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Ten years after the Supreme Court ruled laws could not prohibit sex between consenting adults, it was still illegal for two consenting adults to engage in sodomy in Virginia—until Tuesday. It took a split decision from a federal appeals court on a gruesome case, but sodomy is finally legal in Virginia, even if holdouts remain in other states where local laws still take what's seen as an anti-gay stance to the highest court's ruling.

A three judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that Virginia's "Crimes Against Nature" anti-sodomy provision, which prohibited anal and oral sex, is unconstitutional. Therefore, the provision has been invalidated. The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 2003 decision Lawrence vs. Texas any state laws that criminalized sex between two consenting adults were to be invalidated. Apparently Virginia—and 14 other states with anti-sodomy laws on the books—never got that message. But the decision by the appeals court today was praised by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union's Virginia chapter because the law was seen as infringing on the rights of LGBT Virginians. (There remain those other 13 states, including Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, where you're only prohibited from having anal sex if you're gay.)