Why I’m a Quiet Friend of “Home-Wrecker” Laws — A Child-Centered Argument

Friday, January 16, 2026. This is for Sarah Solomondo.

When a North Carolina civil lawsuit invoked the state’s so-called home-wrecker law in connection with former Arizona senator, Kyrsten Sinema, 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.

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 take on their behalf.

Yet modern 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. Law recognizes this logic everywhere else. Relationships have been the exception.

Alienation of affection closes that loophole.

Why I’ll Defend an Unfashionable Statute

I don’t defend these laws because I seek to revive sexual moralism or punish desire.

I defend them because they:

• treat families as systems, not slogans.

• acknowledge that marriages are not hermetically sealed.

• 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 where modern culture increasingly refuses to draw one.

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 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, pay up!

I advocate for payments directly to impacted children.

You broke up their family? Now you have to put them through college. LOL.

That, to me, is not ass-backwards.

Such payments might mitigate the chaotic consequences infidelity inflicts upon impacted children.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.