Deborah Hobbs, age 40.
Posted on 07/23/2006 4:57:08 AM PDT by ShadowDancer
State Can't Ban Living Together, Judge Rules
POSTED: 1:51 pm EDT July 20, 2006
RALEIGH, N.C. -- A judge says North Carolina's 201-year-old law barring unmarried couples from living together is unconstitutional.
The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of former Pender County sheriff's dispatcher Deborah Hobbs.
Hobbs lived with her boyfriend and quit her job in 2004 after Sheriff Carson Smith demanded she marry her boyfriend or move out if she wanted to work for him.
State Superior Court Judge Benjamin Alford issued the ruling Wednesday, citing a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case which struck down a Texas sodomy law.
Jennifer Rudinger of the ACLU of North Carolina said that decision stands for the idea that the government has no business regulating relationships between two consenting adults in the privacy of their own home.
A spokeswoman for State Attorney General Roy Cooper said lawyers were reviewing the decision and there's been no decision yet on whether to file an appeal.
Out of the boardroom, and into the bedroom. Gotta love it.
201 years!!!!
This law went unnoticed or challenged for 201 years!!!!
What kind of a people would have created a law like that?
Those people 201 years ago knew absolutly nothing about law and the Constitution.
I didn't realize that all of the the framers of the Constitution were all dead 14 years after the signing of said document.
Surely had they been alive at the time of this law, they would have not allowed it to exist.
Or if they were alive, they were the most ignorant represenatives the people have ever known.
Where's that in the ten commandments?
But the bottom line, is you can still be forgiven - as we are all sinners - and continue to sin.
So what's you answer to slavery Mr. needs some sleep?
Here's your first clue ...
North Carolina's (1805) 201 year law was predated by the 1798 Calder v. Bull Supreme Court ruling that established that the USSC has jurisdiction to rule state laws unconstitutional.
In fact, nobody knew anything for over 200 years. It took the ACLU and other radical liberals to use a judge to revise the Constitution to agree with the judicial activists of the last 50 years of illegal Constitutional Revision.
Free Republic humanists love the ACLU rulings that ignore 200 years of legal history and reduce our Constitutional Republic to an Oligarchy to achieve liberal utopian goals.
It's not only Islamists that need to be dragged into the 21st century.
Deborah Hobbs, age 40.
Well, there is another venerable tradition, traceable to Jefferson and probably beyond: the government should learn to say "none of my business!", and say it loudly and often.
Indeed.
The law was 201 years old. It was unconstitutional the whole time?
By the way, Jefferson and the venerable founders had nothing to do with or say about state law. For instance, without violating the Constitution, states were collecting taxes on behalf of churches well into the 19th century.
Bad law in your opinion or some black robe is not necessarily unconstitutional.
Maybe it wasn't enforced during this time. A lot of laws, including Georgia's former sodomy law, were only observed in the breech.
Yeah, all those "filthy" young adult roommates and college students who live together fulfilling libertine fantasies. Never mind the economic equation of it, that saving money on bills, or that single black women with kids pooling their resources together because their man has left them, is in prison, or shot dead -- people should just automatically marry at the age of 18 and buy that dream home and live happily ever after.
You holier-than-thou, my-God-is-better-than-your-God, you're-going-to-Hell types are slightly less annoying than liberal zealots who want to regulate what we smoke and eat.
So let God be the judge of them then, not you or the state.
Do you really want the government investigating, and punishing, the distinction?
I don't mind it being legal. What I want is for it to be legal for a landlord to refuse to rent to unmarried couples.
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