He Who Is Without Sin…

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The governor of New Hampshire is about to sign a bill repealing a law that Moses near to broke his back lugging down Mount Sinai.

Adultery, defined most generally as sexual intercourse between a married person and someone not that person’s spouse, is still a crime in twenty-one of these United States, though soon to be only twenty when that governor dips her pen in Granite State ink. My home state, Colorado, is way ahead of the flattening curve, having repealed a similar law all the way back to last August.

Change comes at a slow pace: had he lived, the oldest criminally accountable adulterer in New Hampshire would be around 240 years old today. That’s a lot of criminal adultery. In France, nobody’s minded about that sort of thing since the birth of…France. I’m pretty sure you can’t get a visa to go to France without committing adultery first.

Some states, like Arizona, you expect to find this law still on the books. They don’t like anything up to date, like gays, Mexicans, or Democrats. But Utah? It’s almost impossible, for a man at least, to commit adultery when you have 23 wives. Like some backwoods areas of the South, there’s at most about three degrees of separation from folks there anyway. Coincidentally the South almost universally legally forbids adultery.

Fortunately for those few affected people, and for the millions upon millions of adulterers in New York, the laws aren’t much enforced. You can’t repeal laws if all the legislators are in jail.