I was thinking recently about the laws that people site from different states in the US, and realized I had just accepted them and never really known if it was true they were on the books. The first examples that come to mind is that people say oral sex and sex positions other than missionary are illegal in South Carolina.
Is that true?
There are hoards of other laws that people mention or that are written on posters (and, I’m sure, “factual” chain emails), can people name some of them and verify whether they’re true or false.
I’ve heard some pretty crazy laws, but I can’t remember what they are right now…
Try this website first. It has long lists, and in some cases it has the actual text of the law and the explanation for it.
I can give you one example of a brilliant law that did exist at one point; I’m not sure whether it’s been officially taken off the books or not. In Kentucky it is (or was) illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket. This law existed to combat horse theft; horses are a major industry in Kentucky. Apparently some of these thieves operated by putting an ice cream cone (or something else tasty) in their pocket and walking into a horse’s stall. The horse would start licking the ice cream, and it would follow the thief wherever he or she went.
The Supreme Court decision Lawrence v Texas struck down “sodomy” (oral and anal sex) laws as a violation of the Constitution. I don’t recall whether South Carolina still had a sodomy law on the books at the time of the decision, but if it did it has been invalidated by that SCOTUS decision. I don’t know if SC banned non-missionary vaginal sex, but under the same legal reasoning as Lawrence, any such state law would also likely be invalid.
A lot of those laws are just extreme statements of otherwise non-sensational laws. One that I recall making the rounds was “it’s illegal in Michigan to tie an alligator to a parking meter!” Turns out it was illegal to tie any animal to a parking meter and the law was designed to stop people from tying their dogs to meters. But a law banning tying a dog to a meter isn’t kooky whereas one banning tying alligators up is.
Just going by the dictionarydefinition of the term “buggery”, one would be inclined to say not, but it would really depend on the case law. The Georgia law against sodomy clearly did outlaw oral sex (before it was struck down, first by the Georgia Supreme Court and later by the SCOTUS):
Reminds me of this bit from the old Brunching Shuttlecocks site.