When it comes to being an enemy of family values, marriage, children and stable communities, it’s hard to top that old favorite activity, adultery.
Infidelity is the most prevalent cause of divorce, according to a 1994, cross-cultural University of Michigan survey funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. And divorces, about a million of them a year in the U.S., have a way of being particularly rough on families, particularly kids.
The “Janus Report on Sexual Behavior,” published in 1993 and based on a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans, showed that 35 percent of married men and 26 percent of married women reported having had affairs. The figure for women was identical to the result obtained by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey some 40 years earlier, though 15 percentage points lower than Kinsey’s estimate for male cheaters–50 percent.
No wonder country music is so popular.
Given all this, you would suppose that those serious about using the force of law to reinforce the family would be focusing on endemic adultery–starting the War on Hanky-Panky, demanding the appointment of a Monkey Business Czar, calling for random morals testing.
So far, though, state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago), has taken the boldest step. She has written a legislative amendment that not only upgrades adultery from a misdemeanor offense that is never enforced to a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but that also calls for the creation and maintenance of local registries for paroled adulterers, similar to the registries maintained for paroled child molesters.
Feigenholtz calls it “the Scarlet Letter amendment” and said she will attempt to tack it onto the bill now moving through the General Assembly to ban same-sex marriages. She argues that if that bill’s supporters are as genuinely concerned about families as they claim, they ought to be enthusiastic about her crackdown on infidelity.
After all, it’s a fair guess that the heterosexual philandering that occurs in one single day in the United States does more actual harm to innocent youths and to the institutions of marriage and the family than has every single long-term homosexual relationship in the history of the world.
This is Feigenholtz’s point. The amendment she will submit is a bluff, an attempt to jerk the chains of Republican legislators and conservative pro-family groups for the blatant and gratuitous gay-bashing behind the prohibition.
“This is an in-your-face move,” Feigenholtz explained. “These people know there is no need for their bill, that it’s simply about platitudes and about (the) November (election). If they’re not total hypocrites about family values, they’ll take action against adultery: That’s what fractures families. That’s what puts extra kids into (the care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services). That’s what’s a moral offense against marriage.”
Her foes probably won’t take the bait. The Republican majority can and no doubt will bury the amendment in committee without debate, recognizing that most Americans have come to regard their private, consensual sexual behavior as none of the government’s business; that despite any good intentions, enforcing felony charges for adultery would create an unpopular intrusion into personal liberties that would clog prisons and devastate the motel industry.
And to the extent that adultery may be more a symptom than a cause of marriage trouble, as some researchers believe, it might not even do much to help traditional families.
Paul Caprio, director of Family PAC, an organization supporting the effort to ban gay marriages, said Feigenholtz’s gambit simply “trivializes adultery,” a problem he said would be more effectively addressed by changes in the no-fault divorce law.
Officials with other groups aligned with Family PAC expressed tentative interest in considering parts of Feigenholtz’s amendment, and efforts to reach Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Inverness), sponsor of the original bill, were unsuccessful..
On the off chance Republicans do call Feigenholtz’s bluff and bring adultery to the floor, as it were, it ought to make for an interesting day in Springfield.
“I’d like to see how many legislators declare a conflict of interest and refuse to vote,” Feigenholtz said. “If they don’t keep their stones in their pockets, they’ll get hurt by flying glass.”
