Rightwing Kansas Gives Gay Boy 17 Years in Prison
(While Karl Rove entertains gay hookers in the White House)
(from Salon.com)
25, 2005 | On Feb. 16, 2000, Matthew Limon gave his boyfriend a blow job and got himself a 17-year prison sentence. The boys were residents at the Lakemary Center, a school for developmentally delayed youngsters in Paola, Kan. It's generous, perhaps, to call them boyfriends. What they did was more akin to sexual experimentation, two boys in a dormitory at night, messing around. Matthew had just turned 18 the week before, and his partner was just shy of his 15th birthday. The younger boy, identified only as M.A.R., consented to the sex, but changed his mind. As soon as he asked Matthew to stop, Matthew did, and M.A.R. has always been steadfast in his statement that what happened was consensual. How the police were brought in, why they were called, isn't clear. Someone from the center complained and the trial was based on stipulated facts -- one paragraph stating that on that night in February, the boys engaged in consensual oral sex. That single paragraph was the basis for the 17-year sentence.
Kansas' statutory rape law prohibits "criminal sodomy" (including oral sex) with teenagers younger than 16. If the object of Matthew's affection had been female, however, Kansas would have afforded him the benefit of its romantically named "Romeo and Juliet" statute, designed precisely for kids like him, kids who have consensual sex with other kids. In Kansas, and in many other states, when two teenagers have heterosexual sex, even the dreaded sodomy, the penalties are relatively mild. If Matthew had had consensual sex with a girl, and the state had prosecuted him at all, the longest sentence they could have given him was 15 months. Instead, because Matthew had sex with another boy, and only because he had sex with another boy, he has spent the past five years in Ellsworth Correctional Facility in central Kansas.
One can only imagine what life is like for him in there. Young men like Matthew are prime targets in jail. Gay prisoners are more than twice as likely to be the victims of rape in prison, and young gay men are particularly vulnerable. Worse, the rate of HIV infection among the prison population is higher than in the general population, so prison rape carries with it the added risk of HIV transmission.
The case of Matthew Limon exemplifies the ugliness and brazenness of American homophobia, but while that may be the most important strand here, it's interwoven with adult discomfort with children's and teenagers' sexuality. The first strand is easy to untangle and resolve. The State of Kansas' justification for the horrifying disparity between its treatment of Matthew and that of his heterosexual counterparts comes down to this: Boys who get blow jobs from other boys are so impressionable that they might "turn gay." Apparently, all the social science research in the world pointing out that sexual orientation is innate, that evidence of it surfaces far before puberty, makes no impression on the wise lawmakers of Kansas. But even the United States Supreme Court, hardly a bastion of progressive values, seems to have rejected Kansas' dubious reasoning. The Limon case reached the Supreme Court, but on June 27, 2003, it was sent back to the state court, to be decided in accordance with Lawrence vs. Texas, the 2003 decision that overruled, on due process grounds, the criminalization of homosexual sodomy.
The other thread in the Limon case is more difficult to unknot. Statutory rape laws exist because we have made a decision that we do not want adults to have sex with children, whether or not the children consent. But we have tempered the harshness of those laws with Romeo and Juliet statutes, because we recognize that a high school senior with a girlfriend in the sophomore class might be immature, but he's not a sexual predator in the same league as a 40-year-old man who has sex with 12-year-olds. |
