Tennessee Bans Sex; Georgia and Alabama Not Far Behind; Already a Moot Point In Mississippi

Some say that Tennessee’s recent posturing against sex is simply damage control for the humiliation the state endured at the hands of Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Dist. 4).  DesJarlais’s rampageous amatory friskiness, outed in 2012, did not go unnoticed by the national press.  Nor did the Congressman’s uncanny resemblance to a certain feature of the male reproductive system.   

 Tennessee Bans Sex; Georgia, Alabama Not Far Behind; Already A Moot Point in Mississippi

by Robin Ford Wallace

The Tennessee House of Representative passed a nonbinding resolution on a 69-17 vote Monday night condemning sex.

“I support First Amendment rights,” said the resolution’s sponsor, state Rep. Richard Floyd, R-Chattanooga. “But you don’t have a right to drag the Tennessee brand … through the mud.”

  Though nonbinding resolutions carry no legal weight and require no further legislative action, and though the move has been seen by some as no more than an election-year come-on to the religious conservatives that many Republican lawmakers perceive as their base, some political insiders are warning this may be the first step toward an outright ban of participatory reproduction in the Volunteer State. 

And given the militant conservatism of the rural South, some pundits say Georgia and Alabama will not be far behind.

“I gave up sex when I became a Republican,” said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.  “Probably the adage that sex was invented in 1963 is just a silly joke, but it’s also true we had a Democratic administration that year.  You can’t help connecting the dots.”

Sex has, of course, been illegal in Mississippi since 1964, when the state’s anti-miscegenation laws were made universal to comply with new federal guidelines against racial discrimination established by the Civil Rights Act. 

North- and South Carolinian Republicans are both testing the anti-sex waters with a series of local public referenda banning intercourse in certain locations or within certain degrees of kinship, and Texas advocates are selling proposed anti-sex legislation to Lone Star lawmakers as a natural extension of their war on women.

“Heterosexual sex involves close contact with females,” pointed out Herman “Tex” Smith of the anti-sex advocacy group GROSS.  “And with the other kind God only knows what you’re getting into.”

(GROSS is an acronym for God-fearing Republicans Opposed to Sex on Sundays.  Though the Texas GROSS chapter successfully pushed through criminalization of Sabbath-day sex in the state in 2012, and though its next target is sex on Wednesday, the popular Protestant Bible-study day, members chose not to change the name to GROSW on the grounds they could not agree on pronunciation, or in fact number of syllables.)

Back in Tennessee, some moderate commentators close to the legislature claim that Monday’s anti-sex resolution is not so much a real strike against biological propagation as damage control against the tarnishing the Tennessee GOP took at the hands of Congressman Scott DesJarlais (R-Dist. 4), in civilian life a physician.  Dr. DesJarlais’s affairs with patients, colleagues, drug representatives and select farm animals did not escape the attention of the national press, and nor did the shaven-head doctor’s physical resemblance to a tall, ambulatory, three-piece-suited male organ of regeneration. 

In any case, rhetoric at the Tennessee legislative session was peppered with such pejoratives as  “outrageous” and “atrocious” as lawmakers voted along party lines in condemnation of multi-party, fluid-exchanging reproduction of the species.  

“I’m raising my 17-year-old daughter in Tennessee,” said House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga. “What kind of people that are up there are doing this stuff?”

“Your parents, at least once,” riposted one Democratic lawmaker, engendering, as it were, loud boos from the right side of the aisle, and a fierce warning from McCormick to “leave my mother out of this.”

Here is an excerpt from the resolution.

HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION 666 

WHEREAS, the members of this body were most distressed to learn that “sex” is being conducted in Tennessee; and

WHEREAS, this news has also distressed countless clergymen and their parishioners who are extremely upset by the practice;

WHEREAS the practice of “sex” contributes to or in some cases is the single causative agent of teen pregnancy, abortion, venereal disease, marital infidelity, naughty films and the regeneration of the criminal classes; and

WHEREAS, "sex" fits nowhere within the mission of the State of Tennessee,

nor should it ever; now, therefore,

            BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, THE SENATE CONCURRING, that this Body hereby condemns the practice of “sex” within the State of Tennessee.

           

In Greek mythology, the goddess Athena was born asexually, emerging from the forehead of her father, Zeus, after he'd had a particularly bad headache. Now Tennessee hopes that "parthenogenesis," named after this event, may be the answer to its own sexual headaches.  

* * *

Tennessee Considers Parthenogenesis as Alternate Form of Perpetuating Species

By Robin Ford Wallace

The overwhelmingly Republican Tennessee House of Representatives with its HB 666 [see accompanying article] took a strong stance this week against sex.  Now Democrats are challenging that position with the same argument they made against the GOP opposition to the Affordable Care Act:  that Republicans have proposed no feasible alternative.

“No one can argue with the premise that sex causes problems for people,” said one Democratic representative, speaking on condition of anonymity.  “But it also makes more people.  I’m not defending recreational sex, just the kind that results in an expanded constituency.”

The lawmaker admitted he had tried sex personally, though only in college and only with a view toward perpetuating the human race.

Now some Volunteer State thinkers say they may have found the solution to the sex problem:  Parthenogenesis.

Parthenogenesis is asexual reproduction, the development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell.  It occurs naturally within certain insects, fish and amphibians, a very few birds and, presumably, American families depicted in 1950s sitcoms, in which the ubiquitous twin bed would have made any other form of regeneration impracticable.

Now Tennessee seems poised to adopt parthenogenesis as its norm, and in what state would that be more apt?  Only Tennessee can boast a full-size replica of the Athenian Parthenon, temple of the Greek goddess Athena, for whom the process is named.

Tennessee built its Parthenon in Nashville in 1897 as part of the state’s Centennial Exposition.  Inside the majestic columned edifice is a copy of the statue of Athena, 42 feet tall, covered in gold and faithful in every detail to its original across the Atlantic.

Athena was a celibate goddess who took the thing seriously:  Peeping Toms on her watch didn’t just go blind, they got eaten by their own dogs. 

Parthenogenesis, on the other hand, was named not for Athena’s own amatory practices but refers to her birth, emerging full-grown from the forehead of her father, Zeus, after he had suffered from an unusually severe headache.

Zeus in general was a rather spectacularly uncelibate deity whose other children, from a variety of divine and earthly mothers, were fathered with the usual method and delivered via the conventional orifice.

Tennessee did not, however, build a temple to Zeus. 

* * *

Fortunately, Tennessee already has a full-size temple to the virgin goddess in Nashville.