Crime
I AM the Law!
Nature
Barbarism
Sexual Deviance
Sexual Variety
What Is Love?
Masturbation
Prostitution
A Few Words About Words
Ethical Nihilism
Society
Incest
Human Neuroses
CRIMES AGAINST NATURE
July 29, 2010
I was passing through the living room yesterday evening and happened to overhear a news item that caught my attention.
It was about a priest (yes, another priest) who had admitted to having sex with a young boy, which is a news item we've heard so much that it's becoming downright banal. But there were two things about this story that gave me pause. For starters, it happened 30 years ago. But what really got me was the charge against him. He confessed to a crime against nature.
I thought, "Crime against nature? What the hell is that?"
There is an awful lot of legally proscribed sexual activity these days (as I'm sure you are well aware), but I honestly could not remember that I had ever heard it spoken of that way, especially in legal circles.
Here was something I had to google, and the following is from the Wikipedia:
Crime against nature is a legal term used in published cases in the United States since 1814 and normally defined as a form of sexual behavior that is not considered natural and is seen as a punishable offense in dozens of countries and several U.S. states. Sexual practices that have historically been considered to be crimes against nature include homosexual acts, anal sex, bestiality, and necrophilia. Other less common examples include fellatio, and cunnilingus. The term is sometimes also seen as a synonym for sodomy or buggery.
If you've been keeping up with this site at all I'm sure you know how I'm going to respond to this. And yes, you're absolutely right. It's a bunch of bullshit.
Now, if you will indulge me, I'm going to quote myself.
No matter how artificial an object may feel to us, it would have to be occuring outside the universe to be accounted as unnatural.
The One Thing (2000)Please do not misunderstand me on this. I agree that there are some human behaviors that do indeed feel very unnatural, and I am not by any means suggesting that I approve of them. (One of the first events I remember that falls into this category involved a young father who raped and murdered his own two-year-old daughter and threw her body in a lake. Now that feels unnatural.)
I am merely taking issue with the way that such social aberrations are talked about. I have a tendency to be very picky with my words.
I certainly do not approve of the priest's behavior (see Fuck the Priests if you don't believe me), but there is no way I can call it unnatural.
As far as I am concerned, crimes against nature are activities that interfere with natural processes, and even then I'm not going to call them crimes.
Here's a heads-up for you:
Crime is a human invention.
It does not exist in the world of nature, or, to put it somewhat poetically:
Mother Nature knows nothing of crime.
What we are so pleased to brand as a crime is nothing but a form of social dysfunction.
Crime is a social problem. It has not a fucking thing to do with nature.
I don't have a problem with society taking a serious interest in such goings on, and dealing with them legally. At the risk of repeating myself, I have a problem with the way society talks about it, what we might call its presentation of its handling of such matters.
Don't tell me that a man is charged with commiting a crime against nature. Tell me that he did something that basically pisses a lot of people off. Tell me that. That is the brutal honest truth. As I said in the essay What You Should Know,
Laws are made by people who are scared shitless.
It's all that laws are really about anyway. Stuff that the majority of people just plain don't like (that they're scared shitless of), like rape and murder and theft and so on.
Yes, it's true. There is nothing inherently wrong with these behaviors. We just don't like them. We don't want to be murdered or raped or have our stuff taken from us. We just flat out do not want it.
Why can't we say this? Why do we have to listen to some horseshit about someone commiting a crime against nature?
I would like to close with a simple but intriguing musing:
What would the ancient Greeks think of all this hoopla over sodomizing young boys?
