Once the Supreme Court decides a case, we are stuck with the laws involved, whether we like the law or not, unless you are Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Last month, three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit deemed a Virginia anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The provision, part of the state’s “Crimes Against Nature” law, has been moot since the 2003 US Supreme Court decision overruled state laws barring consensual gay sex, but Virginia has kept the prohibition on the books.
Now Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is asking the full 4th Circuit to reconsider the case. Cuccinelli wants the court to revive the prohibition on consensual anal and oral sex, for both gay and straight people. (The case at hand involves consensual, heterosexual oral sex, but, as the New York Times explained in 2011, it’s “icky”: The sex was between a 47-year-old man and two teenagers above Virginia’s age of consent.)*
Why? Why? Why? Cuccinelli needs to just give it up. What adults do in their own homes–in their own bedrooms is really no one’s business, especially the government’s business. The Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas pretty much decided this one in 2003. In striking down the Texas law, the “anti-sodomy” laws of many other states were invalidated. Virginia is one of those states.
