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You're listening to the Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage's sex and relationship show for grown-ups. If you're under 18, get out of here, young'un.
If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony, well, there's nothing you can't do.
Walking home from the pot shop in my neighborhood the other day, doing two things at once, eating an edible and doom scrolling as I wandered into traffic. I suddenly felt like reading what I was reading pretty soon. I'm going to be living in a country where no one goes to prison for possessing marijuana anymore, but people go to prison for possessing pornography.
That's the plan in Oklahoma where Republican state Senator Dusty Devers, which is a porn name. If I ever heard one Republican state Senator Dusty Devers introduced a bill the day after Trump was sworn into office or back into office and that would put anyone who produces, distributes, or possesses pornography in prison for 10 years.
The legislation also includes prison terms of up to 30 years for anyone found guilty of quote-unquote porn trafficking, which the bill does not define. which is a problem. As the New Republic pointed out a few years back, trafficking is less a clear-cut crime than a call to moral panic. There's no legal definition of trafficking. Trafficking means whatever a cop or a prosecutor wants it to mean.
So in Oklahoma, porn trafficking could mean anything from transporting someone across state lines to appear in porn against their will to flying into Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City with nude pictures of your wife on your phone. It'll be up to the cops in Oklahoma. Lots of stupid bills get introduced by random state senators and state house members all across the country every year.
State legislatures, we are not sending our best. And when a stupid bill like this one gets introduced by a Republican, it generates a lot of news coverage. The idiot who introduced it gets to claim they're being attacked by the lamestream media. They raise a lot of money.
And the people targeted by the bill out there reading stories about it, in this case, people who make or consume pornography, and that means pretty much everyone winds up feeling anxious. Now, bills designed to attract media attention aren't just a right-wing thing.
Bradford Blackman, a Democratic state legislator in Mississippi, introduced a bill last week called the Contraception Begins at Erection Act. This bill would, if passed, make it a crime in Mississippi for a man to, quote, discharge genetic material without intent to fertilize an embryo. Quick technical point, sperm fertilizes eggs, doesn't fertilize embryos, but point taken.
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