The Culture Wars Part XXXIX

Here's another example of proponents of smaller government and more personal freedom doing their best to prove that the idea of people living their lives as they see fit without state permission drives them absolutely bonkers.

From the Washington Post:

There are about 144,000 unmarried couples living together in North Carolina, and they are all breaking the law -- a statute that has been on the books since 1805.

The law against cohabitation is rarely enforced. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to overturn it altogether, on behalf of a former sheriff's dispatcher who said she had to quit her job because she would not marry her live-in boyfriend.

Debora Hobbs, 40, said 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.

Her lawsuit, filed in March in state court, seeks to have the cohabitation law declared unconstitutional.

"Certainly the government has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes," said Jennifer Rudinger, state executive director of the ACLU. "This law is 200 years old, and a lot of people are very surprised that we even have it on the books."

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

[...]

North Carolina is one of seven states that have laws prohibiting cohabitation of unmarried couples. The others are Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi and North Dakota. North Carolina appears to be the only state where the law is being challenged.

[...]

"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.

But the Rev. Jack McKinney of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, which counts gay couples among its 900-person congregation, said, "I think the state's got better things to do than try to dictate people's private lives to that degree."

By the way, I know at least five couples -- gay and straight -- here in Florida who are violating the law. But I'm not telling...