Says Marriage Is Immoral

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30845, 2 September 1965, Page 2

Says Marriage Is Immoral

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, September 1. Marriage is an “immoral institution,” according to Brigid Brophy, the novelist.

“There is a superstition that sex becomes magically different after marriage,” she said. “It is exactly the same.”

Miss Brophy, whose unorthodox views on sex have pre-

viously caused controversy, was speaking at the annual conference of the British Humanist Association. She said marriage was immoral because it supported “supremely vulgar formations of the divorce law.”

“When my husband and I made use of the social respectability of being married for our own social convenience, we were not only taking a privileged position we had no right to, but helping to prop up a merely superstitious concept of respectability.” Miss Brophy said the divorce laws as they stood would not allow husband and wife to separate simply because they both wanted it that way. “To separate judicially one or the other would have to commit an immoral act, which in my view makes marriage under present laws immoral in itself,” she said. Miss Brophy, who said she had been married for 11 years, claimed the only way to make marriage acceptable was to reform the divorce laws.

The wife of the songwriter, Alan Jay Lerner, composer of “My Fair Lady,” has been given a one million dollar divorce settlement. Mrs Micheline Lerner said she would divorce her famous husband in about three weeks, when she had been in Nevada six weeks.