MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 The week began with some thrillingly good
news, as the United States Supreme Court announced it would hear a
potentially groundbreaking challenge to Texas’ homosexual conduct
law, which classifies anal or oral sex between two men or two
women as “deviate sexual intercourse.” Today’s announcement was an important
step forward for the stodgy Supremes, who in 1986 rejected a challenge to
Georgia’s anti-sodomy law, ruling 5-4 that consenting adults have no
constitutional right to private homosexual sex. But in the upcoming challenge,
lawyers will urge the court to strike down Texas’ sodomy law on
equal-protection grounds, arguing that Texas’ homos-only sodomy ban
violates the 14th Amendment‘s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”
The new challenge stems from the 1998 case of John Lawrence and Tyron
Garner, two Houston men arrested after sheriff’s deputies responded to a false
report of an armed intruder in Lawrence’s apartment and discovered Lawrence and
Garner getting busy in Lawrence’s bedroom. As Lambda Legal Defense lawyer Ruth
Harlow told the Los Angeles Times, Lawrence and Garner were “punished for
engaging in consensual sexual intimacy in the privacy of one of their homes.
Texas’ homosexual conduct law targets gay and lesbian couples while leaving
heterosexual couples free to engage in the very same acts.” (It’s true–Texas
carefully repealed its anti-sodomy law for heterosexuals in 1976.) If the Supreme
Court does indeed find Texas’ proudly bigoted laws to be unconstitutional, the
ruling could end up affecting state laws on everything from adoption and foster
care to marriage and employment. As for the challenge’s chances of success: While
Last Days would like to believe that Texas’ discriminatory-by-definition sodomy
law is exactly the type of state-sanctioned idiocy that withers the instant a
sane, non-Texan ruling body holds it up to the light, two current
Supremes–Rehnquist and O’Connor–were among the doofuses who rejected 1986’s
sodomy-law challenge. We’ll keep you posted.
··Also today: Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber formally apologized
to the thousands of Oregon citizens who were forcibly sterilized in
compliance with the state’s long-standing eugenics law. Based on the
pseudoscientific movement that sought to prevent people considered “unfit” or
“defective” from having children, Oregon’s eugenics law was on the books from
1917 to 1983, during which time more than 2,500 Oregonians (most of
them mentally ill or mentally disabled) received mandatory sterilizations while
in residence at state-run facilities. “To those who suffered,” said Gov.
Kitzhaber, “I say the people of Oregon are sorry.”
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 Just when you thought it was safe to return to the
Catholic Church, today brought the public release of thousands of
pages from the personnel files of eight priests from the Boston
Archdiocese–and the results (reported by Reuters) weren’t pretty. To be fair,
five of the freshly exposed priests had nothing in their files to be
ashamed of, while a sixth–Reverend Thomas Ferry–was guilty of only a
garden-variety “double life,” with the priest accused of maintaining an
11-year affair with a Massachusetts woman. But the last two
priests–Reverend Paul Burns and Reverend Richard Buntel–were
revealed to be grade-A sickos who the archdiocese routinely
protected and reassigned. In a 1999 memo to the Vatican, the archdiocese
revealed that Father Paul Burns had undergone treatment for “incidents of and a
proclivity toward sexual activity with boys” after allegedly molesting at least
six young men in Boston between 1982 and 1991. Despite Father Burns’ well-known
proclivities, the Boston Archdiocese assigned him to two more parishes, following
Burns’ “solemn assurance of his ability to control his impulses.” (After leaving
the Boston church in 1996, Burns pled guilty to sexually assaulting boys in
New Hampshire, and now resides in the slammer.) As for Reverend
Richard Buntel: After a decade of complaints from fellow priests about
Father Buntel’s use and distribution of cocaine, in 1994 the archdiocese
was confronted by a young man who claimed Father Buntel gave him a blowjob in exchange for coke. After Father Buntel confessed, the archdiocese
placed him on administrative leave, then paid $55,000 to Buntel’s victim
to avoid a lawsuit. Ultimately, the lawsuits came anyway–current estimates say
the Boston Archdiocese may face up to 450 sex-abuse claims, and may
declare bankruptcy as a result. As always, God is just.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4 Readers may recall the saga of the Perfect
Girl, the lucky young woman residing in an apartment at the corner of
Broadway and James, where she was overheard having very noisy sex,
during which she repeatedly hollered the word, “Perfect!” Well, today
brought a mysterious Hot Tip from Hot Tipper Annika, who was walking to
her car on Thanksgiving night when she found herself waiting at a
crosswalk with a loud, hot young woman chatting on her cell phone. “She was
obviously drunk,” writes Annika. “I heard her say, ‘I don’t remember that part–I
just remember getting filled out like a fucking application in an elevator.’ She
just kept talking about having sex in an elevator and how she stained her
clothes.” What’s more, as Annika was driving away, she saw the loud, drunken
woman walk into the apartment building on the corner of Broadway and
James. “I have no proof that my girl and the Perfect Girl are the same girl,”
confesses Annika, “but I got a gut feeling.” So do we, Annika. Thanks for
sharing.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 Nothing happened today (unless you count Reuters’
report of the Berlin arts center where visitors spent several minutes
admiring the still-motion performance art of a 24-year-old woman splayed
on the pavement before realizing the woman was a suicide who’d leapt from
a window above).
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 This morning, thanks to the miracle of E!, Last
Days had the privilege of watching Winona Ryder receive sentencing for
her twin convictions of felony theft and vandalism. After being denounced by the
judge for failing to show the tiniest remorse or take any responsibility for her
criminal actions, Winona was given three years’ probation and ordered to
perform 480 hours of community service. Among the communities to be serviced
by Ms. Ryder are a ward for babies with AIDS and a home for blind
children. And while Last Days fully approves of Winona Ryder tending to ailing
babies, her placement in a home for blind children is an obvious mistake, as it
will be far too easy for her to swipe their stuff.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 Tonight at midnight, the Strangercrombie
& Felch Holiday Auction came to a close, with the final tally hitting a
whopping $8,000, virtually all of which will go directly to Northwest
Harvest. Highest closing bid: $2,030 for the design-your-own
Stranger cover. Most dramatic bid: $435 for the God of Chop
Suey gift pack, purchased by former Seattleite now living in Japan,
who’ll fly back to Seattle for his one-night gig as a Chop Suey DJ. Biggest
surprise: $880 for the made-to-order, one-page Stranger profile; in the past, editorial favors from Stranger staffers have gone
for as little as three cigarette butts and some string. Best deals: $265 for the new DVD player and 20 movie rentals from Scarecrow (a $375 value); $333 for the $500 Easy Street Records shopping spree; $61 for the Jackass gift pack featuring a brand-new skateboard from
Crescent Down Boards (a $125 value); and $11.08 for the
brand-new Pottery Barn menorah (a $60 value). Thanks to all who made
Strangercrombie & Felch such a freakish success.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 Nothing happened today (unless you count the
Imaculada Concepción).
Send Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com.
