Marriage, Lesbians, and Adultery

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has decided, in a 3-2 decision, that homosexual sex is not adultery.

The basis for their decision? The "...definition of adultery in the 1961 edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary..."

Apparently the decision had to be made after a man sued his wife for divorce, claiming that she had been engaging in an adulterous lesbian relationship during their marriage, which led to the ultimate breakup. He and his lawyer believe that the affair violated the sanctity of the marriage covenant.

I believe that they're right.

The problem I have with basing a legal decision on a strict interpretation of a 42 year old dictionary definition of a word is that dictionary definitions change. I'm guessing that when the Webster's people sat down in 1961 to commit to paper their definition of adultery they probably didn't ask "So is it adultery if two chicks get it on? Or what about two guys?" In 1961, these weren't big questions. Marriage was the norm and homosexuality was viewed as a deviant perversion. In the intervening 42 years, we have gone through a radical revolution in the way in which we view marriage and homosexuality. Which makes the 1961 definition a relic of a time long gone - and ripe for being updated in the next version of Webster's.

In my view, this creates a problem. What happens if the definition of adultery gets updated in the Fourth Webster's? Does that change the legitimacy of this ruling? If I found a more favorable definition in, say, the Second Webster's, could I use that? It strikes me that by basing the ruling on a dictionary definition - a very specific definition decided by a party other than the court - creates a situation in which court decisions could be changed or nullified by the editors of that dictionary.

I think that the dissenters in this decision have an excellent argument:

"We respectfully dissent because we believe that the majority's narrow construction of the word 'adultery' contravenes the legislature's intended purpose in sanctioning fault-based divorce for the protection of the injured spouse. To strictly adhere to the primary definition of adultery in the 1961 edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary and a corollary definition of sexual intercourse, which on its face does not require coitus, is to avert one's eyes from the sexual realities of our world."

I'm guessing that the three justices didn't want to make a real decision. They didn't want to truly address homosexuality and it's relationship with heterosexual marriages. It was a decision in which no one would end up happy, no matter what the final decision was. So they found a cop-out instead. They passed the responsibility for exercising judgment off to the editors of Webster's in 1961.

What they did was not right, was not fair, was not what they were paid for, and was not surprising given the cowardice of most judges in the face of political correctness.

They shirked from their duty of calling adultery what it is, an unacceptable betrayal of the bonds of marriage.