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 ...
You seem obsessed with sex.
Powerful argument you have there.
I have a difficult time understanding this convoluted "logic" emanating from our enlightened judges.
If you ever get inside a liberal judge's head, please tell how it works.
When people don't understand the issues involved, don't have the intellectual tools to critically examine the issues involved, and don't have the self-discipline to think beyond their own self-interest, we're in a societal freefall.
You're confusing causation with correlation. One could just as easily claim that other factors associated with ghettos (poor economic wealth, high crime, etc.) create unstable families. Money problems can destroy a marriage very easily.
I'm just glad the Constitution keeps me from having to meet your particular standards for relationships. You are no different from the chicago aldermen that want to force restaurants to serve healthy food for the "common good". Nanny statists all.
P.S. I do "cohabitate" with about 60 other people (of mixed genders and races, no less) in a cooperative living arrangement. As little as 60 to 70 years ago, such an arrangement would have been (and actually was) considered scandalous and morally dissolute by the majority. Thankfully, we have more respect for the freedom of free association today.
I suppose if you are a kool aid drinking bible thumper its not.
Obviously, you don't really care. If you did, however, you would do the teeniest bit of research and find out the answer for yourself. Here is just one example.
There are people on this thread actually DEFENDING it !!!
Fornication is a part of licentiousness, not liberty, and its pleasures are not those of true happiness. Further, you can't have a natural right to do a wrong.
In the most unlikely case that you read books, I would recommend to you (as I have to several others in this thread) Myron Magnet's thoughtful study, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which explains the destructive effect of casual male-female relationships among the urban poor. It is, as I have said, supposed to be George Bush's 2nd-favorite book.
Laws against so-called "blasphemy" clearly violate free speech. Laws requiring motorcycle helmets whether good or bad, violate no rights.
Nice to know SO and I are no longer living outside the law.
We are both past child bearing age, both divorced, my children are grown. Oddly enough his children prefer our home and are with us 80% of the time. We both made serious mistakes in our previous marriages and endured hellish divorces. Neither of us can face coming under the jurisdiction of the family court system again for ANY reason.
We've drawn up appropriate legal documents to handle our finances and our health and our heirs. I think we are being responsible citizens. In our cirumstances it seems unlikely that lack of a marriage certificate is going to shake the foundations of civilization.
I would rather live in freedom which neither of the examples you gave adequately respect.
Who my neighbor sleeps with is none of my business so long as both are of the age of consent. There is a virtue in minding one's own business.
Laws that equate to sins that prohibit acts which violate the rights of others, or otherwise directly harm others exist everywhere.
Murder is a sin, so should we legalize murder?
To the state, murder is a crime. Whether or not it's a sin is between the sinner and his church.
What I presented to you was a natural law argument in favor of the criminalization of fornication. I didn't appeal to divine revelation of any kind. My argument was purely "secular," or based on truths knowable to everyone.
The only people who believe fornication is against natural law believe it because of religious teachings. It is clearly a religious based sin.
Is your point that monogomy has not always been normative? It has. Polygamy and polyandry are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Marriage was the issue, not monogamy. Two people cohabiting are maintaining a monogamous relationship.
Right. They perversely divorce the tangential pleasurable aspect of the act from its fundamental procreative purpose in a analogous manner to binging and purging. It's a lie on top of the lie of cohabitation.
What you are doing is simply digging a deeper hole in an attempt to separate religion from secular life. Without the pleasurable aspect, few if any would engage. So it is anything but tangential to most. That's why almost all married and cohabiting couples use birth control and other forms of sexual pleasure.
"I love you baby, just not enough to marry you."
"I love you baby, but not enough to have children with you."
These choices are normally made by both parties.
The act says, "I love you, but not enough to have children with you. But I'm willing to use your body as a means of mutual masturbation."
And that is and should be their free choice. Laws against that too?
Why is it their business alone? They are habituating themselves to treating the opposite sex as a means to an end. The consequences to society of this mindset are all around us.
If there is no direct harm to anyone else, what they do in the privacy of their homes is no one's business. Changes in attitudes are the result of thousands of changes in the social fabric including technology, 2 partner working status, and a host of other changes in the world. It's dangerous to select one or two that for religious reasons are considered bad, and draw any conclusions about changing attitudes.
Why? The purpose of the State is to promote the common good. And fornication harms society.
After providing for a common defense, the primary purpose of any state should be the protection of the rights of its citizens. It is not the job of the state to control the morals of its citizens. It is the job of the state to adjust to those changes. It is the primary job of religion to look after the moral climate of its parishioners.
Where is the flaw in my reasoning?
First, it is simply conjecture. How many children come from broken homes of cohabitation? Millions come from broken homes of divorce. Though a two parent family is preferable to a one parent family, it's simply a fact of life in our society that single parent households exist. Your law would increase that number.
Have you just demonstrated that "the effect of living with this lie is to dissociate in the minds of those involved the natural connection between copulation and marriage"?
It simply does not exist in our society any more. There are many reasons for marriage, children being one of them. Even in the Catholic Church where birth control is forbidden, somewhere near 100 percent of Catholic married partners practice it.
Dogs try to hump people's legs because it feels good. When people engage in artificially induced sterile intercourse, they're behaving like the above mentioned dog.
Which in any free society they have the right to do.
More than bringing forth new human life? What more noble human act is there in life?
Won't disagree that it is a noble act. I am merely telling you that most people get married for a lot more reasons than that. And in any case, it is not in the state's domain to regulate that act in any way. It can promote procreation by certain laws such as maintaining marriage for heterosexuals. But to go any further is not the job of the state.
Then two men could get "married." Or three men. Or three men, two women and my dog.
Some states may eventually permit same sex marriages, but I doubt any will ever permit these other situations you speculate about. But marriage is in the 10th Amendment domain of the state.
When the matter is grave enough, it is. And this is grave matter.
Then submit it for a constitutional amendment. Like I said, the 6 million couples living together today outside of marriage cannot in my mind be influencing many, since marriages outnumber them by a significant amount.
Contrary to conventional wisdom that living together before marriage will screen out poor matches and therefore improve subsequent marital stability, there is considerable empirical evidence demonstrating that premarital cohabitation is associated with lowered marital stability.
The key word here is associated, not causal. So the real causes of the divorce may well have nothing to do with cohabitation.
In any case, you simply cannot stop all activities that could have negative consequences. Let's stop drinking, driving, gambling, sports, etc, since all of those activities bring risks those who do not engage in them don't experience.
So in principle, the guy who encourages him shouldn't be arrested as an accessory?
Not sure where you are going with this, but conspiracy is a crime in most jurisdictions.
I didn't say that. I said that an evil act may be criminalized if the harm to society of criminalizing the act is less than the harm caused to society of decriminalizing the act.
How do you measure the harm of violating the rights of individuals in order to provide a good example to others? That example can be greatly expanded, not just to cohabitation.
Since when does a lie constitute love?
When two people express love for each other but decide against marriage, I fail to see the lie. OTOH, since almost no one marries simply for your procreation theory, are they all living a lie? Should the state require that they create children?
"I love you baby, I just don't want to marry you. I am willing to use you as a means of masturbation for an indefinite period, however."
God gave us a free will. You want the state to take that free will away so that we only do what you perceive is the moral thing.
Love is a choice, specifically, willing the highest and greatest good for the other. What you describe as love is simple selfishness.
Not if both partners wish it.
That may be true. But shacking up is simply a string of one-nighters. So it's hard to argue that such a law would increase the overall incidences of fornication.
No, but it's a proven fact that it will lead to far more single parent households, which for some here would be far preferable to two happy people living together.
You evidently have not been following the debate on this one. I think some guys would rather marry their shack-up sweethearts than cover their thick skulls with a helmet when they get on their bikes: "It's my own damn life, who are you to tell me I can't risk it!"
Like the judge who ruled miscegenation unconstitutional?
So the 'right to privacy' isn't absolute--and the local government has the power to step in. Good. We're in agreement on everything except where the line is drawn.
No freedom or right is absolute. But since the 4th Amendment guarantees the right to privacy, and since a law should not violate other rights, that line does not contain religious and moral issues that do not harm others.
If that's what the Founding Fathers had intended, why didn't they just come right out and say it? Instead, they gave specific instances where privacy must be respected.
No they gave us the specific rules for the violation of privacy. That is quite different. That simply means that privacy may not be infringed except under certain circumstances. That leaves privacy as inviolate under all other circumstances.
Laws that do not reflect the Natural Law are, by definition, unjust. Your rights come from God. The less the laws of the land reflect those of Almighty God, the more we can expect injustice to flourish.
But the rights of individuals are always paramount. The laws which may or may not reflect God's laws still do not trump the rights of individuals. This is why the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, not any other document.
Thanks for putting your true PoV on the table. I happen to think that laws forcing charities which will not accept homosexual adoption to close down are draconian. So we haven't made any progress in my perspective.
Then, the good citizens should change the laws. Charities are not persons, and do not have any rights. I think it's a bad law, but it doesn't violate anyone's rights.
So are you saying that if a state or local government passes laws, approved of by the majority of their citizens, that you believe infringe on someone else's rights but do not directly conflict with anything in the actual US Constitution or Amendments, then you would call on the Federal Courts to come in and overturn them anyway, at gunpoint if necessary?
The Ninth Amendment clearly shows that the founding fathers determined that not all rights were specifically enumerated. But in answer to your question, I can't think of anything I would call on the federal courts for that is not already an enumerated right, especially with the 14th Amendment. You may have some examples.
So much for local self-government. So much for Constitutional strict-construction. I reckon that you'd feel a lot more comfortable under imperial rule, as long as you were happy that the Emperor was protecting your "rights" as you see them. How odd that liberal-tarianism has now come full circle to the point of supporting a judicial despotate.
Most people who consider their own moral codes superior to those of others decry any attempt to ensure the rights of all. Most of them are fundamentalist Christians, but Muslims do definitely fall into that category. I am quite happy with our Republic and I am very happy with federalism. As long as a state protects the rights of all of its citizens, it is free to conduct business as long as it remembers Article IV, and the amendments. A state simply needs to recognize that when legislating against a person or group activity, that it has a compelling interest in doing so.
That's for churches to decide, not the state. I think Benjamin Franklin considered it a part of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Didn't seem to harm him too much. And it may be wrong to say bad things about the Catholic Church, but in our society you have a God-given right to do so.
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