I’m terribly upset I missed this story when it was published in the Herald at the end of March, mostly because I’ve been laughing my ass off since reading it and I hate losing an opportunity to share a good LOLislature story with whoever happens to being paying attention. Ready? There is a bill currently in the MA House that seeks to extend our child pornography laws to include anyone over the age of 60. No, really.
Fueled by a rise in sex abuse against the elderly and disabled and a string of cases involving photography and cyber postings, the proposed legislation would add seniors and the handicapped to kiddie porn laws.
“Obviously with the technology evolving, the crimes committed using that technology have increased. That’s clearly the case,” said Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who covers parts of western Massachusetts and helped craft the proposal. “All we’re trying to do with these two pieces of legislation is to protect our two most vulnerable populations.”
Hey look! They even managed to sneak in a way to blame technology!
sigh.
While elder porn may not be your thing, personally I’m more of an alt-porn guy, telling a healthy 60 yo (defined as elderly by the state) that having a nude picture taken of themselves is worthy of 10-20 in state prison obviously flies in the face of reason and decades worth of little blue pill marketing. If you read the Herald story it’s chock full of examples of why this bill is necessary, truly awful crimes. But in traditional “OH MY GOD HOW CAN’T YOU SHARE MY OUTRAGE?!?” Herald fashion, all of the examples given are already covered under state law, unless someone killed off our rape and assault statutes when I wasn’t looking.
The other component of the bill seeks to add persons with disabilities to the same kiddy porn statutes. This part is a little more confusing since the MGL Ch 265 Sec 13k (the referenced definition) defines a person with a disability as:
a person with a permanent or long-term physical or mental impairment that prevents or restricts the individual’s ability to provide for his or her own care or protection.
But that’s not our only definition of disabled, Ch 71 defines disabilities for the purpose of education as:
developmental delay or any intellectual, sensory, neurological, emotional, communication, physical, specific learning or health impairment or combination thereof
So there is definitely some room for clarity here. Depending on how granular someone wanted to get with the definition of ‘disabled’, it’s easy to imagine a situation where a deaf person or someone missing a toe could wind up getting jail time for posing as a nude figure model in an art class. Silly hypotheticals aside, there is a perfectly good reason why we have a reasonably large ‘elder porn’ market, people tend to enjoy seeing their own demographic in porn and old people are still allowed be sexually active, I think. But the right to a consensual sex life unhindered by law should not depend on meeting a state definition of normal. For the record the sponsor of this bill, Sixteenth Suffolk Rep Kathi-Anne Reinstein, is the MA Legislator who proposed the fluffernutter as the official state sandwich back in 2006. Clearly the kind of exciting and well rounded person who should be deciding what exactly constitutes a healthy sex life in the Commonwealth.
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Finally, someone who believes we need more laws to take away my neighbor’s rights to live their own life. Thank you, Rep. Fluffenutter!
I agree that certain MA legislators do need to get laid more and will generously offer my services to all females lawmakers throughut the state needing such guidance.