So Congress has been working on a repeal on the military’s ban on sodomy between humans. And believe it or not you have to make that specification “between humans” because the Uniform Code of Military Justice defines sodomy as including bestiality as well. From CNS news:
Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.
It states: "(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
Any lawyers out there will tell you that this isn’t too difficult to deal with in repeal. Indeed, I suspect most non-lawyers get that, too. Instead of repealing the entire section in its entirety, all Congress has to is direct that the current statute be replaced with something close to this:
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
There, that’s not so difficult, is it? Except for some reason the version passed in the Senate didn’t do that; instead it repealed the whole thing. Which led to silliness like this:
Which, um, talk about whiffing an easy throw. Mr. Carney, the correct answer is “No, the President does not support bestiality. Next question.” Or if throw in the phrase “are you an idiot?” if you are feeling cranky. But instead Carney stupidly chose to ignore the question. This then gives Michele Bachmann an opening to denounce the whole thing when talking to Glenn Beck:
And even those attention whores at PETA had to stick their noses into it, denouncing Carney for his idiotic response:
“We were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality,” the group wrote in a letter to Carney. “With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed — and for good reason.”
This might have been taken seriously before the last fifty or so idiotic attention-whoring stunts like telling people to drink beer instead of milk. PETA has squandered whatever credibility they ever had.
But the truth what is going on here is revealed by this passage in The Hill piece quoted above:
As the final Defense authorization bill gets hammered out in conference committee, one surprising issue is riling both social conservatives and animal rights activists: the repeal of a ban on sodomy and bestiality.
The Senate bill, which was passed last week, removed an article from the Uniform Code of Military Justice stating “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.”
But the article is still included in the House bill, and House Republicans want it to remain in the final bill.
(Emphasis added.) Now, no one has figured out why the Senate version also repealed the ban on bestiality, but however it happened, it seems that House Republicans are using this as what is classically known as a poison pill. If you are unaware of the tactic, here’s how it works. If Congresspersons want to kill a law, but can’t quite get it voted down as is, they then insert something into the law that they believe will render the law unacceptable.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 demonstrates both 1) how the approach is supposed to work, and 2) how it can backfire. Did you ever wonder why it was that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came to protect people not only from racial discrimination but also gender-based discrimination? Well, because racists opposed to the law proposed adding language extending the law’s prohibitions to sex-based discrimination, that’s how. They believed that this would render the bill unacceptable to just enough members of Congress to allow them to defeat it and when some Congresspersons in favor of the bill tried to remove the language prohibiting sex discrimination, a coalition of racists and feminists blocked the effort. The racists were gambling that this provision would prove to be a poison pill that killed the entire thing, while the small minority of feminists hoped it would still pass. And surely you know who turned out to be right.
So that is plainly what is really happening right now. Like I said, no one has explained how the bill came to be in its current form. I would never assume that stupidity is not a possible explanation. But however it got there, it seems pretty obvious that it is being retained as a poison pill. How would you like to run for Congress next year when your opponent can correctly assert that you voted to legalize sex with animals in the military? I am not particularly happy about that approach—I prefer policies to be determined in a much more straightforward approach than that. I mean today it will be Republicans using the poison pill of legalizing bestiality. Tomorrow it will be Democrats sticking in a provision requiring cute puppies to be drowned in an effort to kill a bill that would actually balance the budget. And in either case it means that a bill’s fate is less likely to be determined by its merits, which is not a good thing in a republic.
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