Sheriff's Dispatcher Challenges Cohabiitation Ban

Believe it or not, even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are seven states that still have anti-cohabitation laws on the books.

One of these states is North Carolina, which has had a law banning unmarried couples from living together since 1805. As in the other seven states, this law is rarely enforced.

Former Pender County Sheriff's Dispatcher, Deborah Hobbs, with the assistance of the ACLU, has filed suit to have the 200 year old 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.

Hobbs resigned from her job, after Sheriff Carson Smith told her she either had to marry her live-in lover, move out, or find another job. Sheriff Smith asserted that this was a moral issue as well as a legal one, saying that he avoids hiring unmarried people with live-in lovers.

Arnold Loewy, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the ACLU lawsuit is almost certain to succeed. If the high court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas protects consensual sex among adults, "it's hard to understand any serious argument that it would not include" the right to live together, he said.

Virginia has already responded to the Lawrence case by striking down a law that banned sex between unmarried people, though, oddly enough, the anti-cohabitation law remains. Apparently, you can fuck whomever you wish, you just can't do it at home!

There were approximately three dozen cohabitation-related charges filed in North Carolina between 1997 and 2004, according to state figures. At least one judge, U.S. Magistrate Carl Horn in Charlotte, regularly asks defendants whether their living arrangements violate the cohabitation ban. Horn routinely refuses to release violators unless they promise to comply.

Interestingly enough, the most sensible thing about this issue that I've heard so far came from a Baptist minister. Rev. Jack McKinney of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh said, "I think the state's got better things to do than try to dictate people's private lives to that degree."

Really.