Posted on 05/11/2003 7:04:33 AM PDT by RJCogburn
IN AN April 30 essay titled "The Libertarian Question," my fellow National Review Online contributing editor Stanley Kurtz argues that laws against sodomy, adultery and incest should remain on the books largely to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage.
By stigmatizing sexual relations outside that institution, Kurtz believes "the taboo on non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality helps to cement marital unions, and helps prevent acts of adultery that would tear those unions apart."
Kurtz also states that keeping adult incest illegal will reduce the odds of sex between adults and their minor relatives. Anti-pedophilia laws, virtually everyone agrees, should be energetically enforced, whether or not the child molesters and their victims are family members.
But Kurtz overlooks the fact that anti-sodomy laws can throw adults in jail for having consensual sex. Approval or disapproval of homosexual, adulterous or incestuous behavior among those over 18 is not the issue. Americans should remain free to applaud such acts or, conversely, denounce them as mortal sins. The public policy question at hand is whether American adults should or should not be handcuffed and thrown behind bars for copulating with people of the same sex, beyond their own marriages or within their bloodlines.
If this sounds like hyperbole, consider the case of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, currently before the Supreme Court.
On Sept. 17, 1998, Harris County sheriffs deputies responded to a phony complaint from Roger Nance, a disgruntled neighbor of John Geddes Lawrence, then 55. They entered an unlocked door to Lawrence's eighth-floor Houston apartment looking for an armed gunman. While no such intruder existed, they did discover Lawrence having sex with another man named Tyron Garner, then 31.
"The police dragged them from Mr. Lawrence's home in their underwear," says Brian Chase, a staff attorney with the Dallas office of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund (www.lambdalegal.org) which argued on the gentlemen's behalf before the Supreme Court. "They were put in jail for 24 hours. As a result of their conviction, they would have to register as sex offenders in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. If this arrest had taken place in Oklahoma, they could have faced 10 years in prison. It's kind of frightening." Lawrence and Garner were fined $200 each plus $141.25 in court costs.
Ironically, Chase adds by phone, "At the time the Texas penal code was revised in 1972, heterosexual sodomy was removed as a criminal offense, as was bestiality."
Even though some conservatives want government to discourage non-procreative sex, those Houston sheriff's deputies could not have apprehended a husband and wife engaged in non-reproductive oral or anal sex (although married, heterosexual couples still can be prosecuted for the same acts in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia). And were Lawrence caught naked in bed with a Rottweiler, consenting or otherwise, the sheriffs could not have done more than suggest he pick on someone his own species. However, because Lawrence preferred the company of a willing, adult human being of his same sex, both were shuttled to the hoosegow.
"The point is, this could happen to anyone," Chase says. "This was the result of a malicious prank call made by a neighbor who was later arrested and jailed for 15 days for filing a false report."
As for grownups who lure children into acts of homosexuality, adultery and incest, the perpetrators cannot be imprisoned quickly enough. The moment members of the North American Man-Boy Love Association go beyond discussion of pedophilia to actions in pursuit thereof, someone should call 911 and throw into squad cars the men who seek intimate contact with males under 18. Period.
The libertarian question remains before Stanley Kurtz and the Supreme Court. Should laws against adult homosexuality, adultery and incest potentially place taxpaying Americans over 18 behind bars for such behavior? Priests, ministers, rabbis and other moral leaders may decry these activities. But no matter how much people may frown upon these sexual appetites, consenting American adults should not face incarceration for yielding to such temptations.
Here is the libertarian answer to this burning question: Things deemed distasteful should not always be illegal. This response is one that every freedom-loving American should embrace.
Ben Franklin's alleged sexual pecadilloes are not well known, at least not by me. I don't care to know if he had them. And if he did have them, he apparently had the good sense not to politicize and grandstand them, and make them the basis of some specious and laughable "unalienable rights" claim.
The challenge to Luis remains: whatever salacious crap he may have gleaned about Franklin from a Larry Flynt publication, is he asserting that Franklin engaged in sodomy?
It should be easy to find out if you have a nose for that kind of sewage.
You must be a public school graduate whose understanding of history has all the depth of a water slick on concrete.
Was that in this thread? Not having seen the post, I don't know how he meant it. I would ask you to turn the other cheek but that might get miscontrued in this thread.
I told myself I should not respond to your ignorant posts, but on occasion I have a lapse of discipline. You and Luis can carry on.
By the way human rights are not fully listed in the constitution, but you probably knew that since you've been on numerous threads about this subject. Read the 9th amendment. Of course you can let the government tell you which live, human adults you can have sex with, but most of us prefer to make our own decisions. Big government being preferred by those who don't understand freedom and therefore not being popular with us conservatives.
Take your best shot, I'm out.
You must be a public school graduate whose understanding of history has all the depth of a water slick on concrete.
You mean, like, "Banned in Boston" was not the name of
a famous pre-MTV colonial melodious troope, dude?!
No where, but then again, neither is marriage a protected right under the constitution.
Where does the Constitution grant any level of government the right to regulate sexual, consensual behavior between adults?
I want to see the constitution empower the government to do things, not this flimsy excuse that somehow, unless something is specifically listed in the constitution, it does not exist.
The constitution, and the BOR make it quite clear that they are not to be considered an enumerated listing of our rights. '
Old Ben probably engaged in the French arts, otherwise he probably wouldn't have been so popular with the ladies. As far as being a sodomizer...the word had not been invented yet.
Where does it say that people cannot so regulate or proscribe immoral conduct? Where does it say that people have no right to decide what kind of a society they are to live in?
These guys argue that the right to privacy does not exist, and run around calling others sodomizers (?) while being too hypocritical to admit that they've engaged in the practice themselves.
I think it was a fair question. I mean, if they wish to enact laws making sodomy a crime for the good of society, they should come clean about their own crimminal behavior...don't you think?
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