Published 15 August 2004

(word count: 750)

Burleson must be the safest town in Texas.

No more rapes, robberies or racketeering.  No more murders, muggings or misdemeanors.  All parking fines have been paid, all noxious weeds have been mowed and littering has ceased to exist.  The last of humanity's most dangerous desperados, the casual pot-smoker, has been tracked down like a deadly dingo and jammed into a jail cell for life.

How else could any municipal police department justify expending its citizen's taxbucks, and manpower, on a sex toy sting operation?

Joanne Webb sells articles of amorous arousal.  To consenting adults.  In the privacy of their homes.  Like a titillating Tupperware party.

Last November, a pair of undercover cops posing as a connubial couple cuffed the craven criminal for violating the state's obscenity law.  Seems that potions, lotions, lingerie and lubricants are illegal in Texas, which bans the sale of "obscene devices" that might cause (gasp!) "Stimulation."

No disgusting French tickler glow-in-the-dark ruby red ribbed rubbers for Lone Star lovers!

Meanwhile, in the Heart of Dixie:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld a 1998 state law banning the sale of sex toys in Alabama, ruling the Constitution doesn't include a right to sexual privacy.

Can't you just hear the three-judge panel jawboning this case?

"We can't have people stimulating their own sexual doo-dads.  They might go wild and start voting Libertine."

"Uh, you mean Libertarian?"

"Libertarian, Libertine, Liberace, whatever.  We have to stamp out pleasure wherever it raises its ugly head job!"

This is being a sloth.  No, I don't mean the animal simile for laziness, I mean a depiction of how a sloth actually lives: hanging head down from a tree limb thinking the world is actually built that way.  To a sloth, up is down and down is up.  Sloth poets emote about the sky below and the earth above.  Wise old sloth sages observe, "What goes down must come up."

Two of three judges, hanging slothlike from a judicial bench rather than sitting upright upon it, came up with an oxymoronic ruling.  Stating that "the Constitution doesn't include a right to sexual privacy" is like saying "An old dirty sock doesn't include a right to sexual privacy."  Of course not.  Our rights are not derived from old dirty socks or triple fudge brownies or rusty bicycle spokes or the price of tea in China or state and federal constitutions or any of a trillion other things the sloth-judges might have managed to conjure up.

Human rights come from being human.  Constitutions come from humans who create constitutions.  The purpose of constitutions in America is, first, to create governments, and then to strictly limit the powers of those governments.  If a government, including the judicial slice of that government, is not specifically authorized to do something, it has no authority to do it.

While I haven't read the Bama constitution, I'm betting that the document doesn't grant judges the explicit right to meddle in the private affairs (pun intended) of consenting adult Bamians.  Therefore, they have no right to meddle.

Dissenting Judge Rosemary Barkett, who apparently read the state constitution rightside up, agrees.  The issue wasn't about sex and sex toys, she rightly notes, but about government leaving peaceful people the hell alone.

Fortunately for freedom and the right to vibrate one's vitals, a Texas judge also agrees.  He dismissed the sex toy case against Joanne Webb.  Maybe he's able to read the Texas constitution rightside up (which likewise fails to be explicit about sexual privacy) or maybe he just believes that a sex toy prosecution is not a case he can ride into the Governor's office on some future election day.  Whatever his motivation, he avoided slothkind's tree limb – this time.

Meanwhile, I'm concerned for the future employment of Burleson's crack undercover couple.  Maybe the city can farm them out to nearby Fort Worth.  There must still be some medieval laws on the books that our fearless undercover officers can enforce.  Back when Old Fort Worth streets were mud and manure and stores were connected by boardwalks, when a lady's long dress dragged across the tops of the timbers, an ordinance against expectorating upon the sidewalks was enacted.

Here, posing as a hooker and a homeless inhabitant of Houston Street, our dynamic duo can do their duty:

"Police!  Freeze!  Caughtcha spittin' on the sidewalk, Tourist Boy!  Up against the wall!  Spread 'em!  Call for backup!  Officer needs assistance!"

As for our legal system in general – we need tart reform.