Independent Perspective News

Supported by this argument, the tribunal refused to grant the Swingers Association legal status. According to the sentence, this activity contradicts public usefulness because it tends to infidelity.

The council considers that the swinger activity -which basically consists on the exchange of couple members- is immoral and violates the fidelity that the parts of a marriage owe each other. With this argument, the Civil Court of the city of Buenos Aires rejected the request made by the Argentine Association of Swingers to be legally recognized.

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The first rejection was made by the General Inspection of Justice (IGJ), the organism of the National Ministry of Justice in charge of enabling commercial societies, foundations or, as in this case, non-profit associations to work. On June 28, last year, the IGJ responded the swingers that the statute they had presented did not verify that their organization tended to the "public welfare".

That is precisely the requirement that the Civil Code demands to grant any association legal status. The IGJ stated: "la question is not whether adult, responsible individuals should or should not have the possibility to choose freely their sex life, or even to exchange couples, but whether such aims justify that the State authorizes a private organization" of this sort.

The Association states in its statute that one of its main goals is "the promotion of the swinger lifestyle, which is an alternative offer regarding sex and culture in the marriage and couple structure". The IGJ was final: with the signature of its head, Guillermo Ragazzi, it determined that none of that adapts to the "usefulness objective" that the law establishes for the State to formally recognize any organization

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The sentence, made public yesterday, was signed by judges Jorge Escutti Pizarro, Hugo Molteni and Ana María Luaces. They started by quoting Augusto Belluscio -Minister of the Supreme Court and an expert on Family Law- and stressing that, much as a husband may allow his wife to have sex with another man, even in his presence, this is still definitely infidelity.

"The vow of fidelity contained in the article 198 of the Civil Code presupposes the exclusivity of the conjugal debit (...). With marriage, each of the parts renounces their sexual freedom, in the sense that they lose the right to have sex with any person other than the other part of the contract", reads the sentence.

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Until 1995, adultery was considered a crime: a husband who "had a mistress within or outside his conjugal home" and a wife who merely had sexual relations with someone other than her husband were punished with between a month's and a year's prison time. In the Civil Law circle, adultery constitutes a motive for divorce.

The sentence against the swingers also quotes articles from the Civil Code that establish when a juridical act -such as a contract of sale, a work contract or the organization of a non-profit association itself- is licit: all that opposes "morality and virtue" is not. And according to the court, this is the case of the aims pursued by the Argentine Association of Swingers.