Roy Cooper, the attorney general of North Carolina Attorney — and one of the few Democratic statewide officials to survive the 2010 tea party electoral sweep that put Republicans in control of North Carolina for the first time since the 1870s — announced this week that his department will no longer defend the state’s ban on marriage equality. The decision comes after judges in the federal appeals court whose jurisdiction includes North Carolina struck down a similar ban in Virginia:
Cooper said that it now would be “futile” to continue defending North Carolina’s ban against challenges from within the state. Four cases involving North Carolina’s ban are pending now.
“Simply put, it is time to stop making arguments we will lose and instead move forward, knowing that the ultimate resolution will likely come from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Cooper said in front of a bank of television cameras at his office.
North Carolina voters in 2012 decided by a wide margin to encode a ban on gay marriage into the state’s constitution. The court’s ruling Monday won’t immediately affect that.
But the decision means that challenges to North Carolina’s ban would likely succeed in lower courts, according to Carl Tobias, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Richmond.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses Monday’s ruling, the judges in those cases will have to declare North Carolina’s ban unconstitutional, Tobias said.
Cooper, a Democrat who won his first term as Attorney General in 2000, agrees.
“Our office believes the judges in North Carolina are bound by this 4th Circuit decision,” he said. “In addition, the State of North Carolina will acknowledge the 4th Circuit opinion that marriage is a fundamental right.”
Roy Cooper is considered the Democrats’ best hope for unseating tea-party Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016.
