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Does the United States Constitution protect the rights of citizens to sell (or use) 'sexual devices?'
That's essentially the question that the federal district court in Alabama confronted this past March in the case of Williams v. Pryor. In that case, the court reviewed an Alabama law criminalizing the sale of "any device designed or marketed as primarily useful for the stimulation of human genital organs." Con-cluding that the ban "bears no reasonable, rational relation to a legitimate state interest," the court concluded that the law was unconstitutional.
We should note that this was decidedly not a 'gay' case. Four of the plaintiffs challenging the law were heterosexual women, and the other two were businesses who catered to women. Nonetheless, the case involves state intrusion into citizens' sexual privacy, and thus has implications for all citizens, gay or straight.
The federal court in Alabama did not conclude that the fundamental right to privacy protected citizens' sexual autonomy; the United States Supreme Court foreclosed such a conclusion with its infamous decision in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick. (Although Hardwick is still on the books, it has been dramatically weakened, if not altogether overruled, by the United States Supreme Court's more recent decision in the Colorado Amendment 2 case.)
However, the Alabama court did conclude that the law was far broader than necessary to protect children and "unwilling adults" from exposure to displays of "obscene material." Moreover, the court concluded that the sexual devices in question did not appeal to "prurient interests" and were therefore not obscene. The court noted that "prurient interests should not be equated with normal, healthy interests in sex," and acknowledged that in many cases of sexual dysfunction, such devices have a therapeutic value.
Most interestingly, the court struck down the statute in part because it interfered with the use of such devices by married couples who sometimes use the devices to aid their marital relationships.
The Alabama court's decision leaves five states with laws on the books banning the distribution of sexual devices: Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia.
Susan Murray and Beth Robinson are attorneys at Langrock Sperry & Wool in Middlebury whose practices include general commercial and civil litigation, employnment, family, estate, personal injury, and worker's compensation cases. If you'd like our column to cover a particular legal issue of interest to our community, please write OITM or call us at 388-6356.
