REPIGLICAN / TEA-BAGGER cuccinelli, candidate of the party that wails and moans about government intrusion in the lives of Americans for governor of Virginia, wants to insert the Commonwealth government into our bedrooms and private lives even more than they already are. I'll bet it is all based on his personal guilt trip about doing these things at some point in his life, and because he is still suffering from it the rest of us have to too. Really ken, aren't there more pressing issues facing the state? And if your real concern is for children not being sexually exploited get the legislature in Richmond to pass a law specifically addressing that issue, not block it as you did in 2004. This from Mother Jones, followed by that classic SNL skit about Colonel Angus (video). AND I think it would be great if everyone would send the link to this video ((SNL Colonel Angus comes Home Skit (Full) - Saturday Night Live http://youtu.be/5xzAVEF-wuw )
to the cuccinelli campaign at info@cuccinelli.com , I did ;-)
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP's nominee for governor, filed an appeal on Tuesday asking the Supreme Court to revive the state's law banning oral and anal sex. In a statement, Cuccinelli claimed that the law, which the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled unconstitutional earlier this year,is "an important tool that prosecutors use to put child molesters in jail." Cuccinelli warned that the appeals court's decision to strike down the statute "threatens to undo convictions of child predators that were obtained under this law" since 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that laws criminalizing oral and anal sex—sometimes referred to as sodomy bans—are unconstitutional.
Cuccinelli wants the court to reconsider a March 2013 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit striking down the state's "crimes against nature" statute. The 4th Circuit ruled that the law did not pass muster in light of the Supreme Court's 2003Lawrence v. Texas decision, which struck down the latter state's anti-sodomy law as an unconstitutional criminalization of Americans' sexual conduct. The Virginia law, however, remained on the books.
The 4th Circuit ruled in favor of William Scott McDonald, who was convicted in 2005 at age 47 under the Virginia statute for soliciting a 17-year-old girl to commit sodomy. That law broadly makes oral and anal sex a Class 6 felony. While such laws
historically targeted gay men, they have also been used against heterosexual activity.
The three-judge panel ruled that an unconstitutional law could not be used to convict McDonald. It added that the Virginia Legislature could pass another law to criminalize sexual conduct specifically between a minor and an adult. The Lawrence ruling applied only to consensual adult conduct.
Virginia has a
notably low age of consent, which means, in effect, that vaginal sex between a 47-year-old and a 17-year-old is legal, but oral and anal sex between the same two people is not. Cuccinelli claims he will only use the sodomy law to bring cases involving minors or sexual assault, and argues that Virginians need not worry about him prosecuting "consenting adults," because the part of the law that would enable him to do so was defanged by the Supreme Court's
Lawrence decision. But in 2004, when a bipartisan group of state Senators was trying to fix the sodomy law so that it would only apply to cases involving minors and non-consensual sex, Cuccinelli, then a state Senator,
blocked the effort. And in 2009, as my colleague
Andy Kroll has noted, Cuccinelli made clear that he objected to oral and anal sex (at least between gay people) on principle, telling the
Virginian-Pilot, "My view is that homosexual acts—not homosexuality, but homosexual acts—are wrong. They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law-based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that...They don't comport with natural law."
As Mother Jones noted, some 90 percent of Americans would be felons if the Virginia law were to be applied nationally. Cuccinelli has remained mute as to whether he's one of them.
Thomas Stackpole is an editorial fellow in Mother Jones' Washington, DC, bureau. He has also written for
The New Republic and
MSN News. Email him tips at tstackpole [at] motherjones [dot] com. You can follow him
@tom_stackpole.
