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Though the tendency to laugh at Ted Cruz’s (admittedly laughable) legal efforts to deny Texans the ability to purchase “marital aids” – as they are often called in conservative circles – is an irresistible one, the case in which Cruz’s office compared the use of sex toys with “hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy” and suggested that there is a state interest in “discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation” (ie, a government interest in limiting masturbation and sex for pleasure) is no laughing matter.

What you have – besides the basis for a number of deeply satisfying giggle fits on the basis of his asserted hypocrisy – is a presidential candidate running on the platform of being a “constitutional conservative” interested in limited government who, not so long ago, argued before the courts that it was in the government’s interest to limit its citizens’ preferred methods of consensual sexual gratification, and who further argued that the sale of sex toys was akin to pimping.

Cruz at the Colorado state convention. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

This was not, let it be said, a simple semantic argument: at issue in the case were women like Joanne Webb, a 43-year-old mother of three children who was prosecuted by the state of Texas because, rather than marketing a vibrator as a funny novelty item no one would ever use, explained to two undercover cops how to use it to enhance their (fake) sex life as a married couple.



But beyond the Cruz connection, it’s interesting to note that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the randy masses in 2008 by asserting:

An individual who wants to legally use a safe sexual device during private intimate moments alone or with another is unable to legally purchase a device in Texas, which heavily burdens a constitutional right.

That same court ruled in 2015 that Texas’s anti-abortion TRAP laws, designed to reduce the number of clinics at which Texas women can obtain legal abortion services, did not impose enough of an undue burden on enough women to justify throwing out the Texas law. The US supreme court heard arguments in that case in March and is expected to rule later this year.