As note many times on this blog, members of the Republican Party of Virginia are obsessed with resurrecting the twice invalidated sodomy statute a/k/a the "crimes against nature" statute. At first blush one has to wonder why the obsession, but once one realizes that the Virginia GOP is controlled by the viciously anti-gay "family values" group misnamed as The Family Foundation ("TFF"), the obsession begins to make sense. In addition to opposing abortion in every instance and pushing for a theocracy in Virginia, TFF's number one goal is to make life a living hell for LGBT Virginians and to criminalize us in every possible manner. Hence GOP state Sen. Tom Garrett's misguided bill to restore the sodomy statute which could again expose gays to felony charges rather than mere misdemeanor charges. Garrett (pictured at left) may claim his goal is to protect minors from adults, but the real agenda is something different. A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch rightly takes Garrett and indirectly the GOP to task. Here are excerpts:
Some Virginia public officials seem to have trouble grasping an extremely simple concept: Protecting children from sexual predation does not require drawing distinctions among different types of sex.
Garrett recently introduced legislation to amend and re-enact Virginia’s notorious crimes-against-nature statute, which court rulings have rendered a nullity. The bill renews the prohibitions against oral or anal sex with minors or in public, while stipulating that such acts between consenting adults in private do not violate the law.
This marks a considerable improvement over the position taken by Ken Cuccinelli, who believes homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of [the] soul” and that “homosexual acts . . . should not be accommodated in government policy.”
[W]hile Garrett’s bill is an improvement, it still has a lot of problems, as others have pointed out at length. Virginia law lets 17-year-olds marry. But if those 17-year-olds then had oral sex, under Garrett’s original bill they would be committing felonies. Genital sex between an adult and a 17-year-old remains a misdemeanor, but merely to solicit oral sex with a 17-year--old would be a felony.
Moreover, public sex acts would be treated differently depending on what sort of conduct they involved: as felonies for “crimes against nature,” but misdemeanors otherwise. As the Virginia ACLU’s Claire Guthrie Gastañaga told ThinkProgress, Garrett’s original measure “leaves in place discriminatory treatment and doesn’t address the underlying problem that LGBT people are treated differently than folks that have other kinds of sex.”
Like they say, this isn’t rocket surgery: (1) Grown-ups should not prey on kids, and (2) sex belongs in the bedroom, not on the boardwalk. Virginia can easily regulate those two questions of “who” and “where” without ever bringing up the question of “how.”
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