Uncommonly silly law of the day (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Wednesday, 23 February 2005

Uncommonly silly law of the day

Both Jeff Goldstein and James Joyner aren’t particularly upset that the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to overturn Alabama’s law prohibiting the sale of sex toys. Mississippi is one of two other states having such laws; apparently the early eighties saw a binge of women getting off with dildos, so the legislature (presumably not wanting competition in the “being dildos” department) decided to intervene.

At first, I was a bit upset about this, but in looking through the Mississippi Code I found out that—lo and behold—I can actually exempt myself from this law:

Sections 97–29-101 through 97–29-109 shall not apply when the distribution or wholesale distribution of the material, performance or device was made by:

(a) A person, corporation, company, partnership, firm, association, business, establishment or other legal entity to a person associated with an institution of higher learning, either as a member of the faculty or as a matriculated student, teaching or pursuing a course of study related to such material, performance or device[.]

So, all I need to do is create a directed study course in sex toys, or con the psych department into letting me teach “Love and Sexuality,” and I can go into the sex toy business—so long as I only sell the sex toys to my students, which I suppose is a conflict of interest of sorts, but what can you do?

Update: Jason Kuznicki has found another amusing exception in Alabama’s law.

1 comment:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. Robert Prather wrote @ Thu, 24 Feb 2005, 6:32 am CST:

If you started selling sex toys to your students, you would be following in a long, proud tradition of rent seeking in this state.

The law is stupid, I would like to see it overturned, but the likelihood of that is probably close to zero. Agreed that the male legislators didn’t want any competition, either in the bedroom or for the title of biggest dildos in the state.

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