By
Graig Uhlin
Arizona Daily Wildcat
The state of Alabama has a thing against dildos.
It's not that it feels threatened by them. It just thinks that they are the loose thread that will cause the tightly woven fabric that is society at large to unravel without hope of repair.
That's a bit dramatic, I know, but there is something fundamentally wrong with government telling its citizens how they can properly "get off."
On Jan. 31, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court ruling, thereby allowing the state of Alabama to outlaw the sale of "any obscene material or any device or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs."
It's legislation against orgasms. It's legislation against the pursuit of happiness. It's legislation that, most importantly, represents an imposition by the government into matters where it shouldn't be going - namely, America's bedrooms.
Alabama's Attorney General Bill Pryor doesn't seem to think so, though. He argued that "commerce in the pursuit of orgasms by artificial means for their own sake is detrimental to the health and morality of the State."
Ugh, I thought we as a society had grown beyond the archaic notion that sexual expression, in private no less, needs to be repressed for the well-being of the innocent and virginal, of those not yet tainted by society's more carnal delights. I can just hear the wails of "Oh god, won't somebody please think of the children?!"
I might be exaggerating the issue. It's not as if the state of Alabama is going to send the SWAT team into people's bedrooms with tear gas and semi-automatic weapons looking to confiscate vibrators.
More likely, the position of the state is to allow local communities to disallow a certain type of business from setting up shop, which will presumably attract a "seedier" element that would corrupt their children, send property values into a downward spiral and so on. This is more an economic issue than anything else.
However, this is an economic issue couched in the language of preserving the morality of a community. Whose morality? By what standards do we establish these laws of morality? It's not as if orgasms hurt anyone. What are we being protected from?
Moreover, there is a slippery slope at play here. The kinds of material and devices which this law prohibits is up for interpretation. When the vendors posed their defense in the appellate court, they argued that other sexual products would be allowed to continue being distributed, including ribbed condoms and the virility drug Viagra.
The implication here is that, according to the government, there are proper, legal ways to "get your jollies." These kind of laws are in the same category as outdated sodomy laws and statutes that prohibit oral sex. While these kind of prohibitions have a deep-rooted history - many of them were established in the colonial period when nonprocreative sex (masturbation, sodomy, etc.) would be detrimental to a burgeoning society reliant on a growing labor force - they are pretty much a moot point now.
I could go on. I could connect sexual expression with freedom of speech and make a First Amendment argument. I could point out the therapeutic effects these device can have.
But I'm spent, at least if that's OK with the government.
