Attention, New York adulterers: Your sin will soon no longer be a crime.

In the halls of the New York State Capitol, as the budget deadline approaches, it seems the only thing everyone wants to talk about is adultery.

An outdated but rarely enforced state law classifies adultery as a crime, and previous efforts to repeal it have gone nowhere. But that seems to be about to change.

The Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill to repeal the adultery law last month, and last week a Senate committee brought a similar bill to the floor for a full vote that could take place as soon as this week. .

The developments have drawn worldwide attention, and the Assembly bill’s sponsor, Charles Lavine, a Long Island Democrat, has fielded interview requests from Europe to South America.

“Any criminal law that criminalizes intimate behavior between consenting adults does not deserve to be on the books,” said Lavine, who added that he has been “happily married” for 54 years.

While adultery remains illegal in a handful of states (in Oklahoma, Michigan, and Wisconsin, adultery is considered a felony), the vast majority of states repealed their adultery laws long ago or never outlawed it in the first place. place.

New York law finds a person guilty of adultery “when he or she engages in sexual relations with another person at a time when he or she has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse,” according to New York’s penal code. Adultery is classified as a Class B misdemeanor and is punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine.

The move to decriminalize adultery is about more than just updating the criminal code to reflect modern values, Lavine said. He viewed recent events, including an Alabama judge’s ruling that embryos frozen in test tubes are children and the 2022 Supreme Court decision rejecting the constitutional right to abortion, as evidence of a growing political desire to impose government oversight over sex and undermining Americans. ‘ assumed the right to privacy.

“We are all in danger of losing our rights,” Lavine said. “Those who are most likely to be prosecuted for this crime, not only in New York, but throughout the United States and even around the world, are women. I believe it is time for our state legislatures across America to stand up for human rights. And women’s rights are human rights.”

This is not the first time New York has been slow to update laws regulating marriage and sex. In 2010, New York was the last state to adopt no-fault divorce (allowing couples to dissolve marriages without needing proof of adultery, cruelty, imprisonment or abandonment), nearly 40 years after California was the first to do so. And it wasn’t until 2021 that state lawmakers officially rejected child marriage and raised the legal age of consent to marry to 18.

When New York first banned adultery in 1907, it was common for states to pass laws criminalizing sex outside of marriage, according to Jill Hasday, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has studied how the law regulates deception in romantic, sexual situations and family relationships. Technically, these laws applied to everyone, Professor Hasday said, but they were often used against women and LGBTQ people.

Just weeks after the law went into effect, a married railroad contractor and a 25-year-old woman he was dating were the first people arrested and charged with adultery, according to a 1907 New York Times article.

New York lawmakers have sought to repeal the adultery ban since at least 1964, when a legislative commission determined that enforcement of the state’s ban on adultery was virtually impossible and “a matter of private morality, not law.”

But the law remains in effect and at least 13 people have been accused of adultery in New York since 1972, according to Lavine.

The most recent case arose in 2010, when a 43-year-old married woman was arrested after engaging in a sexual act with a man who was not her husband in a public park in Batavia, New York. Both were charged with public lewdness. but only the woman, Suzanne Corona, was charged with adultery, said Brian Degnan, the lawyer who represented Mrs. Corona.

A media frenzy gripped Corona, Degnan said, and his mugshot was published in media outlets around the world.

“I couldn’t go anywhere in the city without people whispering,” Degnan said. “She was living her life under a microscope when she just wanted to be left alone.”

Although adultery charges have always been rare, the law was occasionally used as justification in divorce proceedings in the years before New York adopted no-fault divorce, Degnan said.

“It’s embarrassing that this is still on the books,” Degnan said. “Even in law school, everyone started laughing every time the topic came up.”

But when the law is enforced, it can be used to attack and shame women, as Ms. Corona’s experience illustrates.

“Whose right to privacy was violated?” said Mr. Degnan. “Whose marriage was displayed in the media?”

Professor Hasday suggested that women accused of infidelity tend to face harsher social consequences than men.

“What do you call a husband whose wife has had sexual relations with another person? “You call him a cuckold,” the professor said. “What do you call a wife whose husband has had sexual relations with another person? You call her wife. “We still have the idea that adultery is particularly bad against a man.”

Society has adopted much more liberal views on sex and marriage since the early 20th century, when New York’s ban on adultery was adopted, the professor added, but the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction. For example, he said, some states revived old abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

The Supreme Court has never taken a case involving the state’s adultery law, but many people have argued that such laws are unconstitutional based on the court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. That decision struck down a law that criminalized sodomy and ruled that Americans had a constitutional right to privacy.

But in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should reconsider other cases involving marriage and sex, including Lawrence v. Texas.

“We are at a time when the attention of many policymakers has been focused on the regulation of sexuality and reproduction,” Professor Hasday said. “States seem to be turning in very different directions.”

Lavine said any criticism he has received for his role in sponsoring the Assembly bill to repeal the adultery law has been limited to a few “religious nuts.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been called a heretic,” he said, laughing.

He added: “You can’t punish a person’s personal view of what is moral, and that’s all this law does.”