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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> If we allow you adult choices, and you make choices that harm others

So we can go back to banning adultery and divorce?

Holy false equivalency Batman. Adultery and divorce don’t put you in the ICU or the morgue (caveat being crimes of passion).

The magnitude of damage done to children by those social ills outstrips COVID, certainly, and all but a handful of contagious diseases. (To be clear, I support vaccinations and also strong penalties for adultery and disincentives for divorce.)

I know there is plenty of evidence that divorce correlates with bad outcomes for kids.

But I don't think there is any rock solid evidence divorce causes that much harm (over living in a house hold with two people that hate each other enough to get divorced).

You’re speculating that the negative outcomes we know exist would have happened absent divorce. Maybe that’s true maybe it’s not. Between my wife and I we’ve seen both, and I don’t know what’s worse mental health wise.

But in terms of just bread and butter issues, divorce is much harder on the kid. It really messes up family finances unless the parents are really well off. There’s a lot of disruption of home life if there is joint custody, and the documented effects of fathers not being present if there isn’t joint custody. If there are boyfriends or girlfriends that come in and out that can be a source of a lot of problems as well.

I think more importantly, neither are contagious.

They’re not contagious but they create plenty of collateral damage to others that didn’t consent to it.

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