"Fornication" is not a Biblical word. They didn't use that word in the Bible, no more than they used the 19th century invented word "homosexuality."
What I picked up in a dictionary once:
"The word 'fornication' had a lowly beginning suitable to what has long been the low moral status of the act to which it refers. The Latin word 'fornix,' from which 'fornicti,' the ancestor of fornication, is derived, meant 'a vault, an arch.' The term also referred to a vaulted cellar or similar place where prostitutes plied their trade. This sense of 'fornix' in Late Latin yielded the verb fornicr, ?to commit fornication,? from which is derived fornicti, ?whoredom, fornication.? Our word is first recorded in Middle English about 1303."
So it appears that "fornicating" in the Biblical times could have referred to prostitution, just as "homosexuality" likely referred pagan temple prostitution. It is interesting how that word "prostitution" always end up popping up...
But I get what you're getting at. What has always amused me is how divorce is condemned so many times in the Gospels, and, yet, where are all these "good Christians" trying to criminalize divorce? Of course, my favorite is the mistranslation of "porneia" ("blood mixing"; incest) for "adultery" in Matthew, giving a supposed "exception clause" allowing divorce. Well, Henry VIII needed some excuse in the 1500s, now didn't he?
Melon