I’m not sure that many Canadians appreciate this story.

Particularly,

The law has been challenged four times, but the country’s top judges have always ruled that adultery is damaging to social order, and the offence should therefore remain a crime. 

I’m going to step out on a limb and take the side of South Korea’s top judges. Adultery *is* damaging to social order.

I’ve never been able to buy into the position that the government “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” The government has a great deal of business in the bedrooms of the nation. If I murder someone in my bedroom or sell illegal drugs in my bedroom, then the government has a every right to bust my sorry self, in my bedroom.

Yes, but I’m taking that quote out of context – it refers to sexual activity, and the quote actually means that sex is altogether too exciting and intimate for an organization as bureaucratic and faceless as the government to be involved.

Except… That’s not exactly true. If I commit an act of prostitution or statutory rape in my bedroom, the government has every right to bust my sorry self, in my bedroom. Sexual activity is not outside the government’s sphere of influence.

Nor should it be. When I think about adultery, I try and compare it with a crime that no-one argues against, like murder, or theft. Whenever I try and calculate the difference between adultery and murder, it always comes out less than I expect. Does adultery carry more or less moral condemnation than murder or theft? No. Does adultery do less real harm than murder or theft? No.

Why do we outlaw murder? We outlaw it because it is bad. In other words, it’s morally wrong. It’s true that you can’t write a law which will make men good.  But we legislate against those things that are bad. Morality tells us what it means for something to be good or bad. In that sense, the only thing you *can* legislate is [comes from] morality.

Whenever people say that you can’t legislate morality (on a practical level), they really mean that you can’t legislate unpopular morality. Popular morality (murder is wrong; terrorism is wrong) is simple to legislate.  Only the controversial stuff (abortion, same-sex unions, smoking in bars) is, well, controversial. This doesn’t even depend on the religious or secular nature of the morality, or on its degree of extremism. Where there is popular support for killing converts to Christianity, for example, this gets reflected in the law without any real difficulty.

If you ignore the moral aspect of law and evaluate adultery on a practical basis, it is far more damaging than many things which are legislated.

Adultery does harm of an entirely different sort, perhaps. The more I reflect on people, and myself, the more I find myself believing that there’s more to a person than their physical body. The words of a young footballer’s coach haunt me, they tell the simple truth that a person is more,or sometimes less, than the sum of their abilities…

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what he’s got in terms of his ability he should be playing in the Premier League.

“But obviously there’s something within him, the person, that stops him from doing it.”

You can’t tell me that emotional wounds don’t count. You can’t tell me that verbal and emotional abuse aren’t of interest to society. I only have to tell my own story, of the times I’ve been too afraid, too angry, too disrupted, too anxious to do the daily tasks of life. It can affect my work, it can affect my duty as a citizen. It can affect my desire to abide within the law.

An emotional wound the size caused by adultery? The betrayal? The anger? The shame and the insult? That’s a serious matter.

Don’t try and tell me that the government has no right to legislate emotional matters, either. Human rights? Hate crime? Our courts deal with fuzzy, intangible stuff, such as judging intent, all the time.

There’s only one answer that I can come up with as to why my Canadian culture reacts against the thought that adultery should be criminal, which is that, “Sometimes it’s okay.” The argument is that there are times when adultery is not morally wrong, when it is not damaging (i.e. the other person did it first), when it is justified and not deserving of punishment. Or simply, that adultery is just too much fun to allow the government to break it up.

This argument says that the government will never be able to discern with precision which of these cases are damaging and which are not. It says that because adultery can sometimes be justified, you shouldn’t be judging it.

To this, I say, “Hooey.” Maybe the guy I murdered was a bad dude. Maybe he would have killed someone else later on in his life and so I’m justified. Maybe it was okay to steal, because the store wouldn’t miss it. Maybe, maybe, maybe…. Courts deal with gray areas all the time. There’s flexibility in sentencing which adjusts for circumstance. Certainly civil courts (divorces, anyone) handle this kind of fuzziness. It’s not always neat and tidy, but this is sin, people, what do you expect?

I’m not trying to ignore the logistical difficulties involved. I’m just trying to point out that there are many areas of law where things are difficult to enforce, and yet we try anyway, because it matters.

Every time I try and reason out why we in Canada fail to punish adultery on a judicial level, as opposed to S. Korea, it comes out to the very same answer:

We think it’s okay.

This troubles me.