Actually, I think employers either want you or they don’t. If they want you, they won’t fire you. (They might just ask you to put the triad picture in a drawer so as not to cause talk.) If they don’t want you, and are waiting for an excuse, you’re already toast and should be looking for another job now.

In the end (unless you’ve been real bad with your finances), I say you’re better off out from under any organization that would ax you for being poly.

“If you put yourself beneath an asshole, you will be shit on. Do not be surprised. This is the normal function of assholes.”

–Alan

First, yes, an ‘at will’ employee may be fired, or conversely may quit, at any time, and may be fired for good cause or for no cause, but not for ‘bad cause.’ Don’t get excited that your notion of ‘bad cause’ is the same as everyone else’s. Bad cause means the list of protected classes such as age, sex, religion, creed, national origin or disability since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA).

If you are a contractual employee, then you have to follow the terms of the contract, which may say pretty much anything from moral turpitude to ‘employee may not wear turtleneck sweaters on the 3rd Thursday of the month.’

The second issue is about the illegality of adultery. Yes, the laws are on the books, but that is not the ultimate answer of what is ‘legal’. There is some confusion now as to if there is or isn’t a constitutional protection against prosecution for private sexual acts. The case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (for an interesting discussion on that case, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas ) basically gave constitutional protection for homosexual sex acts because it was done in the privacy of the bedroom. By extension, adulterous acts should likewise be covered. But really don’t worry, nobody gets prosecuted unless you are in the military.

http://www.rotc.usaac.army.mil/PA/Security/ADJUDICATIVE%20GUIDELINES.doc
http://www.fas.org/sgp/isoo/guidelines.html

While not a map of state laws, a search for the three words [ adultery law state ] turned up http://christianparty.net/adulterylaws.htm which has a lot of interesting information….. But I notice that Michigan is absent.

searching for [ adultery law michigan ] turns up two excerpts of note:

First, http://www.sherlockpi.com/infidelity-cases/michigan-adultery-law.php — a law that has been on the books since 1931, making adultery a felony.

Second, a court ruling from this January ( http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=59535 ) held that the way a recent sex-crime law was written (I don’t have a link for it), anyone convicted of adultery would be guilty of a 1st-degree sex crime, and at a minimum have to register as a sex-offender, and at a maximum receive a sentence of life in prison.

They don’t prosecute very often, but it has been used to fire a state employee who was living with her boyfriend and has been used to deny compensation in domestic violence cases.