In excellent news for all the quarantine adulterers and other people who are generally into sexual autonomy and personal privacy, it is now totally legal to cheat on your spouse in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s constitutional court decriminalized adultery on Friday, striking down a law that has been criticized as a discriminatory invasion of privacy that is ultimately ineffective at preserving the precious sanctity of marriage anyway.
“The adultery law offers limited help to maintaining marriage relationship,” said Lin Hui-Huang, secretary-general of the Justice Ministry, as he read out the judgment, as Reuters reported. “State power interfering in people’s marriages actually has a negative impact on marriage.”
The law previously held that those who had sex with a married person, or with a person outside marriage, could face up to a year in jail. While jailing for adultery was rare in Taiwan, according to Reuters, critics said the law disproportionately targeted women, leading to accusations of discrimination.
The decision makes Taiwan the latest place in Asia to decriminalize marital infidelity, following South Korea in 2015 and India in 2018. The move also marks Taiwan’s latest progressive decision in marital law, following last year’s landmark legalization of same-sex marriage.
While decriminalizing adultery may seem like something that would’ve happened a long time ago in the developed world, it turns out that marital infidelity is actually still considered a crime in various places. Some of those places are even in ye olde United States of America, almost as if we are still living in the dark ages, from which it seems we are increasingly unlikely to ever escape.
Anyway, congrats to all the now-legal adulterers of Taiwan. Go forth and cheat on thy spouse.
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