"Ride 'em, cowgirl"! - Texas "toy" ban overturned

Hillary focuses on Texas - coincidence?

A federal appeals court has overturned a Texas statute outlawing sex toy sales, leaving Alabama as the state with the strictest ban on such devices.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by up to two years in jail, violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment on the right to privacy. In its decision Tuesday, the appeals court cited Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 opinion that struck down bans on consensual sex between gay couples.

"Just as in Lawrence, the state here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct," the appeals judges wrote. "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the state is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification after Lawrence."

Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama were the only three states that continued to outlaw the sale of sex toys and vibrators.Va. . err. .Virginia has a law barring obscene items, but it does not seem to apply to sex toy sales. Louisiana, Kansas and Colorado all had laws barring obscene devices that have been struck down. And the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Georgia law banning the advertising of sex toys, which can be sold under some approved circumstances.