Marriage Quote by Sol Wachtler

The line is blunt because it has to be. Wachtler is stripping away a legal euphemism that long protected men: the idea that marriage itself supplies permanent consent. By using the word "license" twice, he turns a bureaucratic document into a moral trapdoor. A license is permission granted by the state; he’s arguing that the state has been complicit when courts treat the marriage contract as a standing waiver of bodily autonomy. The repetition is rhetorical judo: the same word that connotes legitimacy and order becomes the vehicle for describing sanctioned violence.

The specific intent is judicial and corrective. He’s not offering a warm, therapeutic view of marriage; he’s drawing a hard boundary around criminal law. "With impunity" is the tell. The target isn’t only the rapist husband; it’s the institutional shrug - police who won’t arrest, prosecutors who won’t charge, juries taught to doubt, statutes that carve out exceptions. The sentence is designed to close the escape hatch.

Context matters: for decades in the U.S., marital rape exemptions were standard, rooted in archaic coverture doctrine where a wife’s legal identity collapsed into her husband’s. Judges and legislatures began dismantling those exemptions in the late 20th century, and Wachtler’s phrasing reads like part of that cultural-legal pivot. The subtext is a demand that marriage be treated not as a private zone beyond scrutiny, but as a relationship where the same limits on power apply - especially when the stakes are a person’s body.