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 ...
Real conservatives (i.e., those who would preserve our social fabric) are a distinct minority, even here.
The social fabric is subject to change. Those who seek to preserve what may no longer be practical are doomed to failure.
Oh, yeah, married parents who actually raise their own children are so '50s.
Actually, it doesn't have the right; it has the power. There is a huge difference. But yes, the state can set certain standards, as long as they do not violate my rights. When they do, the state must explain why such violation is in its interest in doing so. When it can't, as in this case, it looses that power. It's a nice balance. The state's first duty is to protect the rights of its citizens.
Libertarians oppose a military draft and oppose immigration laws. The Founding Fathers had no problem with military conscription, and I doubt if they would have approved of the incremental invasion of America by Mexico.
And this is relative to the discussion, how?
The Founding Fathers did give us a Constitution which contains within itself a mechanism for improvement, but that same mechanism can be abused in the wrong hands.
Indeed it can. But as the last 150 years have shown, far more harm can come from those who decide that states have "rights", and that the rights of individuals are secondary to the "norms" and "standards" the elite decide on. That would also classify as wrong hands.
And of those 6 million people who live together and produce offspring, their partnerships are far more likely to frgament than those of people who are married.
That's a dubious conclusion, since 50% of all first marriages and 60% of all second marriages fail. Far fewer of those living together out of wedlock have children than do married couples. That proves disastrous for the children.
Individuals who are given to instant gratification lack the dedication and self-discipline which is necessary to make a successful marriage work.
Indeed, but those living together have already made some commitment, so those are not the ones giving in to instant gratification.
And they produce the offspring which create the societal problems we see all about us as these children have no role models, no direction, no sense of family honor, no self-discipline or self respect, and become a burden rather than an asset to society.
Almost all of those children spring from one of two circumstances: the single mom who has numerous boyfriends and one night stands, and married couples who divorce. As I said, few of those who live together bring new children into the relationship. As for legislating against a lack of self discipline, I could think of a whole host of laws, most of which though would violate the rights of individuals. A free society pays a certain price for that freedom.
When people choose to live together outside marriage the ultimate consequences are children and society ulitmately bears the burden of dealing with the problems these children generate.
You are simply not talking about most of those 6 million couples living outside of marriage because they are normally quite self sufficient, normally do not have children, and are not a burden on society.
But you may want to look at the children from divorced parents and the single moms, including teen mothers, who have 3, 4 and more children all from different fathers, not one of whom would consider living with the mother, let alone marriage. This is far more about laws regulating morals than any serious attempt to prevent single parent children.
No, I am not, because a state has an interest in keeping him from violating the rights of others, which in this case is me. Rights are not unlimited, but the state must have a legitimate reason for limiting them. In this case, it's easy, just as your free speech rights do not include bomb threats or crying fire in a crowded theater.
The "right to privacy" is abstract and difficult to define--which is why it wasn't included in the BoR.
A couple of points. First, look at the 4th Amendment. If a de facto right to privacy did not exist, why the 4th Amendment? No right to privacy means the state has no obligation to respect privacy. So obviously there is a right to privacy, which can be infringed only upon a legitimate probable cause and legal warrant. And of course, the founding fathers knew that not all rights were enumerated, so the 9th Amendment was put in to ensure that those rights not specifically mentioned were nonetheless protected.
The notion that local govenment doesn't have the power to enforce local standards of decency as agreed upon by the majority of citizens is a liberal-tarian notion which had its coming-out party in the 1960s. I reject it completely.
Oh, I know you do, as do most who believe that their religious convictions belong in the laws of the land. Conservatives generally reject that. Local standards of decency the good citizens of many states agreed upon were rather draconian for the century preceeding the 1960s. For example, what possible good to society comes from miscegination laws? How about segregation laws? What about laws preventing birth control? We could develop quite a laundry list, but suffice is to say that any law which infringes on someone's rights, without a compelling reason, are unconstitutional.
This assertion, I gather, is based on your personal preference for how things ought to be. I lived for twenty years in the inner city, where marriage is essentially dead. Not ONE of the shack-up couples I encountered was (a) self-sufficient, (b) childless (unless one was on the way), or (c) not a burden on society. Across America, these are millions of people.
But I suppose you're thinking about the sleep-around-before-committing crowd--white, middle-class couples who postpone both marriage and child-bearing because they are focused on careers and/or "finding themselves." Sadly, pregnancy has a way of intruding into such relationships (it being natural and all), and when abortion does not result, illegitimacy and all its attendant ills quite often follow. Not at all surprising that the same folks who tell pollsters they see nothing wrong with shacking up also see no problem in bringing a fatherless baby into their Brave New World.
But that doesn't make the problems go away. It just spreads around the squalor that is the everyday norm in the ghetto today. And every one of us has to pay the price.
Oh, yeah, married parents who actually raise their own children are so '50s.
I didn't say that or intend to say that -- but note, in the last 120 years we've gone from multi-generational extended families in rural communities to the nuclear family of the suburbs and exurbs, to single parent families and blended families and back to multi-generational families.
Likewise, we've gone from extended families within a single community where it was unusual for someone to travel 500 miles from home during their lifetime (except in cases of military service) to families scattering thousands of miles apart in an age where it is not unusual to live in four or five different communities over a lifetime.
Some of this change was due to technology, some to economics, and some to educational levels. But the changes took place.
Families did not start in the 1950s -- in fact, the nuclear family with a single wage earner is/was an anomaly in human history.
You remind me of my cousin and her ex-husband. We have a stodgy Old Maid aunt who used to go on and on about couples living together. I don't think she was ever aware that my cousin lived with her (now ex-)husband for several years before they married. I think she thought I would be the one to do such. Anywho, I guess those years of deciding whether they were compatible for life did not pan out because he found a younger version after 15 or so years of marriage. I think he might want children or some such at this point in life rather than the freedom he cherished at 20. So, my cousin is childless and husbandless at 39. And brokenhearted. But at least they had a try-out to make sure they would be compatible.
Life has no guarantees any old way you slice it. People change. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not.
If God truly made us, then God's Word is just providing information about our own best interests, the purposes for which we were made. Those who reject that Word - generally with the contempt shown by our libertarian brothers on this thread - also reject valuable information about how they themselves could most happily live. They have that choice, of course, but the rest of us are then forced to pay the bills for their so-called "freedom."
Just one example: In those places in America where libertine values hold sway over male-female relationships, the public schools are so chaotic and dangerous that decent people will not send their children to them. But they pay and pay and pay for them nonetheless. In fact, they pay more for them than parents pay for decent schools in more conservative parts of the country. And that's just one small example.
Ever read Myron Magnet's book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. President Bush has said that it is his favorite book after the Bible. Every real conservative should be familiar with its thesis.
Well, since the statistics show that there are around 6 million couples living outside of marriage, they must all be the inner city type you are referring to. In fact, they are not. The inner city ones are mainly made up of fatherless homes. In 1998, 27% of family households were single parent. 84% of children in single parent households are with mothers. There are over 4 million single mothers who have never married. Few of those involved a long term live in father. 65% of unmarried couples involve both partners working.
So the problem is not the unmarried couples. Far from it, the real problem is the high divorce rate, and the unmarried teen and adult mothers with no father present.
Sadly, pregnancy has a way of intruding into such relationships (it being natural and all), and when abortion does not result, illegitimacy and all its attendant ills quite often follow.
Yet married couples result in a far greater percentage of one parent households because of divorce.
But that doesn't make the problems go away. It just spreads around the squalor that is the everyday norm in the ghetto today. And every one of us has to pay the price.
Agreed, the problems are staggering. They are just not caused by issue raised here.
I think we need to look at this a little more closely. Consider what is being taken here: we have a sheriff's deputy, thus someone whose very presence in a situation reflects the state's moral authority to arbitrate in dispute, who wilfully refuses to marry but would rather live like a child with a boy she then has pleasures with.
Clearly, this woman is intentionally immature and selfish, thinking maily of her own pleasure no matter the cost or disgrace. That's casting disrepute on the state (which hardly needs help in generating disrepubility [sic, likely]). It should be a matter of employment policy whether she can keep her job when she openly defies a policy she apparently knew about when she hired on. That's insubordination.
Need I go on?
Of course, divorce is a major problem for kids, but in the only American community in which cohabitation is the ordinary household pattern, the children are even worse off than children of divorce. Most of those households featuring "adult mothers with no father present" actually do include a cohabiting male, generally a series of them. But these cohabiting males do not take the place of fathers, as the often violent testimony of the un-fathered children makes very clear.
I've noticed that it's standard practice for proponents of gay marriage to claim that the "real threat" to the two-parent household is divorce. There is much truth to this. No-fault divorce was a key component of the sexual revolution, and it very badly weakened families ties.
But that doesn't mean nothing else will weaken such ties further. In fact, we already know from the European experience that social sanction for gay marriage weakens marriage generally and leads to widespread cohabitation among heterosexuals, with all the attendant ills for the children of such unions (who are increasingly raised by the state).
The same is true of social sanction for cohabitation. When shacking up becomes just as accepted an arrangement as marriage, marriage will be further weakened, illegitimacy will increase even more, as always, the losers will be the kids.
Interesting point. Lots of case law in the area of how far a public employer can set standards of conduct. Clearly, most governmental offices have standards which permit discipline up to termination if an employee acts in such a way as to bring discredit on the office. Generally it has to link directly to the job and employee. 50 years ago, living outside of marriage, or pregnancy outside of marriage might qualify. I doubt if many people today would give it a second thought.
Then there's the issue of whether the "standard" is necessary for the successful execution of duties. Pretty doubtful that a moral issue like that has any bearing on her job. For example, you couldn't fire someone for getting pregnant, married or not.
Finally, there might be an out for the sheriff, if she violated a contractual agreement, but again, a judge might find it was not material to her execution of duties, and likely would be unenforceable.
Wow, a slippery-slope & red herring argument rolled into one. I'm impressed.
"Radical" Libertarians?? As opposed to big-government conservative crusaders saving us from ourselves? Prior to your post I haven't seen any of these stereotypical Libertarian posts.
Let's be honest here - What is the state going to do, arrest all these couples living together? What about all the college roommates living together. NC is a big university state. The law is flat-out ridiculous. The state has no business dictating who should live together.
Red herring? Nope, it's right on target. The issue is whether or not widespread cohabitation leads to problems about which society as a whole must be concerned. It does. The problems in question are illegitimate children whom society must raise and/or incarcerate at public expense.
Good points! A society with a libertarian attitude toward sex won't have a libertarian attitude on much else. Northern Europe is perhaps the best example of this, with rampant cohabitation, illegitimacy, pornography, plus easy abortion and state sanctioned homosexual unions. Yet all those countries are socialist, have confiscatory taxes, massive welfare states and bureacracies. They have speech codes and monitored churches and gun control. We see the same thing building in Spain, where the socialists have legalized gay "marriage" and made abortion easier. In Venezuela, Chavez the Thug has declared Caracas a homophobia-free zone. Canada? Same thing.
Within the U.S., the homosexual friendly areas are all high tax, socialist, gun grabber, speech code zones.
It just goes with the territory. In addition, these areas become indifferent to their own national survival. Pacifist and anti-military sentiment abounds.
True statesmen from Madison to de Tocqueville understood that a free people must be a moral people, or they won't remain free for long.
Root cause of this is Great Society liberal programs. Did the Moynihan Report mention the state of black families before they were destroyed in the 60s? Cohabitation of unmarried couples had nothing to do with it.
Illegitimate kids are the offspring of unmarried people who cohabit, however briefly. Then as now, the cohabiting was not all that brief but not long enough for rearing the resulting kids.
I recommended earlier that self-described conservative fans of shacking up should read Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, a book President Bush greatly admires. I recommend it again.
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