Posted on 07/20/2006 10:13:56 AM PDT by SmithL
Raleigh, N.C. -- A state judge has ruled that North Carolina's 201-year-old law barring unmarried couples from living together is unconstitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued last year to overturn the rarely enforced law 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 in 2004.
State Superior Court Judge Benjamin Alford issued the ruling late Wednesday, saying the law violated Hobbs' constitutional right to liberty. He cited the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case titled Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down a Texas sodomy law.
"The Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas stands for the proposition that the government has no business regulating relationships between two consenting adults in the privacy of their own home," Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina, said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The same socialistic planet you are kiddo. No matter which political faction wants 'majority rule' to enforce 'local standards of decency', its still the same old democratic BS.
- You're making my argument. -- Shortly after Johnson's 'great society' we were subjected to the Nixonian version. - The war on drugs, guns, & liberty started, and hasn't stopped yet.
I agree with you that we've been on a downward slide since the sixties as far as liberty is concerned, but that's largely because of:
A) The loss of local autonomy and self-government to unelected judges.
Hype. -- The judges are reacting to unconstitutional "majority rule" socialistic laws.
B) The sexual revolution, which defined freedom to an entire generation as sexual libertinism.
Get it through your head, -- neither you nor any level of gov't have ever had any delegated constitutional power to decree what is "libertinism".
C) The rise of socialism, which benefitted enormously from A and B above.
Backwards; -- the rise of socialism has lead to prohibition-ism.
The family and traditional morality are the greatest barriers to government expansion in Western societies.
Unless the traditional family in the USA teaches constitutional values, there is no barrier. -- Teaching 'states rights' destroys the Republic.
Once those institutions are trashed, people inevitably turn to government to carry out the functions daddies and mommies previously carried out. Once sexual liberty becomes pre-eminent, people lose all perspective and willingly sacrifice property, speech, gun, and other rights in order to keep their vices subsidized.
Good grief. Is it all for 'the children'?
With children increasingly unvalued, people lose faith in the future.
Yep, Hillary wrote a book about it.
That's why people no longer care what America will look like 50 years from now, and why almost half the population really doesn't care if we lose to Islam.
Yep, 'we need more vice laws to win the war on terror', hype.
Europe is even further down this road than we are, and it's simply taken as a given there that their lands are going to be lost to another people and another civilization.
Get a grip kiddo. We are not going to lose this war to a bunch of religious zealots by striking down laws "Banning Cohabitation".
Well, that's your opinion. Years from now, if the gay marriage issue can be separated out from all the other causal and correlative factors affecting the direction of traditional marriages, divorces, and children, perhaps it can be substantiated that harm is done.
It's teens and younger people who are likely to be suffer the effects.
Well, they're certainly more prone to follow the trends, but again I think the thesis that they would choose not to marry or not to have children because of gay marriages seems to me quite a stretch. Massachusetts would be the key to look at. While their marriage rates were quite low in the Country, their divorce rate was the lowest in the Nation in 2002. For the most liberal state in the Nation, that's not a trivial statistic.
No, but the sanctioning of gay "marriage" means that creating and nurturing children is no longer of any special relevance to marriage.
I guess that's the link I'm drawing a complete blank on. Here in this country, many people marry with only a passing intention to have a family. Most make that decision well into the marriage. They marry because they love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives with each other. Sex is no less important and enjoyable to a heterosexual couple than to a homosexual couple.
The only difference between being married and not married is that the former requires a few more obligations, and who needs that in a "me first" society? That's the attitude conveyed to kids by gay "marriage".
I think that's an attitude conveyed to kids by the fact that marriage rates are declining everywhere, including the US. There is little if any linkage of that to the upstart homosexual marriage crowd. Yes it's a serious issue, but if you are to lay the blame on a target that in reality may not have any relationship, aren't you doing an injustice to the efforts to curb the problem?
Sorry, but there's no "God-given" right to privacy. That's a "gift" from the Supreme Court in overturning state laws restricting abortion.
The everything-is-permitted-between-consenting-adults theory leads to some pretty disgusting and degrading results. No civilization anywhere has survived under such a decadent philosophy.
Really?? Do tell us where.
Bingo!
I'll stick with the conservative approach, that of the protection of rights and the encouragement of self-responsibility. The two are not mutually exclusive concepts.
These evil laws (bringing "state control" into our very bedrooms!) the godless sophisticates here hate so much were in fact conceived as a way of protecting the real rights (as opposed to the genital urges) of the most vulnerable people in American society--children, of course, but also women--by insisting that others with power over them take responsibility for their welfare.
In fact, the "evil laws" were the result of religious moral zeal, not any particular desire to protect anyone. How does for example, a law prohibiting the sale of birth control designed to protect women and children? Throughout our history, most such laws were religiously based or were designed to hold down a particular group...or both.
Gay "marriage" is just one more blow to the family, on top of the many others the left has delivered over the past few decades. None of the blows by themselves are fatal, but they add up, and now with gay "marriage" we may be reaching the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Outta here for the night!
Most religious folks would like to think there's no right to privacy. But if not, then what is the purpose of the 4th Amendment? If no privacy exists, why even have rules for the infringement of privacy? Of course, the 3d and 9th confirm that a right to privacy exists. I cannot conceive of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without the most basic of rights...privacy.
The everything-is-permitted-between-consenting-adults theory leads to some pretty disgusting and degrading results. No civilization anywhere has survived under such a decadent philosophy.
We seem to be doing alright so far. Any examples?
My basic philossphy is "Keep your Bible out of my bedroom, and I'll keep my moral compass out of yours".
Western civilization has indeed survived, -- despite numerous episodes of prohibitionary fervor.
In the USA we've allowed our zealots to operate under the 'victorian compromise'.. -- IE, you can have your blue laws [and even occasionally enforce them - on the lower sorts] as long as you let the rest of us pursue life & liberty.
-- Dictating "cohabitation" is a bit much. Get a grip.
The "particular group" held down by such laws were the pathetic immoral libertines. Now freed of such oppressive restraints, they have formed the Libertarian Party to crusade for recreational drugs and pederasty. Like their counterparts in the ACLU, they fancy themselves the mainstays of contemporary society. Sorry I can't continue this fun discussion, but I have to go to bed.
I agree, you need rest.
Ah yes, the faulty libertine reading of the 9th Amendment.
I first must ask, are you familar with the phrase "Designatio unius est exclusio alterius, et expressum facit cessare tacitum."? That phrase goes to the heart of why the 9th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights.
James Madison made this clear when he stated:
It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration, and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the general government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the 4th resolution.
You see, the Libertine rewrite of the 9th Amendent was addressed and REJECTED by a Federal District Court in Alabama in 1980:
"In contrast to the first eight amendments, the Ninth Amendment does not specify any rights of the people, rather it serves as a savings clause to keep from lowering, degrading or rejecting any rights which are not specifically mentioned in the document itself. The Ninth Amendment does not raise those unmentioned rights to constitutional stature; it simply takes cognizance of their general existence. This is not to say that no unenumerated rights are constitutional in nature, for some of them may be found in the penumbras of the first eight amendments or in the liberty concept of the Fourteenth Amendment and, thus, rise to constitutional magnitude. It is only to say, however, that unenumerated rights do not rise to constitutional magnitude by reason of the Ninth Amendment. The foregoing interpretation of the Ninth Amendment is supported by the history of that provision, which reflects that the Ninth Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to ensure that the maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius would not be used at a later time to deny fundamental rights merely because they were not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. 1 Annals of Congress 438-40 (1789); II Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 626-27 & 651 (5th ed. 1891). Therefore, this court is of the opinion that there is nothing in the Ninth Amendment to be incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment as the Ninth Amendment is merely a rule of construction. The alternative interpretation, which is unacceptable to this court, would be to construe the Ninth Amendment as incorporating all fundamental rights into the Constitution, although they were never intended to be rights of constitutional magnitude." CHARLES v. BROWN, 495 F. Supp. 862 (N.D. Ala. 1980)
The 6th Circuit adopted this reasoning in Gibson v. Matthews, 926 F.2d 532 (6th Cir. 1991):
We agree with the district court that the ninth amendment does not confer substantive rights in addition to those conferred by other portions of our governing law. The ninth amendment "was added to the Bill of Rights to ensure that the maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius would not be used at a later time to deny fundamental rights merely because they were not specifically enumerated in the Constitution." Charles v. Brown, 495 F. Supp. 862, 863-64 (N.D. Ala. 1980). Accordingly, Gibson's ninth amendment claim holds no merit.
The reasoning of the Alabama Court is largely correct, allow me to explain why. If one trys to morph the 9th Amendment into a magic guarentee of a specific right that someone dreams up, then you run into a fundamental problem, Judges, not the people become the final arbiters on what is included in the 9th Amendment.
Let's say that an adult libertarian NAMBLA member claims a fundamental right under the 9th amendment to engage in sexual relations with an 8 year old boy. Where does the 9th Amendment say that this right doesn't exist? You might scoff at such an idea, and rightly so, but the NAMBLA member could use the 9th amendment, along with the aid of a sympathetic judge, to invent such a right out of thin air.
Used in that manner, the 9th Amendment would be nothing more than a Rorschach blot, one whose meaning would change depending on what creative "right" one could invent and attempt to invoke. What's dangerous about this is that it would be the unelected and largely unaccountable Judge, not the elected and accountable represenative, that would be making the final decision on the value of the claimed "right".
The fact of the matter is, [T]he Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even afarther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people." Troxel V Granville 530 US 57 (2000) (Scalia, J. Dissenting).
With all that said, I must add this caveat, please do not misinterpret what I am saying as to be "There are no unenumerated rights" as that reading would be patently incorrect.
It's just that the libertine rewrite of the 9th Amendment as actually granting substantive rights is patently flawed.
Society's moral standards are destroyed and decayed, the trademark of libertarianism.
Since over half of all marriages end in divorce, anyhow, I fail to see the harm here.
I am curious as to why libertines and perverts always repeate this LIE as a fact.
50% of marriages DO NOT end in divorce: www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/d/divorce.htm
Rights belong to the individual. Two individuals, each with separate rights to live where they want, as long as they can afford to, choose to live in the same house or apartment.
Who cares? Young people do it all the time. They're called roommates. Other people share housing, as well.It is not the place of the state to decide who shall live with whom. It's that simple.
I guess you are not even aware of what the NC states? It doesn't prohibit Cohabitation, rather it prohibits cohabitation for the purposes of fornication.
::: crickets :::
The very people who wrote the Constitution endorsed laws like NC's Cohabitation Statute. They endorsed and understood as Constitutional laws that prohibited Adultery, Fornication and other immoral acts. They understood that a people cannot be free if they are immoral. They drew upon people like Edmund Burke, who stated:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
200 years ago, we had slavery and Women had few if any rights. Religious tests though unconstitutional were the law in many states. The founding fathers gave us a Constitution that allowed for continued improvement of our Nation and society.
How nice, another libertine endorses the leftist Statist position of a "living constitution", one that places the power in the hands of the judiciary rather than the people.
When are libertines going to realize that the "living constitution" theory is more dangerous to them, as they don't just get to pick and choose when it's used. Sure, you like the "living constitution" theory when it endorses your various hedonistic perversions, yet when those same judges use the "living constitution" to say that you no longer have a right to own guns, you scream. Guess what, you can't have it both ways.
Either the Constitution means what it says, and means what it ment when the framers wrote it, or it means whatever the judicial oligarchy says it means. Which means they are your new rulers. Bow down and worship.
I hate to break it to you:
"[W]hen a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean." Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393, 621 (1857) (Curtis, J., dissenting).
Further, "The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted, it means now." The State of South Carolina v. United States 199 U.S. 437 (1905).
The pathetic libertine attempts to drag up slavery are so foolish they shouldn't be addressed. Slavery was fixed with the Amendment process. As George Washington Stated:
If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.
The 6 million couples living together outside of marriage hardly compare with the 2 1/2 to 3 million divorces annually, which directly and negatively impact over a million children annually. So the definition of swine may have to be greatly expanded.
Again with the divorce lie? Again, 50% of marriages DO NOT end in Divorce. But 90% of Cohabitating couples do not last more than 5 years together.
Perhaps they understand that true liberty means free choices, which at times will be the wrong choices. But that is the basis of freedom...the freedom to make a bad choice.
You don't have the freedom to destroy the moral fabric of society.
I am starting to believe that libertarians are mentally retarded. I really am.
They drag out leftist lie after lie, in a pathetic attempt to prop up Judicial Activism, provided that judicial activism helps their cause.
Guess what, just like the 50% divorce LIE, the "Rule of Thumb" is ALSO a lie:
http://www.canlaw.com/rights/thumbrul.htm
http://www.debunker.com/texts/ruleofthumb.html
The "rule of thumb" lie is one that was invented by a femi-nazi liar. Yet, libertarians latch on to these leftist lies like they are gospel?
The "Courthouse step" myth/hoax/urban legend is another one, this one seems to have been invented by the idiots on various "Dumb Law" sites, usually run by libertine high school drop outs, who make stuff up and say it exists. I challenged one of these "Dumb Law Sites" to cite me the Statute that permitted wife beating on the Courthouse steps. Guess what, they couldn't do it. You know why? Because the law doesn't exist.
Wife beating, contrary to femi-nazi myth, was prohibited in early America.
This decision was made because the judges ruled that whatever my living arrangements may be is nobody's business. They made these decisions so that they wouldn't have to round up hundreds of thousands of couples who are hard working, taxpaying, law abiding Americans and throw them in jail. If what i am doing is morally wrong, (Morals that have obviously been established by the almighty doer-of-no-wrong, you.) then it is between me and me God. Not me and my government or my neighbor or you.
Again, freedom is no license. Liberty is not the unbridled will, it's not the freedom to do as you like. When you actions degrade the morality of society, society has a right to self defense.
Two problems. 1st, North Carolina an at-will employment state, (You can be fired at any time, for any reason). The only time an employment contract in NC is NOT at-will is if the employeer makes a specific contract to limit his reasons for fireing the employee.
Secondly, Employees of the Sheriff in NC can be fired at any time for any reason because they serve at his pleasure. He doesn't need a reason to fire the woman. He basically can say, "Hey, you've done a good job for me, but it's time for you to go. Goodbye".
The woman doesn't have a case, she can't force the sheriff to let her work for him.
Coyuldn't have said it better myself.
Bravo.
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