Well, well, well. Utah's sodomy laws are being challenged ... by a heterosexual man. It seems that the law, which prohibits oral and anal sex only when practiced by unmarried people, is being used against him for selective prosecution. Previous suits challenging the law have been tossed because judges have said that nobody would be prosecuted under them; therefore any threat is purely theoretical. (So why wouldn't you toss the law if prosecution is theoretical?)
To be sure, I don't expect the law to be tossed, although I do suspect the charge will be dismissed; guilty or no, with respect to that law, it's clearly a case of selective prosecution because they simply don't like the kid. (He does, in fact, have a slightly more serious misdemeanor pending against him.) Utah being one of the two states of the Intermountain West retaining a sodomy law, I suspect that they want to retain the law because it puts into legal effect the Mormon proscription against homosexuals. To be sure, apparently the state of Utah hasn't used it against homosexuals in ages, so retaining the law is merely both symbolic and nonsensical.
(You know, looking at a distributional map ... sodomy laws have been retained or repealed in the oddest places. To be sure, it's been a busy year; Arizona, Maryland, Arkansas and Minnesota [just last month] all had their laws either repealed or overruled by court challenges and Texas is under appeal. But ... Massachusetts has a sodomy law? AND anti-discrimination laws, which must have been a masterpiece of negotiation. How do you protect people from discrimination when the conduct for which they are being protected is illegal?)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!