Adultry was always a morality law, it's just that most morality laws are derived from religion.
Morality laws, by their nature, require an iron fist to enforce. Because they have no rational consequences or proven tangential harms, we have to police the mind. Which is very difficult to do.
Thats not to say that immoral things should always be legal. Murder is immoral too.
But murder isn't just immoral, that's the difference. Its also a real thing that does real harm we can measure and see.
My point was that adultery is no longer legally enforced was not because of concerns about government overreach.
Whether it's morality or religion that changed people's mind about enforcement of Adultery is tangential
No, religion was just one of the ways it was enforced, and the harms were quite 'real':
> the adultery double-standard in many of these societies is that adultery law was primarily concerned with the secure parentage of children in a marriage and so cared quite a lot less about a married man having sex outside of marriage so long as it was not with another married or marriageable woman. Instead, adultery was the crime of illicit sex with a married woman, not a married person. Some societies also had laws against illicit sexual acts outside of marriage – in Roman law this was stuprum – which often carried lesser penalties.
because
> this question matters much more in a society where nearly all wealth comes in the form of scarce farmland that is inherited from one generation to another and overwhelmingly if not entirely owned by men – even in societies like Rome where women could hold and pass down property, most of the landed wealth passed down the male line. Social status in these societies is essentially predicated on land ownership, without that farm the social position of even the peasant functionally collapses and given the extremely low social mobility in these societies, it collapses with little if any chance to ever regain it. Consequently, as you might imagine, the men who dominate these patriarchal societies are extremely anxious that their holdings – their position in society, however meager, which grants them a more-or-less stable living – pass to their actual, biological descendants.
Monogamy, as a concept, is socially constructed. The consequences are by their nature, abstract and "fake". Meaning, not physical.
Cheating doesn't physically harm anyone because it can't.
The only reason those consequences existed is because they were bandaids. The source of problems was more socially constructed stuff - marriage and monogamy.
In order to have property disputes about monogamy you first need to invent monogamy.
Morality laws, by their nature, require an iron fist to enforce. Because they have no rational consequences or proven tangential harms, we have to police the mind. Which is very difficult to do.
Thats not to say that immoral things should always be legal. Murder is immoral too.
But murder isn't just immoral, that's the difference. Its also a real thing that does real harm we can measure and see.