Fornication
Fornication generally refers to consensual sexual intercourse between two people who are not married to each other. When a married person has consensual sexual relations with one or more partners whom they are not married to, it is called adultery. John Calvin viewed adultery to be a sexual act that is considered outside of the divine model for sexual intercourse between married individuals, which includes fornication.
For many people, the term carries an overtone of moral or religious disapproval, but the significance of sexual acts to which the term is applied varies between religions, societies, and cultures. In modern usage, the term is often replaced with more judgment-neutral terms such as premarital sex, extramarital sex, or recreational sex.
Etymology and usage
In the original Greek version of the New Testament, the term porneia is used 25 times.In the late 4th century, the Latin Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Greek texts, translated the term as fornicati, fornicatus, fornicata, and fornicatae. The terms fornication and fornicators are found in the 1599 Geneva Bible, the 1611 King James Version, the 1899 Catholic Douay–Rheims Bible, and the 1901 American Standard Version. Many modern post-World War 2 Bible translations completely avoid all usage of fornicators and fornication: English Standard Version, New Living Translation, New International Version, Christian Standard Bible, Good News Bible and Contemporary English Version do not use the terms fornication or fornicators. Where one translation may use fornication another translation may use whoredom, sexual immorality or more simply immoral or immorality.
In Latin, the term fornix means arch or vault. In ancient Rome, prostitutes waited for their customers out of the rain under vaulted ceilings, and fornix became a euphemism for brothels, and the Latin verb fornicare referred to a man visiting a brothel. The first recorded use in English is in the Cursor Mundi, ; the Oxford English Dictionary records a figurative use as well: "The forsaking of God for idols". Fornicated as an adjective is still used in botany, meaning "arched" or "bending over". John Milton plays on the double meaning of the word in The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty : " gives up her body to a mercenary whordome under those fornicated ches which she cals Gods house."
Across history, cultures, and laws
A survey undertaken by the American Sociological Review between 2000 and 2008 covering 31 developing countries found that "94 percent of Jews... reported having premarital sex, compared to 79 percent of Christians, 65 percent of Buddhists, 43 percent of Muslims and 19 percent of Hindus."Roman Empire
During the sixth century, Emperor Justinian formulated legislation that was to become the basis of Western marriage law for the next millennium. Under his laws, cohabiting couples were no longer recognised as married and their children were regarded as illegitimate, with the same status as the children of prostitutes. However, the status of illegitimate children could be updated if the parents later married.Great Britain
In the 1170s, "it was common practice for ordinary couples to cohabit before marriage and for cousins to marry one another" and there was very little stigma around bastards at any social level in medieval England. For instance, William the Conqueror's right to succeed to the throne of Normandy was never questioned on the grounds he was a bastard nor, in his conflict with Harold Godwinson over who should rule England, was this issue raised as an argument against him. However, attitudes shifted a few generations later when bastards were no longer able to claim the English throne. The Waldensians were a medieval sect accused of fornication and of not regarding it a sin.During the ascendancy of the Puritans, an Act for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication was passed by the English Council of State in 1650. At the Restoration in 1660, this statute was not renewed, and prosecution of the mere act of fornication itself was abandoned. However, notorious and open lewdness, when carried to the extent of exciting public scandal, continued to be an indictable offence at common law, however fornication in a private sense was not illegal.
Prior to the passing of the Marriage Act 1753, laws against bastard children became more strict during the 1730s and 1740s.
In the Victorian era, however, the English working class continued to have a different set of sexual mores from the upper-middle and upper classes. Premarital intercourse was considered acceptable for the working class but only after an extended period of courtship and occurred infrequently even then. The couple were expected to marry, though. Disgrace only arose if the female became pregnant and the couple did not marry.
United States
Ethical issues arising from sexual relations between consenting adults who have reached the age of consent have generally been viewed as matters of private morality, and so have not generally been prosecuted as criminal offenses in the common law. This legal position was inherited by the United States from the United Kingdom. Later, some jurisdictions, a total of 16 in the southern and eastern United States, as well as the states of Wisconsin and Utah, passed statutes creating the offense of fornication that prohibited sexual intercourse between two unmarried people of the opposite sex. Most of these laws either were repealed or were struck down by the courts in several states as being odious to their state constitutions. In Pollard v. Lyon, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a District of Columbia U.S. District Court ruling that spoken words by the defendant in the case that accused the plaintiff of fornication were not actionable for slander because fornication, although involving moral turpitude, was not an indictable offense in the District of Columbia at the time as it had not been an indictable offense in Maryland since 1785. See also State v. Saunders, 381 A.2d 333, Martin v. Ziherl, 607 S.E.2d 367., the only states in America that have laws banning fornication are:- Georgia
- Illinois
- Mississippi
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
Some acts of fornication were prohibited under criminal laws defining the offense of sodomy, rather than the laws defining the offense of fornication. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas rendered the states' remaining laws related to sodomy unenforceable. Lawrence v. Texas is also presumed by many to invalidate laws prohibiting fornication: the decision declared sodomy laws unconstitutional, saying that they interfered with private, consensual, non-commercial intimate relations between unrelated adults, and therefore were odious to the rights of liberty and privacy, such rights being retained by the people of the United States.
Australia
A 2003 survey reported that most non-religious Australians thought that premarital sex was acceptable. It showed that there was a correlation between liberalism, education levels, lack of conservative religious beliefs and a permissive attitude to premarital sex.Islamic nations
In some Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, Brunei, Maldives, Malaysia, Morocco, Oman, Mauritania, Qatar, Sudan, and Yemen, any form of sexual activity outside marriage is illegal.and fornication are strictly prohibited in Islam, as it is thought to lead to having children that do not know their parents and the deterioration of traditional concepts of family. Islam puts strong emphasis on the concept of family and children being kind to their parents. The punishment of in Islam according to Quran is only lashing for the unmarried; scholars allowed stoning only for married according to hadith. For this punishment to be applied, there must be four people who witnessed this incident in order to report it. If the accuser fails to produce four witnesses before the judge, then the accuser will get punishment for slander as it is mentioned in the Quran: "And those who accuse chaste women, and produce not four witnesses, flog them with eighty stripes, and reject their testimony forever. They indeed are the ".
If the person who committed has been proved in a court of law before a judge to have done it, and if they are married, then and only then can they be subjected to, or stoning to death, provided stoning can be performed only by legal authorities.
There are many instances from the pre-modern era and several recent cases of stoning for being legally carried out. became a more pressing issue in modern times, as Islamist movements and governments employed polemics against public immorality. During the Algerian Civil War, Islamist insurgents assassinated women suspected of loose morals, the Taliban have executed suspected adultresses using machine guns, and has been used as justification for honor killings. After sharia-based criminal laws were widely replaced by European-inspired statutes in the modern era, several countries passed legal reforms that incorporated elements of laws into their legal codes. Iran witnessed several highly publicized stonings for in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. In Nigeria, local courts have passed several stoning sentences, all of which were overturned on appeal or left unenforced. In Pakistan, the Hudood Ordinances of 1979 subsumed prosecution of rape under the category of, departing from traditional judicial practice, and making rape extremely difficult to prove while exposing the victims to jail sentences for admitting illicit intercourse. Although these laws were amended in 2006, they still blur the legal distinction between rape and consensual sex. According to human rights organizations, stoning for has also been carried out in Saudi Arabia.