Thursday, April 14, 2016

Stiff Penalty

Mother Jones has the background on one of Ted Cruz’s more interesting cases when he was the Solicitor General in Texas.

In one chapter of his campaign book, A Time for Truth, Sen. Ted Cruz proudly chronicles his days as a Texas solicitor general, a post he held from 2003 to 2008. Bolstering his conservative cred, the Republican presidential candidate notes that during his stint as the state’s chief lawyer, in front of the Supreme Court and federal and state appellate courts he defended the inclusion of “under God” in the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the display of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol, a congressional redistricting plan that assisted Republicans, a restrictive voter identification law, and a ban on late-term abortions. He also described cases in which he championed gun rights and defended the conviction of a Mexican citizen who raped and murdered two teenage girls in a case challenged by the World Court. Yet one case he does not mention is the time he helped defend a law criminalizing the sale of dildos.

[…]

The brief insisted that Texas, in order to protect “public morals,” had  “police-power interests” in “discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors.” There was a  “government” interest, it maintained, in “discouraging…autonomous sex.” The brief compared the use of sex toys to “hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy,” and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution. In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz’s office declared, “There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.” That is, the pursuit of such happiness had no constitutional standing. And the brief argued there was no “right to promote dildos, vibrators, and other obscene devices.” The plaintiffs, it noted, were “free to engage in unfettered noncommercial speech touting the uses of obscene devices,” but not speech designed to generate the sale of these items.

In a 2-1 decision issued in February 2008, the court of appeals told Cruz’s office to take a hike.

For some reason Mr. Cruz and the State of Texas declined to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby depriving us of the chance of getting to know the would-be presidential candidate as the guy who went into great detail about the evils of self-gratification before the Court and the world.

Words that should never be in the same sentence: “Ted Cruz” and “dildo.”

2 barks and woofs on “Stiff Penalty

  1. What causes this? Is it the upbringing? Is it the church of whatever denomination and if so what encourages the obsession with sex, sexual practice, sexual identification and the subset of bathroom selection? So interesting. Someone could do an in depth study for a post-grad thesis. Or not . . .

  2. Words that should never be in the same sentence: “Ted Cruz” and “dildo.”

    Unless separated only by “is a”.

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