Woman Leads Uphill Battle to Make Adultery a Crime

Statewide propositions have run the gamut from mountain lion hunting to affirmative action, but Laura Onate Palacios, a 52-year-old Montebello real estate agent, wants to legislate much closer to home.

Her proposal: Make infidelity illegal and punish adulterers.

Whether her idea ever makes it to the statewide ballot is an open question, but her motivation is clear: The unfaithful husband or wife must be held responsible for bringing anguish, pain and financial losses upon the spouse and family. The sexual partner, she said, would also be held liable to penalties.

“I have seen so much anguish and ordeals that began with infidelity that I asked myself, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?’ ” said Palacios during a lunch break at a Montebello realty office where she works.

Palacios refused to comment directly on whether she had been the victim of infidelity in marriage. She divorced her first husband and is now married to Elio Palacios, an aerospace quality control engineer who until recently didn’t know that his wife was the author of such a controversial measure. He supports her wholeheartedly.

She and a small group of volunteers began last week to circulate petitions gathering signatures to put the question on the state ballot.

The secretary of state’s office, which supervises state elections, said Palacios would have to collect more than 400,000 signatures from registered voters in five months to get it on the November 2000 ballot.

That for now seems like an impossible dream. Palacios has no financial backers in her corner, no prior political experience, no party or religious supporters. She does have numerous critics who dismiss her measure as absurd.

“She wants to legislate morality!” said an unidentified, Spanish-speaking male caller to KWKW-AM (1330) during a recent talk show. “She’s insane.”

Even if voters were to approve Palacios’ measure, said Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of constitutional law at USC, it would be struck down in the courts for being unconstitutional and violating privacy rights.

“I think there’s a widespread sentiment that adultery is immoral, but that it is not the appropriate focus of the law,” Chemerinsky said.

A summary of the proposed measure, prepared from Palacios’ text by the state attorney general’s office, lacks specifics on how it would be implemented. It defines infidelity as “voluntary sexual intercourse between one spouse and a third person without the other spouse’s knowledge and consent.”

A “spouse may recover damages from the unfaithful spouse and the third person for lost wages and expenses due to emotional distress and for lost financial support resulting from abandonment.”

The court “may order a public apology and jail time,” the proposal says without saying how or when.

The attorney general’s summary noted that the measure “could result in costs to the state and local governments to process additional court cases and for incarceration . . . of persons who are ordered to jail by the courts.”

Palacios, a fragile-looking, bespectacled woman who stands barely over 5 feet, arrived in the United States from a small town in Ecuador 27 years ago, where she had been a telegraph operator. Once here, she married her first husband. The marriage brought two sons and lasted 14 years.

Palacios is uneasy when asked how infidelity contributed to her 1984 divorce. “It’s something that happened long ago. It is no longer important,” said Palacios, who remarried in 1992.

Because she had been a homemaker during her first marriage, she was at a loss to make ends meet for her two sons and herself after the divorce, she said. She began attending English and real estate classes at night while sewing children’s clothes to sell at swap meets by day.

Her English improved and she decided to become a U.S. citizen. Palacios also acquired a real estate license, she says. Through troubled times, she managed to pay for her son’s college tuition.

Though she lacks resources and experience in signature collecting, Palacios hopes people who are struck by her issue will come forth and help her gather signatures, she says.

Even if she can’t get the necessary signatures to put her measure on the ballot, Palacios says that at least she will have brought needed attention to what she calls “the root of many evils: infidelity.”