Scrivener.net

Thursday, December 23, 2004


What Arnold and the California legislature have done.

How come I hadn't heard about this? Was there an election or something knocking everything else out of the news?

CALIFORNIA: NEW LAW BANS SEX WITH THE DEAD

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia. Officials said the law would help prosecutors who had been stymied by the lack of an official ban on the practice.

"Nobody knows the full extent of the problem," said Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. "But a handful of instances over the past decade is frequent enough to have a bill concerning it." The new law makes sex with a corpse a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. [NY Times]

But enquiring low-brow East Coast minds want to know: how often had prosecutors been stymied, and what kind of "handful of incidents"?

The Times is too proper and coy to report such things. But you know that the uncensored truth ( in the form of the original news wire report it bowlderized) is out there on the Internet...

"Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that," Ochoa told Reuters news agency.

The state's first attempt to outlaw necrophilia, in response to a case of a man charged with having sex with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern California, stalled last year in a legislative committee.

Lawmakers revived the bill this year after an unsuccessful prosecution of a man found in a San Francisco funeral home drunk and passed out on top of an elderly woman's corpse... [Reuters]

Ewww...

OK, so is California finally catching up with civilization? Or is this just another step in the Republican campaign to suppress alternative lifestyles?

Either way, it beats naming post offices.