By Peter Galuszka
Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli, now running as a Republican for governor, has had a number of strange obsessions: going doggedly after a climatologist over global warming issues he disagrees with and pushing to arm investigators involved with Medicaid fraud.
But nothing compares with Cuccinelli’s stubborn insistence that sodomy should be illegal even though the U.S. Supreme Court says that any such law is unconstitutional. The undercurrent seems to be that Cuccinelli is abnormally obsessed with sex and gays.
To get a feel for what he thinks is important, check out his Website. In July, it issued seven press releases. Three of them involved child pornography, sex crimes or prostitution. In June, the county was four out of 14 press releases and in May, four out of nine releases. One wonders if the attorney general actually believes that sex is the biggest legal problem Virginia faces.
He has been more famous for something else – his dogged insistence that Virginia challenge a federal court appeals knock-down of Virginia’s archaic anti-sodomy law that would make oral and anal sex a felony. Cuccinelli’s excuse is that he is trying to protect children against child abuse.
His argument has been taken apart in an Aug. 7 analysis “Ken Cuccinelli’s Sodomy Obsession” in Slate, the digital magazine.
Cuccinelli claims that Virginia’s anti-sodomy law, which sets no age limit, might be constitutional if the high court “would just interpret the terrifyingly broad sodomy law to apply only to sex involving 16 and 17-year-olds.”
In other words, he would be adding age limits to a law that doesn’t specify them. This gets a bit loopy.
Cuccinelli’s case in question involves the matter of 47-year-old William MacDonald who solicited oral sex from a 17-year-old woman. Nothing apparently happened but it turned out that the state couldn’t hit MacDonald with a statutory rape rap because the age for consent in Virginia is 15.
This is where it gets weird. As Slate puts it: “Asking a federal court to turn a state anti-sodomy law into an anti-statutory rape law means that if MacDonald had engaged in ordinary intercourse with a 17-year-old girl every day for a month, he would not face a felony conviction or be a sex offender.”
Cuccinelli’s revision would mean that the state’s sodomy law would mean those older than 15 can legally consent to sex, says Slate, yet have no right to sexual privacy in actually having sex. Put another way, the state could charge any 16 or 17-year-old with felony sodomy if they chose to have anal or oral sex rather than vaginal sex.
Many teenagers are sexually experienced by the age of 15, including gays. The unwritten message is that Cuccinelli must be targeting gays just as he targeted gays when he advised that state organizations like universities did not have to have policy statements banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Not only is Cuccinelli’s position highly discriminatory against gays and lesbians, it raises troubling questions about what he considers important in Virginia. The Old Dominion faces many problems such as clogged highways, creating jobs, eradicating poverty and improving health care.
Why should what goes on in the bedroom of a legal-aged teenager dominate his focus?
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