Dept of, Wot abaht bestiality?
For lo, it seems some time since I perpetrated a post on this theme.
But it perchanced that I lately received an email from a site that will provide petition facilities to a vast range of people for a vast range of issues, from the very local to the global, and this one was requesting support for a petition to pass a federal law criminalising bestiality in the USA.
I really do not know what the constitutional position is on non-citizens chiming in on such a matter, except, presumably, to register the general horror in which the lax state of the law there is held.
One is informed that in 8 states and Washington DC zoophilia is no crime at all. And in the 42 states in which it is against the law, in 23 of those it counts merely as a misdemeanour.
I was a little surprised to learn this: under English law, for a very long time bestiality was prosecuted as sodomy, i.e. up until 1861 was at least technically a capital crime.
(I have heretofore remarked that there is less historiography than one might wish on the topic - I have been given Doubts about one academic article as the author turned out to be a serial hoaxer, and while it is entirely possible that he also did some entirely legit delving in The National Archives and made serious contributions to scholarship, confidence is rather weakened.)
But given that one is led to believe that several US states continue to have on their books penal laws relating to sexual behaviour, some of them even affecting ye conjugales between legitimately married couples - possibly based on previous English law, or maybe generated entirely from Puritan fervour? - one is a little surprised to learn that animal love gets a pass. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2765966.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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