Posted on 03/21/2023 7:44:06 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
...While Puritan courts were certainly known to execute for sexual transgressions, Mary and James appear to be the only documented case in the history of [what is now] the United States of an outright execution for adultery.**
The crime and the setting inevitably call to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and indeed he would likely have known about this case from Winthrop’s journals.
There are, however, even more compelling parallel cases — which, if they do not end on the scaffold, are at least as dramatic from the standpoint of posterity.....
It’s rather interesting to notice that in Latham and Britton’s case, even the judges who ultimately sentenced the lovers to die were overtly reluctant about doing so: the subtext of Winthrop’s narrative suggests to this reader that, had the pair not confessed, everyone would have been more than happy to use the “two witnesses” loophole to avoid noosing a concupiscent teenager stuck in a barren marriage. Whatever our caricature of them, Puritan elites too had some sense of proportionality about these things.
Even in Hawthorne, where the protagonist is punished only with public shaming, one of the crowd complains,...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
bkmk
Wouldn’t bother me if we executed adulterers.
Probably lose about 100 million people in the country.
Probably also really reduce the STD situation in the country too.
Wouldn’t bother me if we executed adulterers.
Heyyyy, i’ve know several adulterers that were truly nice people. Except to a spouse.
We have made it soooo easy to divorce today if you don’t want to be with someone anymore. Theres no real reason not to cheat, unless they are just being selfish and wanting the perks and status that come with marriage while cheating with Chad on the side for some hot taboo sextime.
If they can do this to the person they are supposed to love the most and take vows to be faithful to, I don’t consider them very nice people. I would consider any “niceness” expressed to anyone else, an act.
Brings to mind Heinlein’s observation that there really only two kinds of people; those who want to control others and those who want to be left alone.
consider any “niceness” expressed to anyone else, an act.
Likely correct. You can never really know what a couple’s relationship is like unless you are one of the two.
those who want to control others and those who want to be left alone.
Pretty tough for someone if opposites marry.
Never a good idea
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