Today in the canteen (which is what they call the little dining hall space in the academic building here) we were talking about voting, which of course came around to explaining how my state’s Attorney General and wannabe governor is actually completely nuts. I didn’t explain it very well, but fortunately, Slate has a fantastic article summarizing what Cuccinelli is trying to do and how very weird it is.
See, the law that Cuccinelli wants the Supreme Court to uphold states that “any person” that “carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth” is a felon and a sex offender. However, Cuccinelli is asking the court to read it to apply only to 16 and 17 year olds, who are over the Virginia age of consent but not legally adults. Basically, he wants this law to be considered special sodomy statutory rape law.
But the thing is, that isn’t how the law is written. Conservatives wring their hands about “activist judges” who move away from the intent of a law in their decisions, but what Cuccinelli is doing here is asking judges to write age into the law where it does not exist. And then, of course, we would have a sodomy law on the books with a constitutional stamp of approval, which would be a big problem for anyone who ever wanted to have sex, but in this case which would be particularly threatening to queer teenagers, who would be considered both potential sex offenders and felons and the appropriate age group for the law to target.
Tangentially related: Virginia also doesn’t protect LGBTQ people against workplace discrimination! ThinkProgress has a deeply upsetting collection of videos of LGBT workers describing workplace discrimination they’ve faced. While not electing Ken Cuccinelli would basically be a huge step forward for LGBT Virginians, there’s more work to do once we can stop discussing the legality of queer sex!