or prostitution.” Id. at 578, 156 L. Ed. 2d at 525. The inclusion of this language by the United States Supreme Court clearly indicates that state regulation of sexual conduct involving minors, non-consensual or coercive conduct, public conduct, and prostitution falls outside the boundaries of the liberty interest protecting personal relations and is therefore constitutionally permissible. We conclude that our state’s regulation of sexual conduct falling outside the narrow liberty interest recognized in Lawrence remains constitutional. Our courts have already recognized the limits of the narrow liberty interest articulated in Lawrence v. Texas, and have upheld laws regulating sexual conduct outside those boundaries. See State v. Pope, 168 N.C. App. 592, 594, 608 S.E.2d 114, 116 (2005) (<HOLDING>); State v. Oakley, 167 N.C. App. 318, 322, 605
holding that such claims however cannot be brought directly against the state or a state agency but only against state officials in their official capacities holding the state may properly criminalize solicitation of a crime against nature holding that a local gun ordinance making the sale of firearms on county property a misdemeanor was not preempted by a state law prohibiting the sale of assault weapons and unsafe handgunsfinding that the ordinance does not criminalize precisely the same acts which are prohibited by statute holding a suit against an agency of the state is a suit against the state recognizing that a suit by the national government against a state does no violence to the inherent nature of sovereignty