No sex toys for you says Not-So-Sweet Home Alabama.

Sometimes when the coercive welfare-statist liberal left is having its way with the Maid of Liberty's maidenhead libertarians forget how the reactionary right can be just as rapaciously idiotic and authoritarian in their own way when they truss up Ms Freedom's mind with their moralistic chastity belts.

A recent article from the Birmingham News, Alabama Supreme Court upholds sex toy ban, tells the tale of Hoover's little Love Stuff (Hoover is a town, Love Stuff is a sex shop) that tried to overturn the state's prohibition against sex toys.

They lost, but it took the wizened black-robed Supremes some impressive judicial hoop-jumping and back-flipping to conjure up the 7-2 outcome.

The first courtroom contortion from the judging corps went like this: "While people have the right to use the devices in private, the Legislature has the right to ban public distribution of those products."

So let's see, how many devices do we use privately in our homes that ought to be banned from public distribution under this astute deliberative conclusion? Fingernail clippers? Dental floss? Toilet paper? Hemorrhoid preparations? Electric nose hair trimmers?

After all, the article doesn't mention anything about saving Alabamian souls from carnal, libidinous, licentious, salacious or prurient evils, so why pick on sexually related stimulators? The decision could apply to virtually any "devices."

Hoover AL "Love Stuff" store manager (right) and 4 mannequins (far right)
greeted a Judge, court reporter, videographer and lawyers who toured the
shop in 2007 ("to help determine if the store is an adult-only business,"
according to the Birmingham News) after the owner challenged the
constitutionality of the state's sex toy ban. It took nearly two years for the
state Supreme Court to render its ruling. The owner may take a run at the US
Supreme Court next. (AP Photo/The Birmingham News, Samantha Clemens)
 

Another question is, how did "the Legislature" acquire "a right" to violate people's rights?" They didn't, of course; they acquired "a power."

But that's a distinction the powercrats all over America never care to dwell on.

Lawyers for Love Stuff had challenged the ban on the basis that it "violated a person's right to sexual privacy." Seems like a perfectly reasonable appeal to the likes of libertarians and other lovers.

But no. The 'Bama Supremes resolved that "public morality was a legal reason to regulate sales."

And you might rightfully ask, "Whose public morality?" Was there a statewide referendum to outlaw these particular self-help appliances? Were contentious town hall meetings held in every hometown and hamlet across the state? Did voters decide what was "publicly moral" and what wasn't?

"Okay folks, the results are in. Velvet handcuffs and love rings and wireless techno arousers and thermoplastic buzz buddies and nubby virility extenders are in but those wicked vibrators are immoral and have to go!"

Which in any case is irrelevant to libertarians since nobody, no matter what their numbers, has the right to vote away anyone else's rights. It's why those oft-mentioned Founding Fathers created a constitutional republic and not a democracy, which, as they knew, is nothing more than mob rule wherein 51% of the people lord it over the other 49%, rights be damned.

Come on now, all commercial activity is private activity, even when it takes place in public. It's people who buy and sell and trade and transport and supply, not some mysterious entity called "the public." Therefore there is no such thing as "public morality." It's just a conceptual device invented by government (another conceptual device) to manipulate people and deprive them of their rights.

In other words, "public morality" is a contrivance used by some individuals to coercively control other individuals.

As a last resort the high court justified its judicial decision by quoting a lower court: "There is nothing 'private' or 'consensual' about the advertising and sale of a dildo."

But how much advertising is private or consensual? Is a TV commercial for electric nose hair trimmers private or consensual? A grocery store window sign for Toilet paper? How about a roadside billboard for Bubba's Bock Beer? Can any driver see it? Did every driver consent to its appearance in their windshields? If the justification for banning the advertising and sale of dildos is based on privacy and consent, virtually all advertising must go.

Every argument employed by the Alabama Supreme Court is an expedient designed to dispossess a person of his or her personal freedom while imposing its own peculiar morality on everyone else, and the result is both hypocritical and hilarious.

Here's how:

The existing law that bans the sale of "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs" includes exceptions for medicinal, scientific, educational and "other" purposes. So the enterprising entrepreneurs of Hoover's little Love Stuff shop continue to sell their self-arousal accessories through the simple expedient of requiring their customers to sign a statement attesting that their usage will be for one of the legally acceptable purposes.

So what do the Justices and their governmental minions do now, send out the SWAT teams at two AM to bash in bedroom doors in search of dildoing evildoers?

The culture war wages on; coercive Morality State versus coercive Welfare State. In both cases libertarians are waiting (but not holding their breath) for the adults to grow up.
 

 (Read the Reed interview at The US Report)