I should just stop reading the news first thing in the morning…

Gay Marriage Critic Tried on Lewdness

The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.

The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle" before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.

Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.

His attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

"Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal," Martin said.

Both sides agree there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a "legitimate governmental interest" in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

Latham’s lawyer has a point.  And as a card carrying member I am happy to see that the ACLU filed a brief on his behalf.  But if the government is poking its nose where it doesn’t belong, its louts like Latham who’ve made that inevitable.  The pulpits bear a heavy responsibility for our culture’s dysfunctional attitudes toward sex and sexuality.  I can see where people might not like having to navigate through a gauntlet of men out looking for sex when they’re just trying to walk down a street or though a park but that’s what you get when you treat sex like its something that’s radioactive, instead of a normal part of our flesh and blood lives.   Here in America sex is either dirty or its cheap, but it isn’t allowed to be wonderful.  And it’s mostly pulpit thumping jackasses like Latham who are to blame for that.  They’re the ones who’ve made sex another three letter word for sin.  They’ve taken what should be a wonderful, playful, joyful, part of our lives, and tainted it with guilt and shame.  Then they cash in on the damage that does.  It’s unforgivable.

I remember watching Phyllis Schlafly on TV babbling about how all you need to teach teenagers about sex is don’t touch anything inside your bathing suits.   Well if that’s all you teach them, then don’t be shocked, shocked, when they grow up to be adults who troll the streets at night for random cheap anonymous sex, because an instinct they never learned how to deal with honorably, that’s hundreds of millions of years older then the human race itself, is dragging them out there by the cords on their bathing suits and they don’t have clue one why they can’t stop themselves.  Just on principal I hope Latham wins his case, but I don’t feel sorry for him in the least.  So called men of God like him have a lot of human misery to answer for.