VARIETY
83
no other western country
IS
fornication a criminal offense. As for
adultery, England, Japan and the Soviet Union have no such statutes;
France and Italy will punish adultery under special conditions (e.g., if
the man should establish the mistress in the family home); Germany
and Switzerland punish adultery only if a court can prove that a mar–
riage has been dissolved because of it.
In actual practice, the state laws are seldom invoked, although
242 Bostonians were arrested for adultery as recently as 1948. These
statutes are considered "dead-letter laws" and there are those who
argue that since they are so seldom invoked, why repeal them? One
answer came in 1917 when a number of racketeers were arrested by
the Federal government because they had taken girl friends to Florida,
violating the Mann Act as well as the local fornication-adultery
statutes. This case (Caminetti
us.
U.S.) set a dangerous precedent.
Under a busy Attorney General, the "dead-letter laws" could be used
to destroy all sorts of opponents, villainous or otherwise.
Rape is another offense 'much confused by state laws. During the
thirties, out of 2366 New York City indictments, only 18 percent were for
forcible rape. The remaining 82 percent were for statutory rape,
a peculiar and imprecise crime. For instance, in Colorado it is statutory
rape if intercourse takes place between an unmarried girl under
eighteen and a man over eighteen. In practice this means that a boy
of nineteen who has an affair with a consenting girl of seventeen is
guilty of statutory rape. All the girl needs to do is to accuse her lover
of consensual relations and he can be imprisoned for as long as fifty
years. There are thousands of "rapists" serving time because, for one
reason or another, they were found guilty of sexual intercourse with a
willing partner.
In nearly every state fellatio, cunnilingus and anal intercourse
are punished. Not only are these acts forbidden between men, they are
forbidden between men and women, even within wedlock. As usual,
the various state laws are in wild disarray. Ohio, the mother of Presi–
dents, deplores fellatio but tolerates cunnilingus. In another state,
sodomy is punished with a maximum 20-year sentence, while fellatio
calls for only three years, a curious discrimination. Deviate sexual acts
between consenting adults are punished in most states, sentences run–
ning from three years to life imprisonment. Of the other countries of
the west, only England and Germany enter this area at all.
Elsewhere in the field of moral legislation, 27 states forbid sexual
relations and/or marriage between the white race and its inferiors:
Negroes, American Indians, Orientals; and our narcotic laws are the
