Small Favors
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins A Grand Month for Sex Good grief, what a hangover. Anyone in the country who didn't overdose on treacle during the Fourth of July weekend, don't speak up now. The rest of...
...inquired Nick von Hoffman...
...RON HAUGE Texas Legislature does when confronted on the subject of sexl Take the state dildo law...
...The Wrong Don's lawyer requested that he be sent to a white-collar prison "like where the Watergate people were sent...
...It's been a grand month for sex generally...
...The Supremes certainly did their bit for Liberty Weekend with the boffo 5-to-4 decision outlawing sucking in Georgia...
...As John Riggins once said to Justice O'Connor, "Loosen up, Sandy baby, loosen up...
...The Wrong Don is a guy we accidentally elected to the State Supreme Court back in 1976, mostly because he sounded a lot like the Real Don Yarborough, a good-guy pol who wasn't running for anything that year...
...He was attempting to stamp out homosexuality...
...We hear the Ethiopians now go around telling Midland-Odessa jokes...
...Think how embarrassing it would be to get sent up on that charge...
...Seems only right...
...The Wrong Don Yarbrough has been back in the news recently...
...Metal tits don't count...
...Just two years ago, Bill Ceverha of Dallas introduced a bill that would have made foreplay a felony...
...Yup, same medical school we invaded Grenada in order to protect...
...Then he was tried on the forgery charge and convicted on a perjury charge, so he took it on the lam...
...The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography made a memorable presentation of its year-long dive into smut, handing over its report to Ed Meese III while he was backed up against a bare-titted statue of Justice...
...As though 10.5 per cent unemployment isn't bad enough...
...Meanwhile, here in the Great State, we are going broke with our customary elan...
...There you'd be, doing twenty at the Georgia State Prison Farm with all the mother-rapers and the father-stabbers, and someone's bound to ask what you got sent up for...
...He said he'd entered the race because God told him to run...
...When you get that far down the ballot, who checks the spelling...
...The Texas Lege, justly famed in song and story as the most astonishing collection of nincompoops ever gathered in one place...
...Three days of unrelieved saccharine brought out the Scrooge in many...
...Even before the Wrong Don was sworn in, allegations surfaced that he had been involved in plotting the death of a Victoria banker and had helped a business associate in a forgery caper...
...Can I apply to be the national Grinch for the Fourth of July...
...For several years, no one could find him, including the Texas Rangers, but in 1983 he was located in Grenada, enrolled at the medical school there under another name...
...Well, the wife and I came to Atlanta for this convention, see, and then...
...I don't know: Why don't they...
...Why don't they ever mention that 30 per cent of the immigrants to this country turned around and went back home...
...And so they put it in...
...One of my favorite moments was when President Reagan—after quoting the famous poem by "Emmett Lazarus"—said, "In the immortal words of Nathan Hale: 'Give me liberty or give me death.' " You remember ol' Nathan saying that—it was right after Patrick Henry said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country...
...God said, "Yeah, but I thought he was the other Don Yarborough...
...With all those rich ladies coming out to Ellis Island to salute the huddled masses at $5,000 a head, it seemed likely a few of them would break their high heels on the stairs getting to their seats...
...You know what the Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every other month...
...Prepared, by God...
...They had all manner of videotapes on him—if he'd just been able to stay on the bench a little longer, he might have been able to do something about this distressing kind of entrapment...
...There's a bank in Abilene where, if you open a new account, they give you a choice between a clock radio and a drilling rig...
...The Wrong Don probably would have made as fine a doctor as he had a Supreme Court justice, but he had to go to prison instead...
...Things are so bad in Houston, the lawyers are walking around with their hands in their own pockets...
...In Texas, if you own six or more similar dildos, you are a felon—you are automatically presumed to be a wholesaler—whereas if you have only five dildos, you are considered a mere hobbyist...
...We forgot mouth-to-anus with chickens...
...So the Park Service thoughtfully had on hand, underneath the stands, extra high heels...
...So there was the Wrong Don, on the Supreme bench, not only a crook but crazy as a peach-orchard boar...
...The Lege started to impeach him, so he resigned...
...The Texas Legislature is what it comes down to...
...He was paroled in late 1984, but now he's back in the soup: They just nailed him for bribery and offering to launder drug money for some folks who turned out to be Federal agents...
...When the Court makes a decision like that, leaving the matter up to "the states," you know what it's really talking about...
...He must be in a place where he's not around violent criminals because of his background as a judge," said the mouthpiece...
...The last time the Lege rewrote the state sodomy law, in 1972, they were rolling along toward final passage, having outlawed everything but missionary position, when an ol' boy from West Texas leapt up and yelled, "Wait a minute, wait a minute...
...The rest of us got cavities just from secondary exposure...
...The public servant who thought up the extra-shoe caper gets the Imelda Marcos Memorial Award...
...Worst of all, the state is running out of money so the governor is threatening to call the Legislature into special session...
...We whipped them Grenadans in a fair fight, too...
...Of all the silly aspects of that supremely silly decision, perhaps the saddest is the Court's touching but entirely misplaced faith in the wisdom, or indeed the sanity, of "the states...
Vol. 50 • September 1986 • No. 9
