Seriously, though, several jurisdictions (particularly of a southeastern geography) still have laws against sodomy, which can be defined as anal sex, oral sex, or manual sex (handjobs).
Someone in a thread I read here recently about watersports told of how he and some of his buddies and their wives would travel around and break as many local sex laws as they could. Apparently, one of them was a lawyer and did all the research for it. They would earn points for the laws they broke with their wives. One Southern county prohibited watersports, so they did it.
Actually, it’s thought that poll taxes were intended to prevent voting by minorities in general, who tended to be poorer. At least, if that wasn’t its intention, it was certainly its result. The nation’s always-flourishing Mexican-American community, for example, was for a long time pretty well locked out by poll taxes. Same for literacy tests–who do you think that sort of blockade would target?
I wonder who wrote those laws.
Reminded me of a sex quiz on Channel 4 (UK)'s website where one of the questions concerned Chinese Empress Wu Shu (I hope I’m getting the name right), who required all of her workers to perform cunnilingus on her as tribute.
At one point two women in Scotland were arrested under the sodomy laws. The case at trial hinged on the question of whether or not two women could actually have sex. After grave deliberation, the judge decided that they could not.
Actually, the liquor–namely, rum–was given out at the polling place. This was in the early years of the nation (US).
Today, all sale of liquor is illegal on election days in Colombia, but for a different reason. It’s to prevent people from getting into violent drunken political arguments. Imagine that happening here.
I don’t know if this was a state law or just a school board policy, but when I began teaching in 1969, teachers were not allowed to teach beyond their fifth month of pregnancy. (Some of the church folks didn’t want us “flaunting our sins” in front of our students.)
Female teachers were not allowed to wear slacks to school – only skirts and dresses.
Women’s basketball teams played only half-court. (Women didn’t have the strength to endure full court games even in Tennessee back then.)
Females could not sign up for woodshop classes and males could not sign up for cooking and sewing classes.
I can remember “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” waiting rooms at the bus station. I accidently walked into the wrong one one time to make a phone call from a booth. (This was during the time of some of the civil rights marches.) There were about ten people in that room and not a single eye left my face the entire time I was on the phone.
As matt_mcl also mentioned, those’ve all been invalidated thanks to good old Lawrence v. Texas, so I’m afraid you’ve lost your chance to break US sodomy laws if you haven’t yet done so. Should’ve done it while you had the chance!
I know a (lesbian) couple who went on a road trip and decided to try to break various local sex laws along the way. Unfortunately for their civil disobedience, Lawrence was decided in the middle of the trip.
I live in Texas. Many’s the time I’ve driven home from work, convertible top down, with a nice frosty Budweiser in the drink holder of my car. Drinking and driving wan’t illegal “back in the day”, but driving drunk was.
imo, just another step in our nation’s march toward criminalizing the ability to commit crime, rather than crime itself.
Yep, I remember back around 1980 buying a case of beer on the way home; and since they were not twist-offs the proprieter would open two bottles for my drive home.
The law is indeed on the books, because it has not yet been challenged, and as this article makes clear, in North Carolina, a dispatcher was forced to resign because she was violating the state’s cohabitation ban. The article notes:
The law remains on the books (and enforceable, for now) because the Virginia Supreme Court only considered a challenge to the state’s fornication law–not the cohabitation statute.
The Virginia statute refers to “lewd cohabitation.” I wonder whether Lawrence would apply where a statute only prohibited two unrelated, unmarried (etc.) people of the opposite sex from living together without reference to their sexual relationship.
An interesting question, probably better suited for GD. I started a GD thread a while back on a related topic
but wound up talking to myself.
I’d love to pick it apart in the right forum. For the record, I don’t think it would make a difference, and perhaps other law covers the issue, too. Feel free to revive the other thread or start your own, and we’ll hammer it out.
“We’ve broken the law in a number of states. That’s right, we’re outlaws! When I’ve gone back to some of the towns where I had a particularly good time, I sometimes go and check to see if they’ve put my picture up at the post office with all the other criminals. ‘Wanted for sodomy.’ And of course they don’t do that, but I wish they would because it would be a great way to get dates.” - Romanovsky and Phillips
