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Alzheimer's is only one of a number of problems which can end the sex life of a happily married couple. What do we think of the sexual needs of the ill spouse? The healthy spouse? Should a contemporary American whose spouse suffers from Alzheimer's or is confined to a nursing home simply sacrifice her sexual expectations? Given the increasing frequency of Alzheimer's in the general population, more and more Westerners may find it difficult just to forget about sexual intimacy in this, the age of Viagra.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor endured this moral dilemma. She stepped down from the Supreme Court to care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer's. While living on an Alzheimer's ward, Mr. O'Connor fell in love with a woman on the same ward who also suffered from Alzheimer's. Mr. O'Connor no longer recognized his wife, but he did ask for her advice as he courted his new love. Justice O'Connor blessed the romance, claiming that it made him happy. I am curious about American responses to such generosity and even more curious about her own sexual needs and the applicability of the theological notion of "conjugal debt" to her predicament.
In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul essentially declares that Christian marriage is for sex and that sex is for marriage. A wife owns her husband's body and a husband owes his wife's body. Each spouse has a moral duty to provide the other with sexual fulfillment (this is the conjugal debt). The Jewish tradition specifies not only that husbands should provide their wives with sex, but with good sex, that is, an orgasm.
O'Connor is an Episcopalian, not a Jew, but she may have found herself unable to claim the sexual satisfaction she was due. Who would blame her for taking a boyfriend on the side?
Her religious community may not have approved of such an arrangement, but even that is not exactly clear. Apart from that, it would seem difficult to find secular laws or rules standing in her way (her husband has since died). The Supreme Court cases Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991) affirmed that Indiana's public indecency statute furthered "a substantial government interest in protecting order and morality." How much should the government care about the sex lives of older Americans? One could easily argue that the American government has cared rather a lot. Another Supreme Court case, Owens v. State (1999), stipulated that a person has no constitutional right to engage in sexual intercourse, at least outside of marriage. City of Sherman (Texas, 1996) had already rejected the claim that a person has a constitutional right to commit adultery. Lawrence v. Texas (2003), of which O'Connor was herself a voting part, legalized new sexual possibilities for Americans unmarried and married. None of these cases really bears on O'Connor's predicament, though.
O'Connor is far from the only American to have -perhaps- found herself lonely in a new way: think of Nancy Reagan here. Neither O'Connor nor Reagan has spoken publicly about her needs while caring for her husband, and so I am only speculating. As the number of Alzheimer's victims swells, who would blame healthy spouses for seeking consolation in the arms (and bed) of a lover? How much, if at all, would Nancy Reagan's or Justice O'Connor's reputation have suffered, had we found out about a supportive man on the side? Not at all, I would hope.
