Senate committee votes to repeal cohabitation law

A Florida Senate committee voted Wednesday to repeal an 1868 law against cohabitation, but the proposal will probably need some parliamentary maneuvering to have any chance of passing in the hectic final days of the 2015 legislative session.

The bill by Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, drew little debate in the Senate Rules Committee. It had previously been cleared by the Judiciary and Criminal Justice Committees, so the bill (SB 1078) is ready for discussion on the floor of the Senate.

But a companion bill by Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, D-Tallahassee, is not moving in the House — with just over two weeks left in the regular session, and many big issues still to be resolved. If the Senate bill goes over to the House, she said she might be able to piggyback its language as an amendment onto some other family-law bill and get the proposal to the governor's desk.

That's not easy, and Rehwinkel Vasilinda said legislators are getting little weary of talking about intimate personal relations.

"Times have changed. Currently, over half a million couples in Florida are breaking this law as we speak," Sobel told the Senate panel. "Government should not intrude into the private lives of two consenting adults."

Few, if any, people get a $500 fine or 60 days in jail for shacking up but Sobel said the law could be used "arbitrarily and capriciously" to harass an unwed couple. She said retirees who live together but don't get married, for familial or pension reasons, can be denied visitation rights with their grandchildren because they are violating the cohabitation law.

The obscure law provides that "if any man and woman, not being married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, engages in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, they shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree."

Sobel said Mississippi and Michigan are the only other states with anti-cohabitation laws. She said, "These archaic laws are still being enforced arbitrarily and capriciously."

But Rehwinkel Vasilinda said the Legislature has already spent a lot of time talking about sex and morals. On Tuesday, the Senate sent Gov. Rick Scott a bill repealing the 1977 law against adoption by gay citizens, and the House had about five hours of debate last week on a "conscience protection" bill that would allow private adoption agencies to refuse child placement with gay couples.

There is also a bill in both chambers to mandate 24-hour waiting periods for abortion. It's not clear if the Senate will take up the House-passed "conscience protection" bill and the abortion legislation always sparks lengthy and heated debate if they reach the floors of either chamber.

With hundreds of bills at various stages of discussion, and a $76 billion-plus state budget stalled by major House-Senate disagreements, lawmakers don't like getting tied up in long debates. The 60-day session is set to adjourn on May 1.

Rehwinkel Vasilinda has tried to compromise on the cohabitation bill by repealing the old law against unmarried couples living together, but keeping the prohibition of any "lewd and lascivious behavior" in public.

"It's hung up in the House," she said of her bill (HB 4045). It was approved last month by the Criminal Justice Subcommittee but has languished for weeks without a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, which is not scheduled to meet again this year.

"I tried to make it non-salacious," Rehwinkel Vasilinda said, "but I think maybe a lot of people are getting tired of having big debates about these kinds of issues."

Since her bill has cleared at least one committee, she said, the repeal language might be offered as a floor amendment to some other bill. But that would depend on Sobel's bill passing the Senate and House supporters getting consent of the Republican leadership.

"It's not completely dead," said Rehwinkel Vasilinda, an attorney and law instructor at Tallahassee Community College. "I'm just concerned that it could be used unjustly. We need to clean old things like this law off the books. The government has no business looking under the sheets."