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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Laws That Should Not Be

Laws That Should Not Be

by John Cole|  May 9, 20056:21 pm| 9 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics

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You and your live-in are breaking the law in NC:

There are some 144,000 unmarried couples living together in North Carolina, and they are all breaking the law – a statute that has been on the books since 1805.
The law against cohabitation is rarely enforced. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to overturn it altogether, on behalf of a former sheriff’s dispatcher who says she had to quit her job because she wouldn’t marry her live-in boyfriend.

Deborah Hobbs, 40, says her boss, Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, near Wilmington, told her to get married, move out or find another job after he found out she and her boyfriend had been living together for three years. The couple did not want to get married, so Hobbs quit.

Her lawsuit, filed in March in state court, seeks to have the cohabitation law declared unconstitutional.

“Certainly the government has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes,” said Jennifer Rudinger, state executive director of the ACLU. “This law is 200 years old and a lot of people are very surprised that we even have it on the books…”

North Carolina is one of seven states that still have laws on the books prohibiting cohabitation of unmarried couples. The others are Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi and North Dakota. North Carolina appears to be the only state where the law is being challenged.

It will be interesting to see if ANYONE supports this law.

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Reader Interactions

9Comments

  1. 1.

    Ira M

    May 9, 2005 at 6:40 pm

    I noticed Florida on that list of states. Now I am writting Jeb Bush to see if he can break up those sinning seniors living together to share the Social Security money. I can just see the shocked face on Ben Greenberg and that hussy Becky Silverman has they are thrown out of the condo in Boca.

    Good riddens to this senior fornicating trash.

  2. 2.

    ppgaz

    May 9, 2005 at 6:57 pm

    Well, once you are a widower or your spouse has passed childbearing age, you are not among those for whom sex is an approved activity.

    When the Sex Police have finally established God’s Dominion in this Christian country, the evil practice of sex between people who are not doing it to have children will STOP.

    I wonder…. will that be before, or after, the Rapture?

    It’s all so complicated.

  3. 3.

    John Cole

    May 9, 2005 at 7:17 pm

    ppgaz- Since the law is over 200 years old, I don’t think the sex police were the issue.

  4. 4.

    ppgaz

    May 9, 2005 at 7:53 pm

    It depends on how old you think the idea of “sex police” is.

    “The Scarlet Letter” was written 150 years ago.

    Using other peoples’ sexual behavior as the basis for control and manipulation is not exactly a recent development. 200 years doesn’t even make a dent in the history of this nonsense.

    But, another way to look at this is, why aren’t those modern North Carolinians dumping the rusty old law? ARe they afraid of ghosts?

  5. 5.

    JG

    May 9, 2005 at 7:57 pm

    I’m waiting to see how O’Reilly, Hannity or Rush spin this into another way the ACLU is against people of faith.

  6. 6.

    Kimmitt

    May 10, 2005 at 2:32 am

    I was about to say: religious conservatives trying to run every aspect of people’s lives are hardly a brand-spanking-new phenomenon, even in the US.

  7. 7.

    Bart Barnes

    May 10, 2005 at 6:07 am

    There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about this incident. I doubt the Sheriff even considered the law prohibiting

  8. 8.

    ape

    May 10, 2005 at 7:42 am

    Will anyone support the law?

    Damn right they will!

    ‘State rights’; ‘activist judges’; ‘religious freedom’.. all the kooky mixed-up worthless GOP shit will come out. except a bit less forcefully. when it’s not a question of hating gays, theocrats tend to be a little less passionate (cf reactions to ‘sodomy’ vs reactions to ‘coveting anything that is your neighbours’)

    ‘cohabiting’, however, unlike ‘coveting’, does contain a hook for sexual puerility so the theocrats will be right on to it.

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Trackbacks

  1. Signifying Nothing says:
    May 10, 2005 at 12:16 am

    Shack up and go to jail

    John “Don’t Call Me Juan” Cole notes that the ACLU is challenging a 1805 North Carolina statute forbidding cohabitation by unmarried couples in court. For those considering living in sin elsewhere, the Tar Heel State is not alone in its…

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