- Joined
- May 30, 2014
No. Speculation on this got started when someone noticed that Virginia's incest statute used male only language, which could actually have caused a problem that might conceivably have made it to the Supreme Court.
However it turns out Virginia is just old fashioned and not stupid, so they have another statute that says any gender specific language in the law means all genders.
Problem solved. There is nothing about this case that presents the sort of Federal issues that would get it anywhere near the Supreme Court.
To clarify it's less about being old fashioned and more about the peculiar way overhauling laws works. It would take manually changing ever single gendered law via legislature to fix the language of each of these statutes. The simpler solution is just too pass one law saying "X actually means Y". It's the same reason in some states a chicken wing is legally classified as a sandwich. Because adding various prepared foods to the tax categories was simpler than redefining 5000 pages of byzantine tax code just to tax bars properly.