On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal against a lower court ruling that struck down Virginia’s anti-sodomy law, and stopping Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli from further attempts to revive the law. Virginia’s crime’s against nature law that bans oral and anal sex formed one of Cuccinelli’s political rallying calls in his fight against Terry McAuliffe (D) for the seat of the governor this November.
McAuliffe has often depicted Cuccinelli, who is the Republican nominee for the seat of the governor in the Nov 5. ballot, as having deeply biased views on social issues.
Cuccinelli and local and state prosecutors supporting his stand have time and again stressed that the law is required to stop child predators and is not to be used against consenting adults acting in private.
However, such a stand is against the current state of law of the land as in 2003, the Supreme Court had ruled all sodomy statutes that criminalized sexual activity between consenting adults as unconstitutional.
Subsequently a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, ruled this year that the anti-sodomy law of Virginia was unconstitutional.
The ruling of the Fourth Circuit was given in a matter where a 47-year-old man was convicted of soliciting oral sex from a 17-year-old girl.
Brian Gottstein, a spokesman for Cuccinelli’s office said, “We appealed to the Supreme Court to save a tool Virginia law enforcers use regularly to prosecute child predators. As we’ve said from the beginning, this case had nothing to do with sexual orientation or private acts between consenting adults.”
Considering that in 2009, Cuccinelli had gone on record saying “homosexual acts are wrong and should not be accommodated in government policy,” his defense of the anti-sodomy law has been criticized by his rival McAuliffe as an illustration of his “extreme agenda and uncompromising approach.”