Sunday, August 17, 2008
News, In this Issue...

Georgia and the big red “A”

Is it time to throw out Georgia’s adultery law?

Georgia and the big red “A”

Left to right: Sen. John Edwardsand his wife Elizabeth; Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista Bisek; Jennifer Moorhouse, a Monica Lewinsky lookalike, poses in front of a giant screen showing U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images; Aude GUERRUCCI/AFP/Getty Images; HECTOR MATA/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage and Mark Woolsey
   
    When former Democratic presidential primary candidate John Edwards admitted earlier this month to a recent extramarital affair, many onlookers simply shrugged it off as exactly the sort of thing we’ve all come to expect from politicians, regardless of party affiliation.

Some compared Edwards to former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and, inevitably, to Bill Clinton, the U.S. president who informed the world that oral sex isn’t really sex, so doing that with someone other than your spouse doesn’t count.

Former history professor Gingrich, who championed “family values,” married his second wife, Marianne, within months of divorcing Jackie, his cancer-stricken first wife, and 18 years later divorced Marianne to marry Callista Bisek, a congressional aide 23 years his junior with whom he reportedly had carried on a six-year affair. (You may recall that Gingrich was the sole prominent Republican to say that Clinton’s non-sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky wasn’t enough of a reason to impeach the president.)   

“It’s the Republicans who have affairs and then divorce to marry the people they have affairs with,” says Atlanta psychiatrist and marriage therapist Frank Pittman. “The Democrats have affairs and stay married.”

    He’s not sure why that is, but unlike Clinton, Pittman doesn’t quibble over what’s sex and what’s not. He explains that it is possible to have an affair that doesn’t involve sex at all, and a sexless affair can be just as, or even more, damaging to the innocent spouse than a purely sexual affair.

    That may be fodder for counseling sessions, but under Georgia’s adultery law, it’s the sex—specifically the kind of sex—that matters. Under our law, Gingrich, depending on the details (which never came out), may or may not have been an adulterer. Clinton, stained dress notwithstanding, was not. But Edwards, since there’s some speculation that he’s the father of campaign videographer Rielle Hunter’s baby, probably was.

    Georgia’s law basically defines adultery as genital intercourse involving penetration between someone who is married and someone to whom that person is not married. The law characterizes adultery as a misdemeanor, and prescribes a punishment exactly like that applied to people who buy the services of a prostitute: 12 months probation and/or a $1,000 fine.

    Of course, for anyone to be punished, they’d have to be arrested first, and that seems extremely unlikely. The law is on the books, but it is never enforced. Police officers say they would have a very hard time gathering evidence to bring a charge. Figuring out if it was a “Clinton affair” or an “Edwards affair” would rely on a lot of hearsay. The details of most hookups would remain mysteries like Gingrich’s. And even if police managed to scrape up some clues, a misdemeanor charge wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

    Yet no one is eager to be the one to strike the prohibition from Georgia’s legal code. So although the state’s sodomy law was overturned a decade ago, Georgia’s adultery law remains in the book, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. 

“We’d have to arrest half the county”

The Sunday Paper conducted an admittedly random survey of about 10 law enforcement agencies, from one end of the state to the other, and found not even one officer who could remember ever having made an arrest or even having heard of an arrest for adultery.

    When we posed the question, “Has your agency ever arrested someone for adultery?” the response was usually a gale of laughter that took a few minutes to subside. There were also requests that we not use officers’ names (not that they felt self-conscious about the topic, mind you; they just felt better talking about it if no one knew who they were).

In Hancock County, after an assistant who was nearly helpless with laughter managed to transfer the phone to him, a sheriff’s deputy said, “No. I’ve been here for 27 years and I have never heard of that happening.” At the Telfair County Sheriff’s Department, the response, when it finally emerged from a wave of giggles, was, “We’d have to arrest half the county.” A retired Atlanta Police Department officer said, “In 26 years, I arrested a lot of people for a lot of things, but I never arrested one for that.” And a Colquitt County officer said, “Honey, let’s face it, I’m sure there have been plenty of occasions when it would have been necessary, but no, I’ve been here 13 years and I’ve never heard of it happening.”

    Gwinnett County, DeKalb County and Cherokee County didn’t hide behind anonymity.

    “I would seriously doubt that you would find any law enforcement agencies that have made arrests for adultery,” said Cpl. Illana Spellman, public information officer for the Gwinnett County Police Department. “It’s like fornication: It’s an old law that has been left on the books. Arrests for fornication or adultery would definitely clog up the court system, and there are other, more serious crimes that we have to pursue.”
   
Mekka Parish, public information officer for the DeKalb County Police Department, asked a group of veteran officers and returned with “a definite ‘no’” answer.

    And at the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department, Sgt. Jay Baker explained that officers would rather pursue arrests that would result in convictions.

    “The problem with adultery would be finding a jury of 12 people who hadn’t done the same thing,” he said.