The Texas Legislature is still living up to the nickname Molly Ivins gave it, the “national laboratory for bad government.” As temporary relief from the federal government’s slide into fascism, the Texas Lege this week presented a grateful nation with some comic relief, even if it’s still kinda fascist. The Lege is considering twin House and Senate bills that would send librarians to prison for 10 years if they allow minors to access books or other materials containing sexually explicit stuff, because apparently dirty books that upset nice Christian moral scolds still exist.
And separately, state Sen. Angela Paxton, the spouse of state Attorney General Ken Paxton, wants to make it a crime for online businesses to sell sex toys without first demanding proof that the buyer is 18 or older. Apparently there’s a great danger of Texas kids buying dildos online, which sounds like something parents should be on top of, not state government. So to speak.
The library criminalization bills, SB 412 and HB 267, would amend the state’s obscenity statute by removing its current exemption for persons who have “scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justification” for allowing a minor to see something sexually explicit.
Such justifications can currently include a “bona fide educational, medical, psychological, psychiatric, judicial, law enforcement, or legislative purpose,” which appears to have been written to allow sex ed and counseling by healthcare providers, but the bill would remove all the allowed exemptions except for “judicial, law enforcement, or legislative purposes,” so as far as we can tell the bill would outlaw most sex ed, too, to say nothing of all those dirty scenes in The Catcher in the Rye or that filthy “Texas state novel,” Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, with all the carrots and poking.
Also, in our very favorite detail, the bill would leave untouched the obscenity law’s existing exemption for showing dirty stuff to a minor if you’re married to that minor, because Texas is perfectly fine with adults marrying 16- and 17-year-olds, as long as they get a judge’s permission. It’s a very moral state that wants to protect kids!
The language in Texas’s penal code (haha, we said penal) on distributing “harmful material to a minor” appears to closely echo the Supreme Court’s “Miller test” for whether something is actually obscene, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The law says that material is “harmful” if its “dominant theme taken as a whole”
(A) appeals to the prurient interest of a minor, in sex, nudity, or excretion;
(B) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for minors; and
(C) is utterly without redeeming social value for minors.
But Yr Wonkette is Not A Lawyer, so it could be that throwing in all the “for minors” language goes far beyond the Miller Test, and really would make any book with a mention of sex illegal, especially if the community is full of prigs who think tiny cartoon genitals in a sex-ed book are unspeakable filth.
This Texas bill looks a lot like Idaho’s bill from a few years back — with the priceless designation House Bill 666 — that similarly would have thrown librarians in jail if a minor sees a book that mentions sex. It failed in Idaho, as have many Jail the Librarians bills around the country, but if any state can pull off such a ridiculous law, we’d bet on Texas. SB 412 passed the Senate last week and now is waiting to be passed by the state House.
And then there’s Angela Paxton’s SB 3003, which purely by coincidence looks like it says “BOOB” if you unfocus your eyes a little. One in a long line of Texas dildo bills, SB 3003 would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $5,000 fine, to sell “obscene devices” to anyone under 18, or to sell said obscene doodads without verifying the buyer’s age via a copy of a government-issued photo ID or using some third-party age verification app. The bill goes into quite a bit of detail on what constitutes a valid age check, and generously allows “exclusive use of payment methods that are restricted to individuals 18 years of age of older, provided such verification is supplemented by another age verification method.”
There is nothing in the bill, thank heavens, about purchasing sex toys for your spouse who is a minor, but we suspect just reading that sentence may have put you on a watch list, sorry.
Presumably, there’s some crisis involving Texas minors purchasing dildos, fleshlights, vibrators, and other naughty toys that we just haven’t heard about. Otherwise this just sounds nuts, and surely nobody in Texas would ever introduce legislation to address a completely imaginary problem.
Haha, we joked you! Fundagelicals are always freaking out about the masturbating and the dildos and the sex toys, which will send all the youngs to hell, so of course Texas needs to demand age verification for dildywhassits. It’s just how Texas does things! Texas in the early Oughts (or Ought-nots) passed a famously unconstitutional bill banning ownership of more than six dildos, and is also considering a separate bill that would restrict sales of sex toys to adult shops, which would effectively force retailers to remove vibrators and the like from the shelves where they sell condoms and other over-the counter birth control stuff.
And of course there’s that long-ago legal brief where then-Solicitor General Ted Cruz tried to argue that the state could outright ban sex toys, because people who use dildos or vibrators are probably just one step away from committing incest.
Sen. Paxton does not appear to have contemplated similar regulation of online sales of cucumbers, hairbrushes, pillows, armchairs, rolled-up sleeping bags, electric toothbrushes, handheld shower heads, washing machines, cell phones, video game controllers, apple pies, or liver, which strikes us as just encouraging all sorts of perversity, or in that last case, reading Portnoy’s Complaint, which could send a librarian to jail.
In conclusion, the Texas Legislature should just go fuck itself and get this nonsense out of its system.
[Popular Information / 404 Media / The Barbed Wire]
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