Have you heard the one about the Southern politician who wants to arrest women for dildo possession?Unfortunately, it's not a joke, so there's no punchline. There's a real live attorney general in Alabama who actually wants to enforce the sex toy ban enacted by the fundamentalist-dominated state legislature a few years ago. Troy King is serious about this -- he will bust your ass for a vibrator.
Sure, there are other states, especially in the South, that have some pretty ridiculous laws on the books. In Mississippi, for instance, it's illegal -- even for married couples! -- to have oral sex. The law's still on the books, presumably because none of the good-old-boy legislators there wants to become known as the guy who legalized blow jobs.
But Troy King is cut from a different cloth. AG King, widely known as a thin skinned, vindictive (that from the Alabama District Attorneys Association!) and spiteful little man and a "hateful punk," believes that sex toys are immoral and that he should be concerned with arresting those who use them.
Mobile Press Register political cartoonist J.D. Crowe's take on Troy King's sex toy phobia
My friend, fellow blogger and former Alabama gubernatorial candidate Loretta Nall gets the credit for originally alerting me to the outrageous sex-phobic shenanigans of Troy King last year. Loretta got some coverage from Dame Magazine on her "Sex Toys For Troy King" campaign, in which Loretta encouraged everyone to send the Attorney General a sex toy of their choice -- a brilliant bit of political theater.
I want to join Loretta in encouraging everyone to send sex toys to Troy King. Here's his address:
Office of the Attorney General
Alabama State House
11 South Union Street, Third Floor
Montgomery, AL 36130
Loretta also blogged about Troy's laughable, pathetically bad posthumous duet with a non-consenting Johnny Cash, and I was galvanized into action. When some idiot who never even met Johnny Cash starts screwing with the memory of The Man In Black, it is ON, homie.
In January of this year, I obtained online a 30-second sample of the King/Cash duet, which Troy had distributed to about 25 friends and supporters as Christmas "gifts," and I slapped together a little slide show video to go with it, which I then put on YouTube.
Next thing I know, I'm being interviewed by leading Alabama newspaper The Tuscaloosa News, and as I told them, as a native Alabamian myself, I really hate when some ignorant, pea-brained yokel like King makes the state a laughingstock.
Almost immediately, the video gets 1,500 views online. And Troy made a rookie mistake: His press officer ran his mouth to the press (Rule #1: If you're a public official, you never respond to a crank). To quote the Tuscaloosa News story, "King spokesman Chris Bence said the West Coast is a good fit for Elliott. 'Outside the state is the best place for him,' Bence said."
Within a few weeks, King pulled some strings and had the video pulled from YouTube; to do so he went through his friends at the John R. Cash Trust, who spooked YouTube into pulling the video with a spurious "copyright infringement" claim. (The claim is patently ridiculous, because a 30-second clip falls well within "Fair Use" doctrine, and in any event, the Cash version of the song on which King overdubbed his god-awful vocals has never been officially released.)
So I started wondering. What's up with a guy so vindictive, so petty, so insecure that he has to have his press agent answer some crackpot 2,500 miles away when I put a 30-second video showing him in a less than flattering light? And when he feels to need to discredit me, he feels that he can do it based on where I choose to live?
Now, here's where it gets hip-boot deep.
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