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But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
I believe the sodomy laws common until 2003 actually did this. It was hypothetically just as illegal for a man to get his dick sucked by his wife as by another man.
But then those laws were almost never enforced against openly gay men and truly never enforced against straight couples using their mouths or butts.
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No tortured constructs needed, just prohibit penile stimulation of prostate.
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes -- could a gay man defend his partner's honour by claiming he just sucked at topping, missed the button every time? Was too short, just let the tip in? The Texas law in question prohibited stimulation with a sex toy (by a same-sex partner), but I've never seen evidence it was enforced; are we just giving up on that here? What happens with a penis sheathe? Strap-on over chastity cage (50+ images on e621)?
"Constructive Possession" should create lots of hilarious edge cases as well. They become less hilarious when the government simply deploys a YesChad.jpg.
To be clear, this is not an endorsement, but rather an attempt to highlight the fact that the "struggle" inherent in law enforcement is not an innate feature of law enforcement, but rather a choice the enforcers are making. The truth value of the statement "This would be impractical to enforce" often smuggles in a number of assumptions about the nature of enforcement.
Yeah, that's absolutely fair, and 'constructive possession' is in many ways just the tip of the iceberg, as bad as the shoestring machine is. Stuff like autokeycard, the various recent regulatory changes, Abramski, so on, very much show the limits of textual formalism as a control protecting the actually disfavored, even to the point of blocking defendants from raising the text.
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For the first type of edge cases, the same thing as sucking at marksmanship or having an insufficient weapon to penetrate the target. For the second type, are you arguing that piv sex in condom is not piv sex?
eta: chastity cages should be outlawed separately, for the reasons of their misandristic nature.
Charging someone with attempting sodomy, if we're taking the metaphor that direction, kinda just makes it funnier.
Dunno. There are sheathes that are like condoms in being full-enclosed (still not rated or tested as contraceptives, though I'd expect that regulatory reasons drive that more than practical ones), but most of them range from an eight-inch to more than a quarter-inch of silicone all around. Their point is to alter texture, appearance, and/or girth/length, but especially since some are dual-use as dildos or even intended for women or trans men to wear, the line between stimulating the prostate with a sex toy and stimulating it with the top's dick isn't very clear.
At least to my intuitions, a condom is very much the same underlying sex act, but there's a point where a gal wearing the same sex toy can hit the same button that makes it a lot harder to call the penis doing the stimulation. But my intuitions aren't anywhere near yours.
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Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
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Are you familiar with the gun-law term "constructive possession"?
The "struggle" involved in proving a crime exists because the authorities in question want it to be a struggle. if they decide they don't feel like struggling any more, they can simply remove the struggle and go straight to enforcement.
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