Mr. Pinup

Alabama‘s ban on sex toys is no laughing matter.Ever since that state approved the Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act in 1998, which prohibited the sale of “any device designed or marketed as useful for the stimulation of human genital organs,” humorists have mocked the statute while many Alabamans with common sense have tried to downplay its significance. In 1997, the District Attorney of Madison County, Tim Morgan, told reporters that enforcing the ban was “a pretty low priority” and contrasted dildo dealing with “real crimes” that needed prosecution, while the conservative-leaning Press-Register of Mobile has called for repeal of the law on the grounds that it “makes Alabama look foolish.” However, after an eleven-year court battle that climaxed on September 11, 2009, when the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the law in Love Stuff v. City of Hoover, Alabamans who sell sex toys — even inside so-called “adult oriented” businesses — face up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Repeat offenders risk a ten year prison sentence. Opponents of the measure should not take this judicial defeat lying down. Whether the law is enforced, its very existence is likely to deter businesses from selling such toys and to deprive the women and men of the Yellowhammer State both freedom and pleasure. However, since the Alabama legislature has insisted on making sex toys a matter for public debate, progressive Americans ought to accept this challenge to debate such devices on their merits. I suspect most people, and most Alabamans, view sex toys as a social good. I am confident that, in the marketplace of ideas, sexual pleasure will trounce Puritanism — and almost everything else.

via Jacob M. Appel: Alabama’s Bad Vibrations.

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