The GOP War on Women and Push to Restore Sodomy Laws

At times it is hard to tell who is more obsessed with the sex lives of others: the GOP or the Vatican.  Both seem happiest only when meddling in what transpires in the bedrooms of people they don't even know.  In the case of the GOP the result is that a campaign to restrict abortion rights - will contraception be next? - continues unabated here in Virginia and elsewhere.  Going hand in glove is an effort being spear headed by Virginia Christofascist and would be governor, Ken Cuccinelli.  An article in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the GOP's twin agenda when it's not seeking tax cuts for the wealthy or funding cuts for the neediest Americans.  Here are highlights:

In red states all over the country, similar laws are being passed, making clinic regulations impossible to meet, and limiting abortions to a term so early in the pregnancy many women don’t even know they are expecting. Where we go wrong as pro-choice liberals, is to think of these states as aberrations, and that the women unlucky enough to live there are the ones who are going to have to take on the fight. They most definitely are not unrelated events. They are a part of a coordinated Republican plan to get Roe v. Wade back before the Supreme Court.

It seems counter-intuitive, but Republicans don’t want the women of the states under assault to accept the new restrictions, they want them to sue. The participating states have purposely used similar language in most of their anti-choice bills, because it increases their chances of getting a different decision on the same law, from different federal judges. And when the lower courts disagree on how to “interpret” one of their decisions, that disagreement practically guarantees that the Supreme Court will take up the case.

Why now? The Republican establishment, the men with their hands on the levers of power, have made a determination that the current Supreme Court is as good as it is going to get – conservative-wise. The changing demographics and their party’s lackluster performance in the last two presidential elections have them worried that the court will become more and more moderate in the next few years. They are determined to get as many of their conservative issues before this court as possible, even if it means passing laws they know are unconstitutional.

Abortion is the prime target, but it is hardly the only law Republicans are hoping they can manage to have revisited before Scalia is six feet under and Thomas spends the rest of his years curled in the fetal position on his old pal’s grave. We have already seen the Voting Rights Act, and affirmative action targeted. Now you can officially add sodomy laws to the list of decisions Republicans are trying to have re-argued. 

Republicans have long hoped that if Roe is overturned, Lawrence V Texas, the decision that made it unconstitutional for states to ban sodomy, will follow. Both decisions are based on the unenumerated “right of privacy” that the Rehnquist Court found in the Constitution, a right Justice Scalia has often said he does not think the Constitution grants. So it is very possible if Roe falls on privacy grounds, so will Lawrence.

The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, is well-known as a true believer when it comes to ending the right to privacy.  .   .   .  .   Cuccinelli has been scheming for more than a decade to get Lawrence V Texas back in front of the Supreme Court. He wants this! He is running for governor at the moment, and political wisdom dictates that attorneys general step down so they can campaign full-time without the baggage of the state’s controversial litigation, but Cuccinelli has stayed on. He’s so close to reopening Lawrence he can taste it, and he doesn’t trust anyone else to take over as the battlefield commander in the Holy War for Missionary Position Only in America!

When the Supreme Court handed down their decision on Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, the Virginia legislature recognized their Crimes Against Nature statute was unconstitutional, and tried to bring it into compliance by adding a consenting adults exception. Newly elected State Senator Ken Cuccinelli led the resistance and killed the changes in committee, so all these years, if you have had so much as a blow job in Virginia, you have been guilty of a felony.

Now, as attorney general, Cuccinelli has decided it’s time. He purposefully used the unconstitutional Crimes Against Nature Law he protected as a young state senator, to charge a man who solicited oral sex from a 17-year-old female. He had many other choices, but he chose Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature Statute so he can finally put the Lawrence decision in the spotlight. 

As expected, the court rejected the Crimes Against Nature Charge, and as expected, Cuccinelli has filed an appeal. He is now on the legal trail that leads to the Supreme Court. With the Republican push to get the Court to revisit Roe and the “privacy” issue, his timing couldn’t be better.

Because of Ken Cuccinelli’s zealous pursuit of bland sex, women and gays have now become strange bedfellows in the struggle to defend the right of “privacy.” I would warn Mr. Cuccinelli not to expect either group to just roll over and take it. After all, he has made that illegal, at least in Virginia.

Cuccinelli is a menace who must be stopped.  And it is not just Virginians who need to be working for his defeat in November.   No one sane anywhere should want to see this man gain the governor's mansion.