North Carolina had a chance to move into the post-Taliban era on Thursday, and we blew it. The sex police are still on duty in the Tar Heel state.

A proposed bill that would have eased one of the nation’s most restrictive laws governing sexual relations between consenting adults died in a State Senate judiciary committee, as did a similar bill in 2001.

Forty-one states pay less attention to the private sexual behavior of their citizens than North Carolina. The Texas sodomy law now being challenged before the United States Supreme Court, for example, applies only to homosexual conduct. But from Murphy to Manteo the supposed “crimes against nature” are illegal for heterosexuals, too.

Woody Allen said sex is only dirty if it’s done right. But in North Carolina, sex that  the government says is done wrong is a Class I felony, punishable by two years in prison.

But the bill, designated number 969, failed to meet the May 1 “crossover” date for proposed legislation, meaning that it didn’t make it from the Senate to the House in time to stay alive. Any change to the current the law will thus require new legislation to be introduced two years from now. Senator Kinnaird says she will pursue overturning the crimes of nature law if reelected to another term.  

The North Carolina law is seen by some scholars as more defensible under the Constitution than the contested Texas statute, because our law doesn’t discriminate against a particular group. Still, it seems indefensible by the standard that it’s none of the State’s damn business what consenting adults do in private.

Arguments against this libertarian position are often of the slippery slope variety.  Defenders of sodomy laws point out that private behavior is frequently regulated in areas such as drug use and prostitution (which of course many libertarians think should be legalized).

More to the point, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum recently drew fire for saying that a right to sexual privacy would protect not only homosexual acts but also bestiality, incest, and polygamy. Whatever legal reasons may exist for banning the other behaviors that Rick Santorum talks about a lot more than most people I know, our current law on consensual sex seems to me to fall on the wrong side of an invisible line.

While Santorum’s defenders tried to paper over his words by pretending he was just making a Constitutional argument about a right to privacy, the Senator himself was pretty clear in stating that all of his pet peeves are “antithetical to strong, healthy families.” Since there is no heated national debate over bestiality, incest, and polygamy, it seems safe to assume that the threat most frightening to Santorum is homosexuality.

And homosexuality is no doubt the sticking point in Raleigh, too. If this law only pertained to heterosexuals, or if it was enforced for heterosexuals, then the legislature (many members of which may have at some point committed criminal acts under the current statute, and many other members of which may wish that they had) would have defused it long ago.

I don’t feel that homosexuality is a threat to my own strong and healthy family. Rick Santorum and many, many Americans may feel otherwise. But the State doesn’t need to be enforcing one set of beliefs over another. People should make their own choices, it’s a free country—although when it comes to private behavior in the State of North Carolina, not quite free enough.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com or www.edcone.com), a magazine journalist, contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday