Carl Person has written about his desire "to end the war on drugs and legalize victimless crimes". When asked by a poster to Liberty Lion, "What kind of victimless crimes are you thinking of? What is the driving principle behind this?", Mr. Person responded:
The victimless crimes are prostitution, bestiality, sodomy, drugs, abortion, and the principles are that we shouldn't be regulating what people do to themselves, and the cost of the regulation should be saved and returned to taxpayers, to reduce taxes, and enable the economy to grow with commerce instead of with prisoners, private jails and private jail guards.
Liberty Lion followed up with Carl Person to get a clarification with respect his position in support of legalizing bestiality. Carl Person provided the following statement regarding the issue:
When I mentioned "bestiality" I was referring to animals, not humans (Note: some statutes prohibiting bestiality include children within the definition.) Bestiality as a victimless crime would center on two elements: 1. "property rights" - limiting the practice to one's own animals or with wild animals (not owned by anyone) and 2. "consent" and/or "non-injury" - if the animal is willing and is not injured in the process. If the animal is already dead, the victimless crime would become a variant of necromancy, and have to be analyzed in a similar fashion. I'm not a practitioner or advocate of bestiality and am only trying to apply Libertarian principles to a seldom discussed victimless crime.
Dallwyn Merck, Secretary of the Libertarian Party of Queens County, responded to this news with the following comment:
I applaud Carl Person for speaking up on this controversial issue and for setting forth a philosophical framework to enable us to analyze when and under what circumstances bestiality should be made legal.
Engaging in bestiality is currently considered a very serious crime in almost all states. In fact, the first person executed in what is now the geographic area known as the United States was Thomas Granger, a 16-year old boy living in Plymouth Colony, who was hung on September 8, 1642 after confessing to “buggery with a mare, a cowe, two goats, divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey”.
Bestiality is far more common than most people realize. After conducting 6000 interviews with participants on their sexual histories, Alfred Kinsey published his findings in 1953, which included the result that 8% of men and 4% of women reported having a sexual experience with an animal at some point in their lives, and 8% of men brought themselves to organism with an animal. In Morton Hunt’s study (1974), it was reported that 4.9% of men brought themselves to orgasm with animal contact. Male sexual contact was more common among rural farm dwellers than urban men. Intercourse was the most common sexual activity, usually with animals such as calves, sheep, and burros.
Since taboos against human-animal contact have been the norm for centuries, the criminal law has resulted in the arrest and stigmatization of those who have found pleasure while in contact with certain farm animals. Whether it be the shepherd with his sheep or the farm boy with a toothless baby calf, human–animal contact has been going on for thousands of years.
Carl Person has brought this issue out into the open and has started a discussion on the topic. He has done a great service to this nation by addressing this issue head on.
Ronald S. Ramo, Treasurer of the Libertarian Party of Queens County, commented on Facebook in response to Carl Person's position as follows:
Guys, it's (bestiality) a close question upon which right minded people can disagree about its regulation.
With respect to whether libertarians would support the decriminalization of bestiality, Thomas L. Knapp, Founder of the Boston Tea Party & Publisher of Rational Review ("The Premier Libertarian Web Journal"), wrote:
It seems to me that the default libertarian position — absent a persuasive argument for “animal rights,” which I do try to keep an open mind for — is that it’s a property issue and therefore a victimless crime (unless of course the animal is someone else’s property)...If non-human animals do not have rights and are “just property", then the answer the Zero Aggression Principle returns is that bestiality (with one’s own property or with permission of the owner of said property) is not aggression, and that prohibiting/punishing bestiality (with one’s own property or with permission of the owner of said property) is aggression.
The issue of bestiality in politics recently came up in the 2010 New York State Gubernatorial Election Campaign when it was revealed that Carl Paladino, the Republican Party's candidate for governor, had sent dozens of e-mails to friends and business associates, many which included photographs and videos of animals having sex with humans. One e-mail entitled "Easy Steady Big Fella...XXXX" included a photograph that graphically depicted a horse having sex with a woman. When pressed by Alan Colmes in an interview regarding why he forwarded these e-mails containing bestiality videos, Carl Paladino declared "I'm human!" implying it is only human to find such videos intriguing and humorous, which might be why you can view human-animal sex videos on the streets of the Red Light District in Amsterdam and why human-animal sex videos are for sale on the internet.
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