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We’re honestly not sure how we feel about this one: at the end of last week, on the same day that New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law requiring landlords to notify tenants in writing about the presence of bedbugs in the building within 72 hours of discovering them, the politician repealed a 117-year-old law that made cheating on your spouse illegal.
To put it clearly: cheating is no longer considered a class B misdemeanor in New York that might land you in jail for up to 90 days.
"While I’ve been fortunate to share a loving married life with my husband for 40 years—making it somewhat ironic for me to sign a bill decriminalizing adultery—I know that people often have complex relationships," the governor said in an official statement at the end of last week, discussing the 1907 now-defunct law. "These matters should clearly be handled by these individuals and not our criminal justice system. Let’s take this silly, outdated statute off the books, once and for all."
According to Gothamist, only ten people were accused of adultery across the state "as their highest-level charge in a given case since 1979."
The last time the situation happened was back in 2010, when the police "charged a 41-year-old married woman after she was caught in a sex act with a man in a public park in the city of Batavia, between Rochester and Buffalo," reports Gothamist. "The adultery charge was later dropped."
All across the country, only 16 states still consider adultery a crime—from Arizona to Florida, Illinois, Utah Idaho and North Carolina, among others.
Although we obviously do not condone cheating of any sort, the new law, which was put into effect immediately, certainly seems to speak about the power that the government does and could have on citizens' personal lives—which is an important conversations worth having in and of itself.