Adultery still Illegal in New Hampshire After 200 years!

The original punishments — including standing on the gallows for an hour with a noose around the neck — have been softened to a $1,200 fine, yet some lawmakers think it’s time for the 200-year-old crime of adultery to come off New Hampshire’s books.

Seven months after the state approved gay marriage, lawmakers will consider easing government further from the bedroom with a bill to repeal the adultery law.
“We shouldn’t be regulating people’s sex lives and their love lives,” state Rep. Timothy Horrigan said. “This is one area the state government should stay out of people’s bedrooms.”

In June, lawmakers voted to legalize gay marriage — a law that takes effect Jan. 1.
“We shouldn’t be in the business of regulating what consenting adults do with each other,” Horrigan said.

Convicted adulterers years ago faced standing on the gallows, up to 39 lashes, a year in jail or a fine of 100 pounds. The punishment has been relaxed to a misdemeanor and a fine of up to $1,200 — with no jail time.

The high court found that the state had no legitimate interest justifying its intrusion into the personal and private lives of two gay men arrested in their bedroom during a police investigation in a weapons case. The men had been charged with sodomy.

Some recently questioned whether South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s admitted extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina made him subject to his state’s 1880 criminal law against adultery. The penalty is a fine of up to $500 and a year in jail. The state said it couldn’t waste limited money trying to prosecute Sanford on such a charge. The law’s constitutionality also has been questioned.

In the past, conservatives argued decriminalizing adultery would weaken marriage.
Kevin Smith, executive director of the conservative Cornerstone Policy Research, opposes this repeal effort for the same reason.

“Even though this criminal law probably is not enforced right now and probably has not been enforced for some time, I think it’s important to have a public policy statement that says generally or in all situations adultery is not a good thing. And I think, by repealing that statute, you’re essentially diminishing the harmful effects of adultery,” Smith said.

Horrigan doesn’t think a small fine will stop anyone from cheating on a spouse. He also wouldn’t oppose taking adultery out of the civil divorce statute as a cause for the breakdown.

“Who we love and how we love is not something, an area the state has much business meddling in,” he said. The original punishments — including standing on the gallows for an hour with a noose around the neck — have been softened to a $1,200 fine, yet some lawmakers think it’s time for the 200-year-old crime of adultery to come off New Hampshire’s books.

In June, lawmakers voted to legalize gay marriage — a law that takes effect Jan. 1.
“We shouldn’t be in the business of regulating what consenting adults do with each other,” Horrigan said.

The last attempts to repeal New Hampshire’s law came after a Merrimack husband filed a complaint against his wife and her boss in 1987. When police refused to pursue adultery charges, Robert Stackelback brought the complaint himself against the pair. He later dropped the charges.

Conservative Lutheran Church "thinks it over"?

Conservative members of the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination voted Saturday to spend the next 12 months deciding whether to split from the church after it liberalized its stance on gay clergy.About 1,200 people meeting in suburban Indianapolis approved a constitution for the conservative umbrella group Lutheran CORE and a resolution directing its steering committee to report back in a year on whether to stay within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, form their own denomination or join another.

Some members urged the assembly to more quickly sever ties with the 4.7-million member ELCA after the vote last month to allow gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy, dropping a requirement that gay clergy remain celibate."Some congregations already have voted to leave ELCA," CORE’s chairman, the Rev. Paull Spring of State College, Pa., said at a news conference afterward. "Others have not voted or do not intend to leave ELCA."Spring and other CORE leaders said their decision a year from now could lead to a reconfiguration of Lutheranism in the United States and Canada.CORE’s meeting this year drew much more interest than the one in 2008, when about 300 people attended.

For this year’s meeting. CORE had to move to a Roman Catholic church that could hold about 1,000 people, and the group cut off registrations at 1,200.Participants said they believe the ELCA has reinterpreted Scripture to portray homosexuality more favorably.

"It’s totally against what’s in the Bible," said Jo Pruett, who said attendance at her ELCA congregation in Rockdale, Texas, has fallen off in recent years because of "waffling" by the denomination. "We’re interpreting the Bible to suit society today."The 71-year-old Spring, a pastor for 44 years, received a standing ovation Friday night when he said the ELCA "has fallen into heresy."

On Saturday, he said the ovation was bittersweet."That’s a very sad thing, to be a church that you belong to your entire life, that now really has fallen in heresy. This has been a great personal struggle," Spring said.Rob Myallis, 30, of Jonestown, Pa., who was ordained a year ago, said ELCA members must square a gospel of acceptance, giving a warm welcome to everyone no matter what their flaws, with a gospel of repentance, where believers confess their sins."God loves you enough to want you to change," Myallis said. "Is our own personal experience more important than Scripture?"

ELCA representatives at the meeting said the charged rhetoric reflected deep pain in the denomination."We are in solidarity with everyone in that room on the central doctrines of the Christian church," said Stephen Bouman, the ELCA’s director for outreach and mission. "We want to listen to them. We want to tend to their pain."ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson on Wednesday warned that withholding financial support to protest the gay clergy vote, as CORE leaders have called for, would be devastating to the church.

The loss of financial support weighed on the Rev. Teka Fogi, a native Ethiopian who leads Oromo Christian Fellowship in Kensington, Md. He fears a decrease in giving to ELCA will result in less support for African congregations such as his own. However, he said the denomination had rejected biblical authority when it came to homosexuality."The church has gone astray. We cannot condone this kind of apostasy," Fogi said.

Go check more of story @ http://www.lutherancore.org/ (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)

www.elca.org/