Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has launched a campaign to protect children, he says, with a law that bans all oral and anal sex in the state — even between consenting adults.
Cuccinelli’s new website supports Virginia’s sodomy law and urges the US Supreme Court to appeal the case against William Scott MacDonald.
MacDonald, then 47, was convicted in 2005 for soliciting a 17-year-old girl to commit sodomy. Several courts upheld his conviction when MacDonald appealed, but the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled June 25 that Virginia’s sodomy law is unconstitutional.
“It is shameful that Virginia continued to prosecute individuals under the sodomy statute for 10 years after the Supreme Court held that such laws are unconstitutional,” Rebecca Glenberg, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, told timesdispatch.com.
The US Supreme Court ruled that all sodomy laws were unconstitutional in 2003.
Rather than criminalize consenting adults, Glenberg said, Virginia lawmakers “should enact narrowly drawn statutes that do not apply to private conduct between consenting adults and define equitably and clearly what sexual conduct with minors is unlawful.”
John Aravosis, at America Blog, argues that Virginia Republicans use sodomy laws because they refuse to pass actual legislation to protect children. He writes, “Had the Virginia GOP passed a law banning sex with children, they’d be tacitly saying that sex between adults, including gay adults, was okay.
“And the Virginia Republican party is so uptight, so intolerant, and so discriminatory, that they couldn’t bring themselves to pass a law banning child-rape, lest the absence of language banning consensual sex between adults gave a silent nod to the notion that it’s okay for adults, straight and gay, to have sex, be it oral or any other kind.”
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