Which states prohibit fornication

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In the Virginia Code, fornication -- consensual sex with an unmarried person -- isn't legal. From plastic bags to natural hair, here are the new laws coming in Delegate Mark Levine, who introduced the legislation to repeal it, said that the law fuels Virginians' confusion and distrust in the law: If unmarried sex is illegal, then what else is? Read More.

In 21 states, cheating in a marriage is against the law, punishable by a fine or even jail time. The New Hampshire Legislature is voting on a law Thursday that would repeal its anti-adultery law. Tim O'Flaherty, the bill's sponsor, said during a public hearing last month.

States' anti-adultery laws are rarely enforced, a vestige of our country's Puritanical beginnings, says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School. States with anti-cheating laws generally define adultery as a married person having sexual intercourse with someone other than their spouse.

In North Carolina, adultery is when two people "lewdly and lasciviously associate. Yet in his state of residence, Virginia, as in 22 others including Massachusetts, adultery remains a criminal act, a vestige of the way US law has anchored legitimate sexual activity within marriage.

In most of those states, including New York, adultery is a misdemeanor. But in others — Massachusetts, Idaho, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin — it is a felony, though rarely prosecuted.

In the armed forces, it can be punished severely, although usually in combination with greater wrongdoing. In nearly all the rest of the industrialized world, adultery is not covered by criminal code. Like other US state laws related to sex — sodomy, fornication, rape — adultery laws date to the Old Testament, onetime capital offenses stemming at least partly from a concern about male property. Peter Nicolas of the University of Washington Law School said the term stemmed from the notion of ''adulterating'' or polluting the bloodline of a family when a married woman had sex with someone other than her husband and ran the risk of having another man's child.

Linda C.