History in the United States
How the country named, judged and eventually stopped punishing sex outside marriage.
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Fornication in Puritan New England: Crime, Court and Punishment
New England's Puritan colonies treated fornication as a crime under laws drawn largely from Scripture. In Plymouth Colony, records from 1633 to 1643 show 19 fornication convictions, punished by whipping, the stocks, fines or a bond for good behavior. In the 1660s, fornication convictions matched drunkenness convictions in number.
View the topic →Were Scarlet Letters Real? Shaming Punishments in Colonial America
Yes, in some cases. Plymouth Colony law allowed adulterers to be whipped and forced to wear the letters "AD" on their clothing. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) echoes this kind of penalty: Hester Prynne must wear an "A" after bearing a child outside her marriage in Puritan Boston.
View the topic →A History of Fornication Laws in the United States
There was no single date. Fornication laws came from colonial codes and survived statehood: North Carolina's cohabitation statute dates to 1805, Georgia's to an 1833 code and South Carolina's to 1880. Courts and legislatures dismantled them piecemeal. After Lawrence v. Texas (2003), legal scholars consider the remaining statutes unenforceable against consenting adults.
View the topic →Race and Fornication Laws: From Pace v. Alabama to McLaughlin v. Florida
In Pace v. Alabama (January 29, 1883), the Supreme Court upheld an Alabama law punishing interracial adultery or fornication with two to seven years in prison, far more than the ordinary offense. It reasoned both partners received the same penalty. McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) struck down an interracial cohabitation law and rejected Pace's view of equal protection.
View the topic →The Mann Act and Caminetti v. United States: Policing Unmarried Couples
In practice it could. In Caminetti v. United States (January 15, 1917), the Supreme Court held that the Mann Act's ban on interstate transport for an "immoral purpose" covered taking a mistress from Sacramento to Reno, even with no money involved. The current law, 18 U.S.C. § 2421, now refers to prostitution or criminal sexual activity instead.
View the topic →When an Idaho County Prosecuted Teenagers for Fornication
One well-documented case came in 1996, when the Gem County prosecutor in Idaho used a 1921 state fornication law against about half a dozen young people, mainly teenage parents on public assistance. The offense carried up to six months in jail and a $300 fine. Idaho repealed its fornication law in 2022.
View the topic →The Kinsey Reports and Premarital Sex in Postwar America
Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), drawn from thousands of interview histories, became bestsellers and reshaped public debate on sexuality, including sex outside marriage. Later federal survey data showed how common it is: 95% of Americans had premarital sex by age 44.
View the topic →Bowers v. Hardwick: The 1986 Ruling That Lawrence Overturned
In Bowers v. Hardwick (June 30, 1986), the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law 5-4, finding no constitutional right to the conduct at issue. Georgia's own Supreme Court later read a broader privacy right into the state constitution. In 2003 Lawrence v. Texas expressly overruled Bowers, weakening all laws against private consensual sex.
View the topic →Massachusetts and Fornication: From Bible Commonwealth to Repeal
Yes, for centuries. Early New England criminal law drew heavily on the Old Testament. In 1972 the Supreme Court noted in Eisenstadt v. Baird that fornication was still a Massachusetts misdemeanor, carrying a thirty-dollar fine or three months in jail. It was repealed in 2018, the same year as the state's adultery statute.
View the topic →Utah's 1973 Fornication Law and Its 2019 Repeal
Utah repealed Code § 76-7-104, its 1973 law making sex between unmarried people a class B misdemeanor, through Senate Bill 43 in 2019. The House passed it 41-32 and Governor Gary Herbert signed it in March 2019; the repeal took effect May 14, 2019. A separate earlier bill had already decriminalized adultery and sodomy between consenting adults.
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