VIRGINIA: AG Ken Cuccinelli Asks Appeals Court To Uphold Sodomy Ban

Last month I reported:

Over the objections of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (who is running for governor), yesterday a federal appeals court overturned Virginia's ban on sodomy. The ruling arose from the conviction of a man who had solicited oral sex from a 17 year-old girl.  The appeals court said that the state should prosecute unlawful sex between adults and minors, but that it could not use the "crimes against nature" provision as the basis of a prosecution.

Cuccinelli now wants a full "en banc" panel of Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges to overrule the two Fourth Circuit judges who shot him down the first time. Chris Geidner writes at Buzzfeed:

Cuccinelli writes that "a reasonable state court could conclude that Lawrence did not wholly invalidate Virginia's sodomy statute." Applying that to the request for a federal-court decision overturning a state-court conviction, Cuccinelli writes: "Plainly, the scope of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence was not so evident that it necessarily invalidates sodomy convictions even where no expectation of privacy among consenting adults is involved. Thus, there is no basis to conclude that the state courts 'erred so transparently that no fairminded jurist could agree' with their rulings."

RELATED: There have been many calls for Cuccinelli to resign as other state attorneys general have historically done once they announced their candidacy for governor. So far he has refused even though he holds a large stock interest in a company currently suing the state over a tax dispute.  Cucinelli has a long and vile history of blocking LGBT rights in Virginia, including supporting a ban on gay adoptions. In 2011 he declared that God had personally placed him in office to fight President Obama.