"Do you think it would be good for a family for someone to try to get their completely innocent daughter or sister or cousin executed for encouraging them to repent?"

What is she even talking about.

All right then.

"Avenger, I am on this committee because I have raised nine children in Cheliax, and I have buried four. Where I have done awful things, and I have, I have done them to protect them. I spoke at Select Wain's trial not because she told me to repent, but because on her encouragement a crowd of a hundred men broke into my house and murdered my daughter and my nephew in front of me, and because the Queen's prosecution asked me to stand as witness to it. I am not angry with the Select for being found innocent. I simply want a Cheliax where my children's lives do not need to be paid for in blood. 

If you believe that I have suggested something evil in this committee, say so. If you are angry that I admitted in court that someone murdered my child in front of me - the Select is alive. My family is alive. We have all seen our justice. It is over. Let it lie."

Sarenrae, bless this warrior and bring his blade to your side against the darkness,

"I think it was wrong for people to murder your nephew and your daughter. I'm sorry that it happened. I hope the people who did it hang.

None of those people were Valia Wain.

Trying to trick people into thinking an innocent person broke the law so you can get them executed because you're mad about something other people did is Evil. Maybe you think you've repented, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure part of repenting is that you're supposed to stop doing Evil things. I don't actually think that's very relevant to the things this committee is supposed to deal with, a lot of her family was murdered by Asmodeans, but I'm not going to just pretend like it didn't happen just because it didn't work.

I am perfectly happy not to bring it up in committee." (No she isn't, but she's pretty sure no one is going to call her on it.) "I'm not going to vote down your ideas just because you suggested them. You can tell because... I literally said I agreed with your idea. If you have good ideas I'm not going to secretly try to sabotage them, that would be stupid, I don't want to hurt random other people because of something you did. If all you want from this committee is to help protect people's families I'm not, actually, going to get in the way of that.

But if Delegate Noguera i Mata wants me to not feel upset about you trying to have my — friend — killed, I don't think I can do that and I wouldn't want to even if I could. —If he just wants me to not make comments about you being Evil I can... probably avoid that specific phrasing? Lluïsa is Evil and I don't have anything against her."

"Fine."

Calistria is legal in Andoran, which is to say that Her priestesses don't hide like they do in other places. He has heard sermons from them occasionally, though since he is noble, usually brief ones delivered to captive audiences who thought they had sat down for a play and saw it interrupted before the curtains went up. One of the important points that struck him as likely true, is that most whores are women who had their reputation ruined by the bad behavior of a man who promised marriage, and reneged before reaching the altar or betrayed his promises with bruises and scars. A delegate from Calistria on this committee ought to be able to represent the interests of those women and the children they bore, the people the family has failed, and so when it was suggested that She, not just Erastil, ought to sit on it he, after a moment of thought, concluded this was sensible enough.

This one does not seem to be interested in doing that.

So now he is considering that a secondary benefit of adding an Iomedan is that a two-thirds vote to remove Ferrer would then probably succeed.

"Back to the orphanages, then. We might consider a very low fee, but I suspect nothing low enough to avoid a large increase in infanticide, which was among Asmodeus's chief goals in the first place, is large enough to defray the costs meaningfully. It might discourage reckless pregnancy slightly, but I think that is not likely enough to be worth it to ask for an Abadaran analysis or something of the kind to determine whether it would be worth the small increase of infanticide it would certainly cause. Does anyone have other suggestions? Should we instead return to how to properly incentivize enduring marriages?"

"I think — for the marriage thing, not the orphanage thing — a big part of the problem is that a lot of men are going to be worse than not having a husband or a father at all. And if a woman knows a man would be worse than nothing, she's not going to marry him, and if we're thinking about it as how to get her to marry him anyway it's kind of solving the wrong problem. I don't know if I said that in a way that makes sense.

And then the other part of that is that a woman might not know if a man would be worse than nothing, and if you're not sure one way or the other it's a lot safer not to take the risk. 

So I think... probably the first thing you need to do is to make absolutely sure that the law protects people that are being mistreated by their husband, or for that matter by their father? Like, if a woman tells the Watch that her husband beat her senseless, they should treat that seriously and not ignore it just because they're married, if a woman's husband does that sort of thing a lot and she doesn't have a way to escape him to even report it it should be treated as self-defense if she kills him, if a woman wants to get a divorce she should be allowed to, if you don't let women divorce their husbands a lot of them will never get married in the first place."

Calistrians.

"I do not think the current problems facing Cheliax are those of too little possibility of divorce."

"Well, I think it depends? I don't think a man should be allowed to abandon his wife and children if she doesn't want him to and he doesn't have a good reason."

"Does Cheliax even have laws about marriage?"

"I think the laws about marriage are whatever the convention decides they are? But there's lots of things we could decide they are. ...I'm not sure what laws about marriage we already have."

"Cheliax has contracts, and it has other laws which reference the concept. Succession and inheritance, most obviously; children whose parents are married still typically inherit over those whose parents were not. But this is only relevant to those with property."

"Typically laws on the books which consider assault are either defined differently, or customarily applied differently, within a family. A father who strikes his daughter is considered differently than a man who strikes an unrelated girl of the same age. If I remember correctly from my youth in Infernal Cheliax, such assault would be a tort, in which the girl's father, or possibly mother, had standing to sue in civil court the man who did the striking; if it was his daughter he struck, he would be suing himself and therefore it was void. Similar things would apply for a wife rather than a daughter, I expect. In many countries there is the difference that a married couple is considered a single legal person and so a husband or wife assaulting the other is legally equivalent to giving yourself lashes voluntarily. Calistria of course disapproves, but the same legal principle also allows things such as perfect protection on secrets shared between couples without worry that they might be slander or evidence of a crime you're unsure if you committed, and also is the basis for strong demands on their shared property if divorce occurs."

Blink. "I wasn't saying it should be illegal to hit your family at all, everyone hits their kids — or, wait, is this like the thing where it turns out most places don't whip you for coming in last at school?"

"Virtually everyone save some wild early-Galt radicals does discipline their children with force with varying frequency and force. Cheliax is more severe than others, of course. My point was that a reasonable punishment for a particularly badly-behaving child would be considered assault against anyone else's child in virtually all countries, in one way or another, and a similar state of affairs holds for husbands and wives. A wife who has bruises may legally and morally be considered fairly punished by her husband; a woman who received the same bruises from an unrelated man is almost always considered the victim of assault, though if she is highly disreputable, e.g. of Calistria's profession, this is unlikely to be enforced in most places. I do not know the Queen's current law on the topic but I expect it to make the same distinctions, and this includes the family as a legal concept."

"It hadn't actually occurred to me that you could ban hitting your wife at all but I bet there's lots of women who'd be much more likely to get married if you did. But I was mostly thinking of husbands who're putting their wives or children in danger, not just who are hurting them at all."

"I would normally expect a woman in that situation to leave. ...I suppose this is probably much harder now that we don't have daycares, and not very symmetric to enshrine as a right if we're trying to prevent men from leaving."

"I don't see why it'd need to be symmetric, men and women are different and the law should reflect that. But — well, first of all, not all women in that situation can just leave, like maybe someone's husband hurts her badly enough she can't walk, and not all of them will be able to tell a guardsman either but as long as some of them can it'd still be helping some people. And — I mean, I don't think people should be allowed to get away with doing that sort of thing to their wives, but I also think — probably if the law might go after them for it they'd be less likely to even try? ...And also Delegate Roig said we should make it harder for people to get divorced, which would... make it harder to leave."

"Every nation in which the rights of men and women are not symmetric has asymmetries in the same direction."

Damn, 'no siring bastards' and gender equality are in direct conflict.

It's not technically having different laws for men and women, given wizardry....

"We don't have to do what other countries do, lots of countries do things that are kind of stupid." She's mostly going off the pamphlets here but probably not all of them are lying. "I think probably there should be asymmetries in both directions. Like, men are stronger than women, and that's really important to consider if you're making rules about what sorts of things spouses can do to each other, or who's allowed to leave whom, and it would be silly to conscript women when most of us wouldn't be able to fight. But then on the other hand, if there were a famine, it might make sense to give more food to men. And you'd hire a woman to be a nursemaid, and a man to lift heavy crates down at the dock, and not vice versa. ...Those are just examples, probably lots of those aren't things you'd need laws for, I haven't thought about what all the laws should be."

Perhaps, in this committee for the writing of laws, she should think a little more about what all the laws should be.

"I believe I would begin, in our sad present state, with a very simple law:

When a man and a woman marry, their oaths to each other shall be administered by a priest of a permitted church, and witnessed by two or more persons in good standing among their community. This being done, they shall then be held to these oaths: the man not to leave his wife and children, except in cases of adultery or other great provocation, and even then to provide for the children of the union until they have come of age; and the woman to be loyal to her husband, and to care for their children.

This shall be principally enforced by civil suit, the deserted husband or wife bringing a complaint against their spouse. The court may direct the straying spouse to return to their spouse and children, or require them to pay for their support, or declare the abandonment to have been permissible due to extraordinary circumstances (adultery, extreme cruel treatment, etc.).

"You should allow lay priests, this doesn't need spells and there's a shortage of clerics."