Last week India’s supreme court reinstated an old law that effectively makes all gay sex a crime, joining Russia in the sad, sad list of the non-extremist (in theory) countries trampling the human rights of sexual minorities. This prompted Salon to publish a rather naïve article about the shock of “discovering” that the United States of America aren’t much better off from a legal standpoint.
More specifically, in Texas and Kansas it is officially against the law to have any sort of homosexual contact. The alphabetical list of states outlawing “sodomy” include  Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah instead, plus the military. If this doesn’t sound queer seem unusual to you, wait for this: the definition of ‘sodomy’ changes from state to state. Sometimes it is intercourse between «members of the same sex or between a person and an animal», and in other cases it extends even to anal and oral sex between consenting heterosexuals – the legacy of the puritanical, sexophobic past of the “land of the free”.

Coincidentally, Io9 published at the very same time the below map of the strangest sex-related laws in USA. Reading some of them really makes you wonder. What in hell possessed Oklahoman bartenders to require a specific law against staging simulated animal sex? Who times kisses in Iowa, and how? What sort of apocalyptic accident happened on a California highway caused by boobie pillows, whatever they may be? Your guess is as good as mine, so enjoy the map – and let me know your local weird sex laws in the comments, will you?