Amortentia and re The morality of love potions/Merope and Tom Sr.

[festuco]

No: HPFGUIDX 152376

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" <justcarol67 at ...>
wrote:

> Carol responds:
> Where is the evidence that she used force or that she "used love
> potion to make him marry her"? All we know is that she wanted him to
> love her. The potion, which creates an obsession with a person may
> have compelled him to propose to her, take his marriage vows, and make
> love to his lawfully wedded wife, but there's no evidence that Merope
> had either sex or marriage in mind when she gave it to him. 

Well, she could have said no. She was under no compulsion and new
exactly what was going on. Yet they were married.

Besides, you ignore that it is not canon that she gave him a love
potion. It is DD's idea that she used this option to compell him
because to her it would have been more romantic than Imperius. So it
is equally possible she used Imperius as somebody already pointed out. 

(See my
> other posts for more detailed arguments. I'm simply asking people to
> look at the canon here rather than making unfounded assumptions based
> on postmodern Muggle moral judgments with which Merope could not
> possibly be familiar.)

Well, even in the WW both parties have to give consent when they want
to get married. If Tom had been in his right mind he would never have
given consent, nothing postmodern or Muggle there. 

To quote some canon: 
'Can you not think of any measure Merope could have taken to make Tom
Riddle forget his Muggle companion and fall in love wit her instead?'
HBP Bloomsbury Hardcover edtion p. 201

Seems pretty clear cut to me. 

> Carol responds:
> Whom is Merope blaming for her circumstances? It's Tom Sr. who claims
> that he's been "hoodwinked."

Well, what could he have said? That he was enchanted by an evil witch? 

Merope does take responsibility for her
> actions by telling him that she's a witch and has been giving him a
> love potion. Her reward for her honesty is to be abandoned in London,
> penniless and pregnant.

We don't know that. This is all guesswork from DD. We know he got out
and she was left. And I don't see why his running away should somehow
have been wrong. 
> 
 You cannot conjure money or food even if you're a witch. She has
> no means of earning a living, and Tom Sr. knows that. 

First, how should he? Second, thats is her problem. He was in fact
kidnapped and raped by her. He was USED. 

He has seen her
> hovel and her father and her madman brother. His fear that his child
> may turn out like them does not justify neglect of his parental
> responsibilities, regardless of the circumstances under which the
> child was conceived.

I don't see him having any parental responsibilities at all actually.
If a woman is raped and gets pregnant and cannot get an abortion I
don't see she has any parental responsibilities either. Why not:
because in both cases the person does not want a child, even stronger,
would have given anything not to have gotten one. I  read an article
over the Bosnion war once that said this was one of the huge problems
they had. There were a lot of  women who were raped by Servian
soldiers and had gotten pregnant and a substantial number of them
hated their babies and wanted nothing to do with them at all. To say
the victim is responsible? No I don't agree at all. Merope, of course,
shares that responsibility.

> The problem is that she must bear the burden of pregnancy with no
> resources. She is frightened, desperate, and demoralized. Tom, however
> angry and humiliated he may be, does not have to carry the child or
> give birth to it. He merely needs to provide for its welfare so that
> it won't be born in the street or taken to an orphanage. However he
> may feel about Merope, he is the child's father and is as responsible
> as she is for its welfare, both morally and legally, and in a much
> better position to do something about it.

Legally he is because of the forced marriage. But morally not at all.
He is not so much the father as the forced deliverer of the sperm.
Merope did all of this to herself. Now I do agree that she probably
had no idea things would turn out like this, that her intentions were
not evil. But her actions were. 
> 
> Carol, again wondering why so few posters have any compassion for the
> abused, neglected, ignorant, and traumatized Merope
>
I have lots of compassion for her, but that does not make her actions
anything less than criminal. She quite probably was not able to
understand the horror of what she did, because of her upbringing. Yes,
she needed help, needed it badly. But that was not the obligation of
her victim. 

Gerry