Only about a dozen people have been charged under New York’s law since 1972, and of those, just five cases have netted convictions, according to Assemblyman Charles Lavine, who sponsored the bill to appeal the ban. The last adultery charge in New York appears to have been filed in 2010 against a woman who was caught engaging in a sex act in a public park, but it was later dropped as part of a plea deal.
Lavine says it’s time to throw out the law given that it’s never enforced and because prosecutors shouldn’t be digging into what willing adults do behind closed doors.
“It just makes no sense whatsoever and we’ve come a long way since intimate relationships between consenting adults are considered immoral,” he said. “It’s a joke. This law was someone’s expression of moral outrage.”
Katharine B. Silbaugh, a law professor at Boston University who co-authored “A Guide to America’s Sex Laws,” said adultery bans were punitive measures aimed at women, intended to discourage extramarital affairs that could throw a child’s parentage into question.
“Let’s just say this: patriarchy,” Silbaugh said.
New York’s bill to repeal its ban has already passed the Assembly and is expected to soon pass the Senate before it can move to the governor’s office for a signature.
The law almost was removed from the books in the 1960s after a state commission tasked with updating the entire penal code found the ban practically impossible to enforce. The commission’s leader was quoted at the time as saying, “this is a matter of private morality, not of law.”
The panel’s changes were initially accepted in the Assembly, but the chamber restored the adultery law after a politician argued its elimination might appear like the state was endorsing infidelity, according to a 1965 New York Times article.
Another Times article from the period also detailed pushback from at least one religious group that argued adultery undermined marriages and the…
Read the full article here
