I'm pretty sure the sheriff had other issues and hit on this excuse. I guess he figured if it was good enough for Ashcroft when he went after Greenpeace it's good enough to bully employees.

Quote of note:

"Certainly the government has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes," said Jennifer Rudinger, state executive director of the ACLU. "This law is 200 years old, and a lot of people are very surprised that we even have it on the books."

The sheriff told the Star-News of Wilmington last year that Hobbs's employment was a moral issue as well as a legal question. He said he tries to avoid hiring people who openly live together but does not send out deputies to enforce the law.

ACLU Challenges N.C. Cohabitation Law
Woman Fired for Living With Boyfriend

By Steve Hartsoe
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 10, 2005; A06

RALEIGH, N.C., May 9 -- There are about 144,000 unmarried couples living together in North Carolina, and they are all breaking the law -- a statute that has been on the books since 1805.

The law against cohabitation is rarely enforced. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to overturn it altogether, on behalf of a former sheriff's dispatcher who said she had to quit her job because she would not marry her live-in boyfriend.

Debora Hobbs, 40, said her boss, Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, near Wilmington, told her to get married, move out or find another job after he found out she and her boyfriend had been living together for three years. The couple did not want to get married, so Hobbs quit.

Her lawsuit, filed in March in state court, seeks to have the cohabitation law declared unconstitutional.