Legal Commentary

Insert Alligator Joke Here

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

The Buzz, the St. Petersburg Times’s blog, reports on Bestiality, monkey husbands and Bullard. Oh my!

The act of bestiality is a step closer to becoming illegal in Florida now that a Senate committee voted to slap a third-degree felony charge on anyone who has sex with animals.

Florida is one of only 16 states that still permit bestiality — a fact that animal-rights activist and Sunrise Sen. Nan Rich learned to her horror when a Panhandle man three years ago was suspected of accidentally asphyxiating a family goat with which he was copulating.

“There’s a tremendous correlation between sexually deviant behavior and crimes against children and crimes against animals,” said Rich, a Sunrise Democrat. “This is long overdue. These are heinous crimes. And people belong in jail.”

But the Mossy Head man suspected of assaulting Meg the Goat was never charged, because law enforcement officials could never link him to the crime scene. The suspect was arrested in a separate goat-abducting months later, said Walton County Assistant State Attorney Walter Parker.

Rich’s proposal was amended to target only those who derived or helped others derive “sexual gratification” from an animal. The amendment specified that conventional dog-judging contests and animal-husbandry practices are permissible.

That last provision tripped up Miami Democratic Sen. Larcenia Bullard.

“People are taking these animals as their husbands? What’s husbandry?” she asked. Some senators stifled their laughter as Chairman Charlie Dean explained that husbandry it was the rearing and caring of animals.

Bullard didn’t get it.

There’s more where that came from…

You have to wonder about some of our local representatives some times. Actually, you have to wonder quite often about some of them.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on March 10, 2009 (boomark / email).