ANKARA (AFP) - Facing a popular outcry at home and stern warnings from Europe, the Turkish government discreetly stepped back from a plan to introduce a motion into a crucial penal reform bill to make adultery a crime punishable by prison.
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The ironic thing about the proposed inclusion of an adultery clause into this penal reform bill is that the bill is intended as a long-overdue corrective to previous Turkish criminal law which was adopted in 1926 from fascist Italy. Wilhelm Reich theorized in 1936 that without the suppression of sexuality and the imposition of anti-sexual morality, you could not have an authoritarian government, because people would be free from shame, and would trust their own sense of right and wrong.
And that’s it in a nutshell. In a free society, a nation’s citizens are fully-fledged adults, capable of making their own decisions of what form their personal, private relationships will take and to accept the responsibility for their actions in regards to such relationships. An anti-adultery law would have the government acting inappropriately in a parental-type role.
Laws banning adultery have no place in this bill, which wouldn’t fit the progressive nature of the other clauses which comprise it:
Heavier penalties to the crimes of torture and child molestation; unless explicitly ordered by a judge or a prosecutor, it forbids degrading virginity tests, often conducted at will on women suspects; it bans child pornography, child abuse, the trade in human organs, environmental pollution and computer piracy.
It would seem that common sense will prevail yet again.
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