Texas ban on sex toy sales is overturned

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A federal appeals court has overturned a statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas, one of the last states — all in the South — to retain such a ban.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

And

In its decision Tuesday, the appeals court cited Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 opinion that struck down bans on consensual sex between same-sex couples.

"Just as in Lawrence, the state here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct," the appeals judges wrote. "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the state is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification after Lawrence."

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Well then, I guess I'm heading back to Texas this weekend to buy a shitload of sex toys.

I'm just kidding, of course.

Anyway, this decision is a long time in coming because, you know, banning sex toys is fucking stupid. That is, such laws are a weird artifact from an era when it was believed that the government had a right to tell you how to have sex. Even though popular attitudes started changing on the topic by the 1960s, and had become conventional wisdom by the 80s, it wasn't until 2003's Lawrence v Texas US Supreme Court decision that the law finally caught up. Or, if you prefer, the law stayed the same, but the interpretation of that law caught up with decades of medical, psychological, and cultural research dating back to the mid nineteenth century, which means that understanding the "due process" clause of the fourteenth amendment in terms of private consensual sexual activity is now legally based on solid science, rather than narrow minded religious superstition.

Given the far right-wing makeup of the current Supreme Court, however, and how the conservative majority's "strict constructionist" judicial philosophy now apparently means "always rule for the conservative point of view despite all precedents," I have no idea what will happen to this case if it is appealed.

But for now, I advise everybody to go buy a vibrator. You know, while you can still get them.

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