March 21, 2006 | 9:20 a.m. ET Mississippi Outlaws Sex Toys (Dan Abrams)
There is a landmark legal battle of constitutional proportions being fought down in Mississippi. It involves fundamental rights protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, not to mention the rights of certain small business owners to satisfy their customers. This week, another court refused to recognize Mississippians’ right to find companionship for 29.99 and so a law outlawing the sale of sex toys will stand.
“A person commits the offense of distributing unlawful sexual devices when he knowingly sells, advertises, publishes or exhibits to any person any three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs or offers to do so or possesses such devices with the intent to do so.”
Well, I am glad to see that the local legislators are focusing on the most pressing issues of the day. I’ve long believed that a three-dimensional, possibly battery-operated device is far more menacing than a handgun. In Mississippi, people can buy guns at a gun show with no background check and certain weapons can be carried almost anywhere. Sure, guns and toys can bring joy and a sense of comfort to the user, but apparently the legislators concluded that a genital replica is a far greater threat to society.
This, from a state that levies only an 18-cent tax on cigarettes, 55 cents below the national average and where 62 percent of residents are overweight, making it the fattest state in the country. Yet still the public schools don’t make gym class compulsory. Mississippi’s laws would make you believe sex is the single greatest threat to public safety and well-being. After all, it’s illegal in Mississippi to have sex with someone you’re not married to or to live with someone other than your spouse.
Both can result in a $500 fine and six months in jail. And men are not permitted to be aroused in public. But at least good people are protected from the disfigurement that could result from an accidental electrical overload from a defective toy.
Georgia and Texas have passed similar bans and courts have repeatedly ruled the legislators have the power to do it. I guess the Second Amendment doesn’t say anything about the right to bear a stimulation device.
But the sex activists are not closing up shop in the South Pole just yet. They formed a lobbying group based in Florida called the National Alliance of Adult Trade Organizations or NAATO. Not, of course, to be confused with the other NATO, which is based in Brussels.
I don’t mean to pick on Mississippi. I love the state and the people, but I just don’t get why the legislators are fighting so hard for this law. We’re talking about adults here. It’s not that I really care about ensuring that these toys are ready accessible. Really. It’s just that you have to wonder, is one of these toys really a greater threat to the community than what real live people do to each other every day?