Woman sues North Carolina over cohabitation law

Debora Hobbs is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation. Hobbs was told by her supervisor to either resign her job as a sheriff's department dispatcher or marry her live-in partner. She resigned, and on Monday, the ACLU filed a suit on her behalf that challenges North Carolina's rarely enforced law that prohibits unrelated persons of different genders from living together.

Aside from the obvious fact that this law is ridiculous and offensive, and aside from the fact that it is obviously selectively enforced, it raises other questions. Does it have to be two persons living together, or can it be an entire mixed gender household, as we often see in university communities? What if it is an established fact that one of the persons is gay and the other is straight? What if a very old person is being cared for by a young, live-in aide?

Hobbs' supervisor made it clear that he tries to hire only people who are not living together outside of marriage, so it is a wonder there hasn't already been a lawsuit filed. Even if you reason that people who work for law enforcement should not be breaking laws, it doesn't make any sense because Hobbs was not a law enforcement officer. On the other hand, the sheriff also made it clear that he sees the situation as a "moral" issue as well as a legal one.