Viva la Differenza

The sexual double standard is not only a way of life in Italy, it is written into the statute books. Under the Penal Code, a wife is subject to a year's imprisonment for adultery if she so much as kisses a man other than her spouse; a wandering husband, on the other hand, is free to keep a mistress if he does so discreetly--which, in Italian legal parlance, means not under the same roof as his wife. Last week, to the dismay of militant Italian feminists, 15 judges in Italy's highest court ruled for the double standard.

Deciding against two wives accused of adultery who had sought to have Article 559 of the Penal Code declared unconstitutional, the judges ruled that the law, enacted during Mussolini's Fascist regime, was valid, even though it stood in clear contradiction to the 1947 constitution. Article 3 of the constitution states that "all citizens have equal social rank and are equal before the law without distinction of sex." True enough, reasoned the venerable judges, but this did not mean that the framers of the law "were obligated to provide equal discipline for all." Husbands must be protected against a wife's infidelity, argued the judges (all in their sixties and seventies), so that an erring mate does not pass off an illegitimate child on her husband as his own.

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