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This article needs the attention of someone with a knowledge of legal history. I've just looked through the reference for Footnote 2 "The doctrine and law of marriage, adultery, and divorce" at Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ .
Possibly the error was the results in merely searching the book for the term "adulteress" and "adulterer" and counting the results. Searching on punishment give additional results.
1. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA485#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false Capitol punishment for the adulterer (man), expulsion of the woman "adultress" from the house.
2. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA491#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false In the Marian Islands the offense is not punishable in the woman; but if the man offends, the woman and her relations waste his lands and turn him out of the house.
3. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA492#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false If the adultery be committed with a woman of inferior caste, and by force, the possessions of the adulterer are confiscated and the possessions of the adulterer are confiscated, his person mutilated, and he is carried round the city on an as : for adultery with a woman of inferior or equal caste, and by fraud, the adulterer forfeits his estates, is branded on the forehead, and banished from the kingdom. These laws of Shaster apply to the higher castes. If a man of low caste commit adultery with a woman of high caste, he is tied on a hot plate and burned to death; while adultery of the higher caste with lower castes may be compensated for a trifling fine. A Brahmin suffers only the loss of his hair : but the wife of a Brahmin is subject to severe discipline if the crime be committed with the higher castes; and if she offends with a lower caste she is punished by the loss of her hair, a nauseous unction, and a procession on an ass through the city, …
4. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA504#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false every person, the man as well as the woman
There are more instances in the book. For example ancient Jewish law decrees that both the man and the woman be put do death. I didn't continue searching because of point B below.
What we can see so far is that the reference contradicts the claim in the article that generally only the woman was punished. Generally both were punished, generally with a similar level of punishment. And in cultures were the punishment was not at a similar level, it was more often the man who was put to death, with the woman having her head shorn, being put out of the house, etc.
B. Even though the reference was written by someone with an MA from Trinity College Oxford. The author was at Oxford University, so I *assume* he had a good grasp of English, Scots, and biblical law, despite being a church minister and chaplin, and having no academic or professional qualification in law or legal history.
But what of other laws from other countries and from non-biblical history? The book was written in 1826 in a folksy style, with phrasing that indicates it wasn't based on understandings and stories, rather than reading the texts of the foreign laws.
Shouldn't a reference to what past laws are or were in foreign cultures be required to be written after reading those laws of those various foreign cultures? I don't know the answer, I am not an expert. So I did not update the article. But I suspect an additional more authoritative source reference should be found. Ideally an expert in legal history should provide aid.
Perhaps the current source reference could be left in place to indicate that generally both men and women were punished, but that sometimes the man was punished more severely. 2604:3D09:A87F:FD10:D133:49D6:4AC6:937D ( talk) 07:26, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
There is currently no information on the law in California apart from there being no adultery law there as of 1996. There is the potential for curiosity over the law in that state considering the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, adapted into a film in 1967, is set in California and contains a well known example of adultery in popular culture and a threat to prosecute the unmarried partner. In December 2014 User:John Paul Parks added a note in the article about the film saying "In 1967, the year in which the film was made, adultery was a criminal offense in California. See Cal. Penal Code §§ 269a, 269b (repealed 1975)". The note has since been removed and I cannot imagine any such reference appearing in that article soon considering trivia sections are discouraged on Wikipedia. Such a reference might be better mentioned in this article considering it is about a real life adultery law. I have so far not been able to find any reference to a former adultery law in California but most web sources I found claims that the state has no adultery law as it has no-fault divorce which was introduced there in 1970. Tk420 ( talk) 20:56, 9 September 2019 (UTC)-edited
Utah decriminalized adultery in 2019, as it states in the article. It would be nice if someone could update the map. Galaxy1011 ( talk) 08:00, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
Several parts of this article refer to a "double standard" between male and female adultery as though this is some heinous bigotry; I note here that the ENWP article for double standard itself begins: "A double standard is the application of different sets of principles for situations that are, in principle, the same."
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that male and female adultery are not identical in consequences, due to mater semper certa est. A husband who is unfaithful to his wife cannot trick his wife into thinking any resulting children are her own; a wife who is unfaithful to her husband can. Given the enormous time and material investment associated with parenting, which most wish to reserve for their own children, this creates a fundamental asymmetry in the crime (one that has partially been rectified in the modern day via paternity testing, true, but that is not retroactive), and thus an asymmetry in the punishment is not unjust.
There is currently no connection drawn between the sex-specific nature of uncertainty of paternity and the asymmetry in punishment, which I think overly dismisses ancient customs. Magic9mushroom ( talk) 08:41, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
New text was added in the section "Biblical sources" by Al-Andalus, but absolutely no sources were cited. It reads like an essay presenting the personal thoughts of the author, rather than an encyclopedic analysis of the religious doctrine; and the tone is also unencyclopedic. Given that the section deals with the bible, it has to cite text from the bible and add scholarly interpretations from reliable sources for that text in order to explain the biblical concept of adultery; otherwise it's simply WP:OR and violates WP:V. I suggest the new text be cut until the problem is fixed. 2A02:2F0F:B1FF:FFFF:0:0:6463:DD53 ( talk) 18:09, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
The current lede (recently changed) reads:"Adultery (from Latin adulterium; ad- + alterō, “I change/alter [one lineage for another”]) is extra-marital sex partaken by a spouse, or premarital sex partaken by a betrothed person, that is considered objectionable on social, religious, moral, or legal grounds."
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Archives ( Index) |
This article needs the attention of someone with a knowledge of legal history. I've just looked through the reference for Footnote 2 "The doctrine and law of marriage, adultery, and divorce" at Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ .
Possibly the error was the results in merely searching the book for the term "adulteress" and "adulterer" and counting the results. Searching on punishment give additional results.
1. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA485#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false Capitol punishment for the adulterer (man), expulsion of the woman "adultress" from the house.
2. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA491#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false In the Marian Islands the offense is not punishable in the woman; but if the man offends, the woman and her relations waste his lands and turn him out of the house.
3. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA492#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false If the adultery be committed with a woman of inferior caste, and by force, the possessions of the adulterer are confiscated and the possessions of the adulterer are confiscated, his person mutilated, and he is carried round the city on an as : for adultery with a woman of inferior or equal caste, and by fraud, the adulterer forfeits his estates, is branded on the forehead, and banished from the kingdom. These laws of Shaster apply to the higher castes. If a man of low caste commit adultery with a woman of high caste, he is tied on a hot plate and burned to death; while adultery of the higher caste with lower castes may be compensated for a trifling fine. A Brahmin suffers only the loss of his hair : but the wife of a Brahmin is subject to severe discipline if the crime be committed with the higher castes; and if she offends with a lower caste she is punished by the loss of her hair, a nauseous unction, and a procession on an ass through the city, …
4. https://books.google.ca/books?id=mt0TAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA504#v=onepage&q=punishment&f=false every person, the man as well as the woman
There are more instances in the book. For example ancient Jewish law decrees that both the man and the woman be put do death. I didn't continue searching because of point B below.
What we can see so far is that the reference contradicts the claim in the article that generally only the woman was punished. Generally both were punished, generally with a similar level of punishment. And in cultures were the punishment was not at a similar level, it was more often the man who was put to death, with the woman having her head shorn, being put out of the house, etc.
B. Even though the reference was written by someone with an MA from Trinity College Oxford. The author was at Oxford University, so I *assume* he had a good grasp of English, Scots, and biblical law, despite being a church minister and chaplin, and having no academic or professional qualification in law or legal history.
But what of other laws from other countries and from non-biblical history? The book was written in 1826 in a folksy style, with phrasing that indicates it wasn't based on understandings and stories, rather than reading the texts of the foreign laws.
Shouldn't a reference to what past laws are or were in foreign cultures be required to be written after reading those laws of those various foreign cultures? I don't know the answer, I am not an expert. So I did not update the article. But I suspect an additional more authoritative source reference should be found. Ideally an expert in legal history should provide aid.
Perhaps the current source reference could be left in place to indicate that generally both men and women were punished, but that sometimes the man was punished more severely. 2604:3D09:A87F:FD10:D133:49D6:4AC6:937D ( talk) 07:26, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
There is currently no information on the law in California apart from there being no adultery law there as of 1996. There is the potential for curiosity over the law in that state considering the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, adapted into a film in 1967, is set in California and contains a well known example of adultery in popular culture and a threat to prosecute the unmarried partner. In December 2014 User:John Paul Parks added a note in the article about the film saying "In 1967, the year in which the film was made, adultery was a criminal offense in California. See Cal. Penal Code §§ 269a, 269b (repealed 1975)". The note has since been removed and I cannot imagine any such reference appearing in that article soon considering trivia sections are discouraged on Wikipedia. Such a reference might be better mentioned in this article considering it is about a real life adultery law. I have so far not been able to find any reference to a former adultery law in California but most web sources I found claims that the state has no adultery law as it has no-fault divorce which was introduced there in 1970. Tk420 ( talk) 20:56, 9 September 2019 (UTC)-edited
Utah decriminalized adultery in 2019, as it states in the article. It would be nice if someone could update the map. Galaxy1011 ( talk) 08:00, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
Several parts of this article refer to a "double standard" between male and female adultery as though this is some heinous bigotry; I note here that the ENWP article for double standard itself begins: "A double standard is the application of different sets of principles for situations that are, in principle, the same."
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that male and female adultery are not identical in consequences, due to mater semper certa est. A husband who is unfaithful to his wife cannot trick his wife into thinking any resulting children are her own; a wife who is unfaithful to her husband can. Given the enormous time and material investment associated with parenting, which most wish to reserve for their own children, this creates a fundamental asymmetry in the crime (one that has partially been rectified in the modern day via paternity testing, true, but that is not retroactive), and thus an asymmetry in the punishment is not unjust.
There is currently no connection drawn between the sex-specific nature of uncertainty of paternity and the asymmetry in punishment, which I think overly dismisses ancient customs. Magic9mushroom ( talk) 08:41, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
New text was added in the section "Biblical sources" by Al-Andalus, but absolutely no sources were cited. It reads like an essay presenting the personal thoughts of the author, rather than an encyclopedic analysis of the religious doctrine; and the tone is also unencyclopedic. Given that the section deals with the bible, it has to cite text from the bible and add scholarly interpretations from reliable sources for that text in order to explain the biblical concept of adultery; otherwise it's simply WP:OR and violates WP:V. I suggest the new text be cut until the problem is fixed. 2A02:2F0F:B1FF:FFFF:0:0:6463:DD53 ( talk) 18:09, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
The current lede (recently changed) reads:"Adultery (from Latin adulterium; ad- + alterō, “I change/alter [one lineage for another”]) is extra-marital sex partaken by a spouse, or premarital sex partaken by a betrothed person, that is considered objectionable on social, religious, moral, or legal grounds."