North Carolina: Punishing Cohabitation

In North Carolina, an 1805 law prohibits unmarried couples from living together. It isn't enforced much, but it was the cause for a sheriff's dispatcher having to leave her job. She and the ACLU are now suing in the hopes of having the law overturned.

TBO reports:

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. ... The sheriff told the Star-News of Wilmington last year that Hobbs' employment was a moral issue as well as a legal question. He said that he tries to avoid hiring people who openly live together, but he doesn't send out deputies to enforce the law.

I think that it might be a "moral issue" for the people of Pender County to have a sheriff who spends time fighting crime rather than worrying about the sex lives of his employees. But maybe all the crime has been solved down there and people's sex lives is the only thing left to work on?

Arnold Loewy, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the ACLU lawsuit is almost certain to succeed. If the high court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas protects consensual sex among adults, "it's hard to understand any serious argument that it would not include" the right to live together, he said.

Unfortunately, some people in the South haven't yet gotten the memo that others' sex lives is none of their business and not something that they can use the government to regulate. They complain about "big government" being on their backs, but then turn around and send the sheriff after people who are cohabitating.

There were roughly three dozen cohabitation-related charges filed in North Carolina between 1997 and 2004, according to state figures. ... At least one judge, U.S. Magistrate Carl Horn in Charlotte, regularly asks defendants whether their living arrangements violate the cohabitation ban. Horn, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has refused to release violators unless they promise to comply.

"We think that it's good to have a law against cohabitation because the studies show that couples that cohabitate before they're married, that their marriages are more prone to break up, there's less stability in the marriage," said Bill Brooks, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Family Policy Council.

So, does Bill Brooks think that the government should ban other things that correlate with an increased chance of marriages ending? Because, you know, atheists are less likely to get divorced than evangelical Christians. Following Brooks' "logic," perhaps the government should encourage more atheists to marry and discourage marriages among people like Brooks.

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