The Loveshade Family Blog

Until now, if you sold "marital aids" in Texas, you could be prosecuted for obscenity.  A federal appeals court has finally overturned that law.

Under the law, you couldn't sell sexually-oriented devices.  Ironically, some businesses got around this by selling dildos as "novelty items" with notes specifying that they weren't intended to be used for sexual purposes.  Right.

Even weirder, you were automatically considered a sex toy dealer if you possessed six vibrators.  They needed no evidence whatsoever that you were actually trying to sell them--possession meant promotion.  Strangely, you weren't considered a garment dealer if you had six pair of blue jeans, and possessing six pair of shoes didn't make you a shoe store.

Those of us who are involved in the Discordian Division of the Ek-sen-triks CluborGuild have a personal interest in this, as one of our friends was prosecuted for obscenity in Texas.  Fortunately, that case was finally dismissed.

The government continues to want to spy on you in your bedroom.  Hopefully laws like this will continue to get thrown out, especially as obscenity, like beauty, is only in the eye of the beholder.  Robert Anton Wilson called obscenity the modern form of black magic--there is no test to measure how much "obscenity" or "black magic" is in an item or image.  But a tremendous number of innocent lives were ripped away from the fear of witchcraft a few centuries ago, and a tremendous amount of personal freedom is being stripped away today.

These anti-freedom laws have already been tossed into the trash can of history in Louisiana, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia. Mississippi and Alabama continue to live in the past. Let's hope that laws against not just sex toys, but all forms of so-called obscenity, are throw into the garbage.

Read about this case in the relunctantly and slowly forward-moving state of Texas at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080214/ap_on_re_us/sex_toys_ban

(Danacasso pointed this tidbit out to us)