The U.S. Supreme Court today denied Ken Cuccinelli's bid to enforce Virginia's law criminalizing “sodomy,” despite a landmark 2003 Supreme Court case striking such laws down.

The Virginia Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate has been seeking to use the “sodomy” law against a man who solicited oral sex from a 17 year-old girl, arguing that the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas applied only to consensual sex between adults. The Fourth Circuit ruled that his efforts were flatly unconstitutional. Cuccinelli asked the Supreme Court to hear this appeal, but they have declined to do so.

Cuccinelli has only himself and his hatred of LGBT people to blame for this. After Lawrence, the Virginia legislature nearly adopted a bill replacing the expansive and unconstitutional law with one specifically limited to situations not involving consenting adults in private. Had they succeeded, that law might today be used against adults who have sex with minors. But it didn't succeed, due in great part to then-state Sen. Cuccinelli, who opposed the bill and helped defeat it. His explanation for that opposition? As he told in the Virginian-Pilot several years ago:

"My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong," Cuccinelli told the newspaper. "They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that. . . They don't comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society."

Cuccinelli's extreme views have been politely rejected by the courts. Soon the voters of Virginia will have their chance to politely repudiate him, too.