Top Ten US Sex Laws

by on July 7, 2008 · 4 comments

in Uncategorized

Here they are. This my favorite:

Having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal in Florida.

Is that to protect the porcupine or the human?

4 comments

{ 4 comments }

willie July 7, 2008 at 6:16 pm: not to be a total downer, but none of those silly laws have citations. appropriate for digg.com, but not the monkey cage.

with that said, i believe that every one exists.
Jacob Christensen July 7, 2008 at 6:58 pm: Leave aside the question of references, what we want to know as political scientists are:

1. How is the distribution of prohibitive sex laws with regard to a) geography, b) level of government (federal, state, county/city), c) time.

2. Who introduced these regulations? What were the arguments?

3. Are these regulations actively policed? If not: Were they policed earlier? Why (not)?

That said, #6 sounds pretty intriguing to me. Who the &%€# dreamt that one up?
Clyde Wilcox July 7, 2008 at 8:47 pm: The Virginia silly law is true, and is part of a much longer list that includes extramarital sex, oral sex, anal sex, and in some cities anything other than the missionary position.

And every tourist store has “Virginia is for Lovers” T shirts.

Of course, most of these laws are invalid based on Supreme Court privacy rulings.

But what would be really interesting would be to see how some of these laws actually got passed.

I have to think that most of them were passed as jokes, but that is obviously not true about sex with the lights on.

Or possibly even the size of animals..
R. Espino July 10, 2008 at 12:29 pm: Arizona got rid of some of its “archaic” laws in 2001 with The Equity Act of 2001 (which includes the laws that push Arizona to Number 1 on this list).

http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/45leg/1r/summary/h.hb2016_5-02-01_astransmittedtogovernor.doc.htm

Not surprisingly, there was resistance to overturn these laws at the time.

It remains to be seen what will happen with Arizona’s other archaic laws.