What Does Your Word Mean?

A Korean actress has been given a suspended sentence of eight months for adultery It's one of the few non-Muslim countries that still have laws like this on the books.

The 40-year-old actress sought to have the adultery ban ruled an inconstitutional invasion of privacy, and in a petition to the Constitutional Court, her lawyers claimed the law had "degenerated into a means of revenge by the spouse, rather than a means of saving a marriage".

Okay, I'm not sure about prison, but there is something beyond mere revenge at work here. The spouse was injured because she broke her vows. He should have restitution, probably from both offending parties. It ought to be harsh on the perpetrators.

Marriage, freely entered into, is far more important than the latest political law that comes out of a legislature. But people seem to want the price of breaking personal vows to be nothing, while the price of breaking a political law that you don't even know anything about can be ridiculously high.

That doesn't make any sense, and as we are seeing, such a topsy-turvy situation inevitably leads to lunacy. The world financial situation flounders now for a similar reason; governments ignore individual contracts and try to dictate what they want across the spectrum. Nobody can establish trust, or feel particularly certain about the value of assets; everyone waits, and in some case bets on what the government will do or say next, but few can actually build a business in this atmosphere.

And families are much more important, more personal, than businesses.

I suppose this is where libertarians would call me conservative, but I think the voluntary nature of marriage means this is, at the very least, a contract broken, and as such this is far more crucial to society than say, whether or not you paid your income tax.