Laws Against Things That People Will Do Anyway

I'm in Phoenix this morning, looking forward to getting home this week, back to normal. You'll be glad to know that Phoenix is wet and chilly this morning, we've had some of those storms that made such a mess in California. When I say "chilly," I mean that it's 56 degrees outside, brrr. And when I say it's "wet," I mean that last night you could actually see that the pavement was darker than usual due to the accumulation of literally dozens of "raindrops." This morning, no, you can't actually see anything, but it is cloudy and it kind of feels like it could rain.

I found this Washington Post story by way of Hecate, whose opinion I share, as usual.

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 5 -- The lights dimmed. Couples skated purposefully onto the ice. And at the command of an unseen deejay, teenage lips touched in defiance of what even authorities here have grudgingly come to call "the kissing law."

"The law to me is nothing. I don't think it's going to stop anyone," said Bianca Secchia, 14, who participated in the demonstration Saturday and shared another, less political smooch afterward with her boyfriend, Attie Nortje, 17, at the darkened Northgate Ice Arena.

The protest on the northern suburban fringe of Johannesburg was hardly a signal moment in South Africa's storied history of liberation politics. Most of the two dozen young demonstrators settled for scattered group hugs that prosecutors would have struggled to deem criminal even under the new law, which prohibits physical romantic contact involving anyone under 16, regardless of consent.

But the controversy generated by news of the looming event -- first on the social networking site Facebook, then in radio and newspaper reports -- led authorities to announce that they had no intention of arresting or prosecuting anyone for violating a law enacted just three weeks earlier. It amounted to quite a victory for legions of cyberlinked high school students not yet old enough to drive themselves to their own protest.

Strictly speaking, the law criminalized for those under 16 a remarkably broad range of behavior, including mouth-to-mouth contact and any other form of touching that could cause sexual arousal. S. Africa's Teens Give New Law the Kiss-Off: Anti-Intimacy Measure Sparks Online Outrage

It turns out, lawmakers in South Africa have decided to make teenage kissing, indeed any "physical romantic contact," illegal.

You can just see the intelligent logical processes that would lead to such a law. One: consider teen sex and the problems it causes; two: almost all teens who have sex start with kissing; three: make kissing illegal and there can be no One. Brilliant.

I was in Portugal a month or two ago, and they have a system that I thought sounded kind of neat. They have sensors along the road that measure how fast you're going. If you're going over the speed limit, the sensor trips a traffic light, turning it red, so you have to stop. That'll slow you down, right? The guy I was riding with told me about this, and I thought it was fascinating, until we came to one of these sensors, which he sped through (they are clearly marked). Sure enough, the traffic light turned red -- and my friend drove right through that, too. He said, "It's nighttime, there's no traffic, I don't need to stop." "Couldn't you get a ticket?" I asked him. "Oh, yes," he said, waving his hand to indicate the deserted streets, "But there are no police here."

The point being that people are going to do what they're going to do, no matter what the law says. There are apparently some people, politicians and preachers mainly, it appears to me, who think that people make their personal decisions by first finding out what the rules are, and then doing whatever it is they are supposed to do. Actually, I guess I do know some people like that, gutless people with no initiative of their own.

In fact, actual prosecutions of consensual encounters between teenagers under 16 are unlikely under the law, requiring explicit approval from the country's top prosecutor. Authorities said the measure was intended to make it easier to prosecute sexual liaisons between adult men and much younger girls, and assaults on the mentally disabled.

Yet news of the law triggered a backlash among thousands of students armed with little more than computers, Facebook accounts and an acute sense of outrage at what they regarded as the clueless behavior of repressive adults. Many teens also posted pictures of themselves engaged in amorous, but largely PG-rated, exchanges.

"We're young. We need to experiment," Natalie Winston, 12, said before the protest here. "When you're 21, you're old already, and ugly."

Hey, how's that make you feel?

There are some things you can pass laws against, and it's just not going to happen: Prohibition was one of those things; I don't know why people drink alcohol, but it apparently doesn't matter what the law says, we never saw so many drunks as we did when the Constitution was amended to prohibit it. That would go for teen kissing, as well -- teenagers are designed by nature to experience sexual arousal, and to like it. They are pairing off and learning to adapt to their new adult bodies, and the power of all this makes some fuddy-duddy law irrelevant, trivial. No kid caught up in the emotion of a lover's kiss is going to ask himself or herself what the law says about it. They may decide to go behind the bushes or something, but no law is going to stop kissing.

Move this to the local arena. The Citizens for a Responsible Whatever believe that a new law banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity will lead to guys claiming to be "women on the inside" so they can lurk in ladies rooms. The idea is crazy on so many levels, but relevant to this news story, you can see that it doesn't matter what the law says, men aren't going to lurk in ladies rooms. For one thing, ladies don't like perverted men coming into the ladies room, and will beat them with their purses. For another thing, gallant gentlemen, as well as ladies' boyfriends and husbands, who are bigger than the ladies themselves, do not like guys lurking around ladies rooms, and will throw them out. Even another thing, there is a ton of social pressure on men not to wander into the wrong restroom, it's embarrassing. Another thing, guys don't like to say they are "women on the inside" if they're not. There are just so many reasons.

The law the CRW is protesting is about discrimination. If somebody is trying to catch a taxi, the taxi should stop, no matter whether the person fits a simple gender stereotype or not. Because there is a tendency for prejudice against transgender people in the population, they have a hard time. I don't want to see anybody go to jail for that kind of discrimination, but maybe it will make somebody think twice, and maybe the debate will make some people think about it a little bit. What would it take for somebody to choose to change their gender? It's a big decision, it almost always involves a lifetime of anxiety, confusion, fear, discomfort. Life has dealt them a different hand, and they have to figure out how to play it, and one reasonable approach is to live like you feel. Just because you and I don't feel that way, doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to ride in a taxi or get served in a restaurant, or hired for a job.

It is absurd to think that the CRW really believes that perverted men will lurk in ladies rooms because of this new law. That hasn't happened anywhere that this kind of law has been passed, and it goes against everything that men -- even perverted men -- tend to feel and do. The argument is a red herring and they should be ashamed of themselves.

The only thing that makes sense is that the CRW wants to reject this law because they think that legitimizing the decision to live according to your subjective gender will lead to a wave of transgenderism (which is not really an "ism" but just a way to make a noun out of an adjective). They think that men and women will start switching their gender identities left and right, until pretty soon you can't tell who's what.

I'd have two questions about this. First, why would people do that? Reader, do you yourself feel an urge to change your gender identity? Ninety nine point nine percent of us don't. Second, the question of the day: does someone who is considering changing their gender identity care at all if there is a law banning discrimination? Does the law affect their choice? I'd be pretty sure the answer there is a negatory.

You can pass laws against teen kissing or homosexuality or changing your gender identity, but they will not affect anybody's personal decisions.

The relationships among law and custom and nature provoke deep questions, it seems to me, questions worthy of intellectual consideration. The motives of teenagers who want to kiss seem, to me, pure and refreshing, the motives of creepy people like the CRW are neither pure nor credible.