It’s one of the many strange things about sex and the law in the United States that sex between humans and non-human animals isn’t illegal everywhere. It’s specifically illegal in 32 states, of which 16 make it a felony; the other 18 don’t have laws against it.
Some animal welfare advocates see the dearth of laws against bestiality as a huge gap in what they see as a network of oh-so-conscientious laws that govern society’s oh-so-considerate treatment of its oh-so-lucky non-human citizens. Conservative elements see the dearth of laws against bestiality as a a vast gap in the network of laws that govern and control what they see as revolting human perversions.
Florida is one of the states without an anti-bestiality statute. This is a state, mind you, where the “bipartisan” Republican governor just banned federal funding for Planned Parenthood even though that means losing another $1 million in unrelated Federal funding. Luckily, the legislature is not just targeting abortion. It just passed Senate Bill 344, a which specifically bans sex with animals.
Andrew, a blogger at Southern Fried Science, got some attention by pointing out that the legislation bans sex with animals, that is, all animals, that is, all animals including humans, since – news flash – we’re animals. (Some of us more than others). Andrew claimed that Florida just banned sex. He framed this as another example of Florida lawmakers’ utter fail when it comes to basic biology.
But putting forth that idea requires a complete misunderstanding of and disrespect for America’s phenomenally boneheaded lawmaking process. Laws are among the wackiest goddamn things you will ever read. Let me repeat: laws. Those are bills that get passed. Many bills that don’t get passed are ten times more half-assed than the ones that do. I used to type these damn things into a database when I worked for a lobbyist database. This was back before OCR, whey they paid people like me $6 an hour to type this shit in the middle of the night while listening to Larry King. It was, oh, just oodles of fun.
I typed not just California laws, but those from other states, including Florida – and all states vote on some whack-ass shit. They still do. On three separate occasions during the nine months I worked typing legislative documents (20 years ago), I saw proposed state laws banning bestiality.
Normally, legislation provides definitions to ensure that terms are clear to judges down the line. But animal welfare bills don’t usually define “animal,” as far as I can tell. The idea that a bestiality law would be invalidated because it doesn’t define “animal” is beyond pedantic; it’s flat-out wrong.
The bill, Florida’s S. 828.126, F.S., available from e-Lobbyist, does, however, do a lot of defining just what “sex” is, and it’s intimately creepy. Skip the following section if animal sex either squicks or politically outrages you:
828.126 Sexual activities involving animals.—
(1) As used in this section, the term:(a) “Sexual conduct” means any touching or fondling by a person, either directly or through clothing, of the sex organs or anus of an animal or any transfer or transmission of semen by the person upon any part of the animal for the purpose of sexual gratification or arousal of the person.
(b) “Sexual contact” means any contact, however slight, between the mouth, sex organ, or anus of a person and the sex organ or anus of an animal, or any penetration, however slight, of any part of the body of the person into the sex organ or anus of an animal, or any penetration of the sex organ or anus of the person into the mouth of the animal, for the purpose of sexual gratification or sexual arousal of the person.
[Link.]
Robin Marty at Care2.com echoed the sentiments of many when she said, “If you have to rely on courts “almost certainly” interpreting your law properly, you’re doing it wrong.” But if that’s true, every law ever passed in the United States is doing it wrong. All laws require on the interpretation of the courts.
Don’t get me wrong! This is still half-baked legislation intended to outlaw perversion. It ultimately has fuck-all to do with animal welfare, and it will not even do what it was intended to do. The bill’s author, Nancy Rich, is legislating from revulsion, not rationality.
In that, Kommentkrieg on this one is particularly illuminating. It shows the Wisdom of Repugnance, displayed by Marty when she makes the following parenthetical aside in her article:
Seriously? You had to ban it to get people to stop?
But then commenter Karin B. slaps Robin down for minimizing the problem:
There is nothing funny about bestiality. It is about time that we in FL do have a ban. As pointed out above, without a legal ban anybody can have sex with a non-human animal and, if caught, would not be convicted of any crime…I find this posting of very poor taste, and many of those who left comments should be ashamed to display such blatant disregard for animal welfare…
[Link.]
Karin hijacked the thread for her “pet” obsession, but she’s right that there’s nothing funny about the kind of bestiality she thinks she’s talking about — animal abuse. The Florida legislation was authored by Rich after she heard about a case near her where a guy accidentally killed a goat by grabbing its collar while having sex with it.
The problem is, the guy who asphyxiated a goat – assuming it was “his” goat – could have slaughtered it, and that would have been fine with everyone except the goat.
So…do Karin, and Florida’s legislators, get their protein only from vegetable sources, or – to meet them more than halfway – do they eat only the flesh of humanely-slaughtered animals?
Or do they eat factory-farmed critters like most of the rest of the country, but they want to legislate morality, because bestiality is “disgusting”?
Gee, let’s ask Nancy Rich, the author of the bill what she thinks…as Mark Caputo of the St. Petersburg Times-Herald did back in 2009, when Rich first introduced the legislation:
“There’s a tremendous correlation between sexually deviant behavior and crimes against children and crimes against animals,” said Rich, a Sunrise Democrat. “This is long overdue. These are heinous crimes. And people belong in jail.”
But the [Florida] man suspected of assaulting Meg the goat was never charged because law enforcement officials could not link him to the scene. The suspect was arrested months later in a separate goat abduction, said Walton County Assistant State Attorney Walter Parker.
[Link.]
From which I derive two pieces of information:
First, Senator Rich believes this is about “sexually deviant behavior” connected to crimes against children — the same argument sometimes used about porn. People who have sex with animals are said to be also child molesters…therefore, we must legislate.
Second, even with this law on the books, the Florida man accused of strangling the goat would not have been charged. Just because there’s a law against what he’s accused of doing doesn’t create evidence where none exists. There is no way this legislation being on the books would have affected the case it was conceived to address.
This isn’t about animal welfare at all. Given Rich’s middle-of-the-road history, I don’t even think it’s about legislating morality as such – at least, not insofar as Rich is concerned. Based on her record, she’s a moral crusader only on matters of child welfare, and I believe she’s framed this within that context only because that’s what she’s used to. Her legislation is about the squick factor, pure and simple.
For the record, I believe all human interactions with conscious beings, whether they have pointy ears and a tail or lipstick and high heels (or any combination thereof) should ideally be governed by the same standards of consent. You can have the argument as to just what that means with someone other than me, for now.
But this law does nothing to improve animal welfare, and animal welfare advocates who want to get self-righteous about it are barking up the wrong tree. They’re squicked. And that’s a crappy place from which to legislate. This new law doesn’t do much.
Thankfully, it also doesn’t outlaw sex.
Photo by Danilo Pasquale.
828.126 (1) (a) is interesting – seemingly allows for fondling of the animal in question for it’s own sexual arousal or gratification, just not of the person involved. Good news for folk that like to pamper their pets!
Ahem, moving on… I could see it coming that someone would, of course, link this to child abuse. Whereas I don’t really condone sex with animals, I can’t imagine that it encourages child molestation, and it’s bizarre to imagine that it might be treated with the same judicial prejudice.
oops, sorry Thomas for misnaming you in my previous comment (take it as a compliment). good post.
I cannot help but notice the fact that this law does not seem to ban any behavior at all if the behavior is for the purpose of sexual gratification or sexual arousal of the animal. As long as the person doesn’t try to enjoy it, no crime has been committed.
@EM — regardless of the humanity or inhumanity of slaughter methods, I never implied this guy was innocently slaughtering his goat for meat by doing what he did. I used the term “could have” intentionally.
@ EM: read _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_ and your idea of required humane slaughter methods will go out the window.
@ Violet: I find your post intriguing. I think you nailed several critical cultural and political problems with this approach to bestiality. In Norway, the enforcement of the law regulating porn was recently changed to allow for all porn that portrays CONSENSUAL sex, including consensual BDSM, but not porn that shows grave sexual violence and coercion, or sex with minors, animals, and dead bodies.
“The problem is, the guy who asphyxiated a goat – assuming it was “his” goat – could have slaughtered it, and that would have been fine with everyone except the goat.”
To be fair, most places have laws requiring humane slaughter methods, which, to my knowledge, do not include strangulation during rape.