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Better check your state laws.
In many states, it already IS illegal, and has been for decades.
The law simply isn't enforced.
Lawrence v Texas (1993) and other decisions put them on very questionable legal grounds.
While they largely stopped being enforced voluntarily, it's quite likely that they'll be found unconstitutional if a state were to try enforcing the (criminal) laws on the books about it today.
How would you feel if Adultery were illegal? Like say Adultery came with a year or so of punishment, perhaps even more if it can be shown there were children it had a very negative impact on, would you think there would be less people committing Adultery if they knew they could go to prison for a time and have a record?
With so much Adultery going on and all the negative consequences it has, especially for children it does make me wonder if it should be a punishable crime.
Up into the fifties if women were convicted of adultery they lost all property claims, and custody of their children in most N. American jurisdictions, I believe.
I had an old landlady years ago that would always tell me the (I sensed incomplete) story of her divorce from a very wealthy local family (all of them absolute nut case whackjobs, and worth millions). Years later I leased a barn from the family and in the concrete root cellar there was this iron box: inside was the legal papers convicting my old landlady of "FORNICATION" IN 1954!! So I got the rest of the story.
Oh, but if you were a MAN, nothing happened, of course. I don't think we're going to go back to that, Not yet, anyway.
Others have stated "It's still illegal, but not enforced" it's really something left to individual choice...Like Murder, Rape and robbery....It's illegal, but yet people still do it.
It was still illegal in NY when Rudy was Mayor. That was a standing joke. If Adultery was enforced, the Mayor would be serving a life sentence.
Actually marriage favors women. Period. If the man has money, she gets half, sometimes more (like if he has been cheating). If she has money she keeps it (even if she has been cheating) and he gets to walk away, if he is lucky. Only if she is abandoned, does a woman do worse, which is why a woman starts pressing a worthy guy for a wedding ring before the first year is up.
There are men that have been known to seek alimony from women, but this is rare.
Yes, marriage is generally favors women.
Regarding adultery: Unlike other primates women evolved to have concealed ovulation and to be sexually active in a private setting. Unlimited promiscuity like in chimps was not the best solution for humans to evolve. Exclusivity seems to have advantages and that is why this is the preferred system in most cultures that never had contact with each other.
Given that adultery includes sex for any two people who are not married to each other...
Well there are laws and there are lawyers drawing them up. In my particular case my examples come from The Republic of The Philippines where adultery is someone besides the legal husband knowingly having sex with a married woman and concubinage is a husband keeping a sexual partner in a way that creates scandal to his wife. So President Aquino's baby sister and ex president Cory Aquino's baby while having an affair with a married man and having a child committed no crime. While technically the baby daddy having an open affair was guilty of concubinage but never prosecuted. Meanwhile my father in law keep a mistress and a second family but because my mother in law and brothers claimed to have not known of his affair until she step forward to claim 25% of his estate when he died he was not guilty of a crime.
In a nation with no divorce, unless you married a Muslim man under Sharia Law, and adultery crimes on the books Manila looks like the US with the separated starting second families at a similar rate with only the celebrities and politicians bothering to go through the annulment testi-lying process. But with the laws on the books so folks with enough political pull can push a prosecution, in lieu of an extortion attempt like happened a few years ago to the Britain whose story was featured on a Locked Up Abroad episode
Up into the fifties if women were convicted of adultery they lost all property claims, and custody of their children in most N. American jurisdictions, I believe.
I had an old landlady years ago that would always tell me the (I sensed incomplete) story of her divorce from a very wealthy local family (all of them absolute nut case whackjobs, and worth millions). Years later I leased a barn from the family and in the concrete root cellar there was this iron box: inside was the legal papers convicting my old landlady of "FORNICATION" IN 1954!! So I got the rest of the story.
Oh, but if you were a MAN, nothing happened, of course. I don't think we're going to go back to that, Not yet, anyway.
You post raises more questions than it answers, Among them, why was the charge fornication, rather than adultery? I'm not expecting you to know the answer, but... ...
Well there are laws and there are lawyers drawing them up. In my particular case my examples come from The Republic of The Philippines where adultery is someone besides the legal husband knowingly having sex with a married woman and concubinage is a husband keeping a sexual partner in a way that creates scandal to his wife. So President Aquino's baby sister and ex president Cory Aquino's baby while having an affair with a married man and having a child committed no crime. While technically the baby daddy having an open affair was guilty of concubinage but never prosecuted. Meanwhile my father in law keep a mistress and a second family but because my mother in law and brothers claimed to have not known of his affair until she step forward to claim 25% of his estate when he died he was not guilty of a crime.
In a nation with no divorce, unless you married a Muslim man under Sharia Law, and adultery crimes on the books Manila looks like the US with the separated starting second families at a similar rate with only the celebrities and politicians bothering to go through the annulment testi-lying process. But with the laws on the books so folks with enough political pull can push a prosecution, in lieu of an extortion attempt like happened a few years ago to the Britain whose story was featured on a Locked Up Abroad episode
adultery is committed by a married woman having sex other than her husband while concubinage is committed by a married man living "scandalously" with any woman.
see how men create laws for their own benefits? and these laws were taken from Spanish laws which in turn copied it from the ancient Romans
anyway, these crimes are considered private crimes in the Philippines, committed only against the offended person. so the state can not prosecute offenders without the instigation of the offended party. and being a Catholic country, these offended women rather cling to their catholic beliefs and false sense of family unity than to bring to court their offending husbands. and of course the cost and length of litigation
At the civil level, I'd be fine if it was illegal, as long as the damages were limited to within reason of actual financial losses. I'm not a diehard fan of "no fault divorce" being applied across the board - if one partner is unfaithful, they broke the marriage. Period.
However, I staunchly oppose making it a criminal offense, as this smells an awful lot to me like the beginning of theocracy...
Adultery is symptomatic of greater marital issues. Criminalizing the symptom is hardly going to help the marriage. And tossing Mom or Dad in jail - how's that going to help Junior? Beyond that, it's going to be a very difficult offense to detect at prosecutorial evidentiary levels, so there's not going to be much of a deterrent effect.
So what's the point of such a big-government intrusion into the private marital lives of people?
And the fact that it isn't enforced makes it functionally legal.
Further, such laws that do exist are of dubious constitutionality. For example, the North Carolina ban on adultery has been ruled unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.
Agree with everything you said. An unenforced rule is essentially not a rule.
At the civil level, I'd be fine if it was illegal, as long as the damages were limited to within reason of actual financial losses. I'm not a diehard fan of "no fault divorce" being applied across the board - if one partner is unfaithful, they broke the marriage. Period.
However, I staunchly oppose making it a criminal offense, as this smells an awful lot to me like the beginning of theocracy...
You know what? I think a lot of things should revert to being criminal offenses, and enforced by imprisonment, beatings, castration, or other direct applications of punishment. Our present system incentivizes the pursuit of high net worth males and then forcing them into situations of cheating through denial of marital concupiscence with a lawyer on speed dial. Then sit back and let the courts siphon half (or more) of his net worth to your waiting bank account. Some women do this multiple times. Why do we pay victims with money when what we have done to them is emotional and/or physical?
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It used to be illegal, but only for women
