Adultery could mean life in prison, Michigan court finds

The Founding Fathers agreed: the best way to keep religion and government strong was to insure that they ran on separate, parallel tracks.

Now, in Michigan, the Republican legislature has forced those tracks to converge and the result is a freaking train wreck:

Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

"Technically," he added, "any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I," the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan's criminal code.