Sunday, August 17, 2008
News, In this Issue...
Georgia and the big red “A”
Is it time to throw out Georgia’s adultery law?
A law no one will touch
Attorneys who have done battle over state control of private sexual behavior say the statute on adultery is a misguided attempt to legislate morality, and that Georgia should get rid of it.
But there’s little chance of that.
Steve Sadow, an Atlanta attorney who argued the case leading to the Georgia Supreme Court’s overturning of the state sodomy law in 1998, says that if someone were prosecuted under the adultery statute, he would be interested in pursuing its repeal. But, he says, a legal database shows no prosecution for adultery in Georgia later than 1952, and little activity before. And he thinks the likelihood that someone would be hauled into the dock nowadays on an adultery charge, giving him a prosecution to contest, is just about zero.
“No district attorney in this state would want the adverse publicity that might arise from prosecuting someone for adultery,” he says. “This is different from a legislator attempting to sponsor a bill to eliminate adultery. In the case of the D.A., you’d have someone who would be railed against as attempting to criminalize or prosecute morality, when there are so many bigger and more important issues he or she should be focusing on, such as drug use and violent crime. In the case of the legislature, it looks like you are attempting to legislate immorality.”
The Gold Dome crowd has sporadically addressed the issue on both sides of the coin, ranging from a 2005 proposal to prohibit a divorcing adulterer from receiving any marital property to a state senator’s announced 1997 campaign to repeal several laws on private sexual behavior, folding adultery into the package.
But the status quo remains, and that troubles Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the Georgia ACLU.
“This should be taken care of by the legislature,” she says. “For many reasons, this is a very bad law. Number one, if it were enforced ... there would be a police officer at every divorce hearing, and an arrest would be made anytime there was an adultery allegation. I am saying that to illustrate how ridiculous it is that the law is on the books. We would be in support of any lawmaker who would sponsor a repeal.”
While Seagraves says the group will study whether to take steps to press such a case in the legislature, she agrees with Sadow that the short-term prospects for a repeal are slim.
“The legislature right now doesn’t seem to be, as a whole, a group that wants to broaden freedom and liberty,” she says. “But there are some enlightened legislators out there and if approached, they might introduce such a bill.”
There is precedent for the ACLU to jump in. The group represented the defendant in the 2003 case that resulted in the Georgia Supreme Court throwing out the state’s fornication law. But again, for such a battle to take place on the adultery front, a prosecution would have to arise first.
Who’s your daddy?
Pittman, who in his book “Private Lies” chronicled almost 50 years of counseling couples whose unions hit the iceberg of infidelity, believes adultery should remain illegal.
“We have to make sure that when people screw around, they know they have committed an offense against another person,” he says. “But I am not so sure about enforcing it.”
He adds that our society encourages adultery.
“We have a whole popular culture built around reassuring yourself you’re sexy,” he says.
Maybe so, but that’s nothing new. At least as early as the 12th century, poets described a subject’s sex appeal by numbering their many lovers—and those odes to courtly love almost entirely referred to married people. Some of that, of course, was pure fiction. But factually, the great beauty of the era, Eleanor of Aquitaine, complained that her husband, King Louis VII of France, didn’t frequent her bed enough to allow her to conceive a male heir, so she left him for England’s much more virile King Henry II, with whom she’d begun a lusty relationship while still wedded in apparently too-holy matrimony to the very devout Louis.
People didn’t become more faithful with the rise of democracy and a more equal distribution of wealth, either. In her book, “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” social historian Stephanie Coontz writes that in a 1928 survey, one quarter of married American men and women admitted to having had at least one affair.
In 1998, around the time of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Associated Press compiled survey results that showed 22 percent of married men and 14 percent of married women admitted to having had at least one affair. (One survey put the numbers at 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively.) The AP also reported that although 90 percent of Americans believed adultery to be morally wrong, only 35 percent believed it should be illegal.
Given how long adultery’s been going on and how it’s managed to survive every slate of prohibitions thrown at it, one can’t help but wonder if the only reason Adam and Eve weren’t stepping out was that there was no one else to step out with.
“I have studied 42 societies, and around the world you will find men and women who have committed adultery,” says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. “Even in those cultures where you can get your head chopped off for it, they do it.”
Fisher, who explores the topic in her books, “The Anatomy of Love” and “Why We Love,” believes that, whatever its social and personal ramifications, adultery is part of an unconscious reproductive strategy, and that in a way, humans have evolved as adulterers. If a man has two children with one woman, she explains, he’s spreading his DNA into the next generation. But if he “goes over the hill” and has two children with another woman, he’s doubled the amount of DNA he’s spreading, and he’s adding to its variety. So adulterers may have disproportionately contributed to the human gene pool.
It’s not all “he,” though. In the ’40s, Fisher says, a study in Los Angeles hospitals intended to examine other traits in the blood samples of newborn babies found a trait that shocked the World War II-era world: Between 10 percent and 30 percent of the babies studied were not the offspring of the men to whom the mothers were married.
If it’s always been so common, why is it illegal in Georgia?
“This is what they call ‘cultural lag’ in anthropology,” she says. “It hasn’t caught up with the reality.”
SP