Great news this week for adulterers and indeed anyone who has been having sex without being married in the Los Angeles suburb of Rolling Hills.
They will no longer be subject to a jail term for gratifying the ”lust or passions” of a member of the opposite sex to whom they were not married.
A law stretching back to the 1950s made it an offence for any unmarried men or women in Rolling Hills to have sex in a ”bed, car, structure or public place”.
Violators were subject to three months in jail or a $250 fine.
Introduced at the time that the area was incorporated as a city, the law has remained on the books until it was spotted recently by a local resident, Richard Colyear, who was leafing through the municipal code in preparation for a city council candidates meeting.
City officials said this week that removing the law was a formality because the state had taken over all sex offence legislation in 1962.
But the Rolling Hills code will now be amended to reassure any nervous couple slipping into the back seat of their Mustang in this expensive suburb just to the west of Long Beach.
Puritanical attitudes to sex and hypocrisy were at their height in Los Angeles when the law was first introduced.
In 1950, the actress Ingrid Bergman was denounced on the floor of the Senate as ”Hollywood’s apostle of degradation” and a ”free-love cultist” for leaving her husband and becoming pregnant by the Italian film director Roberto Rosselini.
Bergman did not make another American movie for seven years.
Earlier, in the 1930s, the Hays Office had been founded to restrict the burgeoning sexual content in Hollywood films.
The 1941 film Kings Row, which helped a young actor by called Ronald Reagan to make his mark, was delayed by the office because of its depiction of ”illicit relations” and ”much loose sex everywhere”.
It was in the same spirit, it seems, that the guardians of morality in Rolling Hills passed their ordinance.
The law forbade anyone from arousing or appealing to the ”lust or passions” of anyone who was not their spouse.
But even if the ordinance was on the statute books, it would seem that police in Rolling Hills did not take their duty to uphold that particular law too seriously. Anyway, there is no record of anyone having done jail time for the offence.
It is possible that the police took the view of another former LA resident, Aldous Huxley, who concluded in Antic Hay that ”there are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism”. – Guardian Unlimited Â