family systems are still treated as real interests rather than sentimental afterthoughts.

What the North Carolina Law Actually Does

North Carolina is one of the few states that still recognizes a civil cause of action called alienation of affection.

Despite the caricature, it is not a criminal statute, not an adultery ban, and not a morality code.

It allows an injured spouse to sue a third party if that party knowingly and materially contributed to the destruction of an intact marriage.

That’s it.

No requirement of sex.
No requirement of illegality.
No interest in shaming.

The law is structurally indifferent to sexual behavior.

What it evaluates instead is patterned relational intrusion—secrecy, emotional triangulation, dependency, and the erosion of stability within a family system.

The lawsuit involving Sinema was filed in North Carolina for a simple reason: that is where the marriage allegedly harmed was based and where the injury was felt. Political office does not confer immunity from civil jurisdiction because Sinema’s affair partner’s wife and children would like their day in court.

Why This Was Never Really About Sex

What made the Sinema case notable wasn’t scandal—it was asymmetry.

Between public power and private vulnerability.
Between elite insulation and domestic consequence.
Between adult freedom and relational fallout.

By the time the relationship became public, no Senate rules had been violated. No ethics sanctions followed. Legality did its quiet absolving work.

But legality is not the same as harmlessness.

Civil law exists precisely for situations where conduct is permissible yet damaging—where no institution wants to intervene, but real people still absorb the cost.

The Party Missing From Most Critiques: Children

This is where my sympathy for these laws begins.

When marriages fracture under secrecy and third-party intrusion, children do not experience that rupture as a philosophical debate about erotic autonomy.

They experience it as:

• attachment disruption.

• household income volatility.

• residential instability.

• divided caregiving alliances.

• chronic stress that reshapes development over time.

Children do not consent to the relational risks adults assume for their own pleasure.

Yet modern American legal discourse often treats marital breakdown as a closed loop between two adults, erasing the downstream effects on dependents who have no vote, no leverage, and no exit.

Alienation of affection statutes do something unfashionable but important: they refuse to treat third parties as morally or relationally neutral simply because they were not the ones married.

Consent Is Not the End of the Analysis

One of the most common objections is that these laws undermine consent. They don’t.

They simply refuse to treat consent as a get-out-of-impact card.

Two adults can freely choose each other and still create foreseeable harm to others—especially children—without intending to do so.

American jurisprudence recognizes this logic everywhere else. Why have intimate relationships been the exception?

Alienation of affection laws seek to close that loophole.

Why I’ll Defend an Unfashionable Statute

I don’t defend these laws because I want to revive sexual moralism or police adult desire.

I defend them because they:

• treat families as systems, not slogans.

• acknowledge that marriages are not hermetically sealed units.

• create rare accountability for external relational disruption.

• indirectly protect children by discouraging reckless intrusion into intact households.

They don’t stop affairs.
They don’t save every marriage.

But they draw a boundary—one modern American culture increasingly refuses to draw—around the idea that intimate choices can produce foreseeable harm beyond the consenting adults involved.

FAQ

Isn’t alienation of affection just a way to punish adultery?
No. The statute is indifferent to sex. It addresses whether a third party knowingly and materially contributed to the destruction of an intact marriage through sustained relational intrusion.

Doesn’t this undermine adult consent?
No. Consent governs participation, not impact. Civil law routinely recognizes that consensual actions can still produce compensable harm to third parties—especially dependents.

Why not hold only the married partner responsible?
Because family systems are not closed loops. When third parties knowingly enter and destabilize intact households, they become causal contributors, not neutral bystanders.

Aren’t these laws outdated and misogynistic?
They are gender-neutral civil statutes. Critiques often conflate cultural discomfort with accountability for relational harm.

Why focus on children instead of adult autonomy?
Because children bear the most durable costs of family destabilization and have absolutely no capacity to consent, exit, or mitigate the fallout.

Would financial damages actually help children?
Civil damages follow harm. Directing compensation toward impacted children acknowledges where the harm lands and introduces accountability where modern culture often refuses to do so..

The Sinema Case, Reframed

Seen this way, the lawsuit was not a scandal—it was a collision.

Between modern elite exceptionalism and an older legal idea that still feels quietly radical: that impact outranks intent, and that families are not disposable units in the pursuit of adult pleasure and fulfillment.

Law cannot make life partners faithful.
But it can still insist that private choices are not cost-free—and that when children pay the price, someone is allowed to say: this mattered.

Civil damages exist to follow harm downstream—to the people who actually absorb it.

I advocate for payments directly to impacted children.

Here’s an uncomfortable thought experiment for anyone living under homewrecker laws:
If you help break up a family, should you also bear some responsibility for their long-term consequences—college tuition included?
That possibility alone might tend to give us pause.

That, to me, is not ass-backwards.

Such payments are not punitive.

They are an attempt—however imperfect—to economically mitigate the chaotic consequences infidelity inflicts on America’s impacted children, who have been silently absorbing the consequences.

Be Well. Stay Kind. And Godspeed.