It's Illegal!

It was very late into a warm summer evening in New York City. The streets were dark and quiet, but inside a small bar nestled into a queer neighborhood the party was as alive as ever. Folk of all kinds were chatting and drinking and generally enjoying themselves, all too unaware of the scene playing out outside. And while they weren't aware it was happening, they weren't surprised when a number of police cars rolled up outside, and armed officers rushed into the building. This wasn't the first time this had happened this month. It wasn't even the first time it'd happened this week. Immediately, the police began arresting the employees of the bar, along with a number of trans people and drag queens. These people were forced into vans in handcuffs. As the events unfolded, a crowd began to form. And this was not a happy crowd. At first it was taunts, shouts, voices crying out together against the scene before them. But those words turned physical as people began throwing coins, bottles, and other things they could find at the cops. The cops, on the back foot, ended up barricading themselves in the bar, while protestors outside threw firebombs through the window and even ended up using a parking meter to ram down the door. Chaos flooded the streets as the Stonewall Inn became a riot. 
 
"But wait!" 
 
A lone voice rang out from the crowd. 
 
"Don't you all know that being gay is ILLEGAL?"
 
Hit with this revelation, the queer activists understood that what they were doing was wrong. They realized the error of their ways, and happily knelt to the ground to await their well deserved arrest. 
 
 
 
Obviously, this overly simplified retelling isn't how that went down. But to some of you boot lickers out there, apparently you think this version of history would have been better. The Stonewall riots were a pivotal part of the gay rights movement, and in the days and weeks that followed, Stonewall served as a key location for activists to connect and to push their agenda. 
 
I'll be honest, dear readers, I'm mad. I didn't want to write this article. I thought there was no way enough people would be dumb enough to honestly think that "It's illegal" is a good argument for why zoosexuality is wrong. But here we are. I've seen it too many times and frankly I'm sick of it. Too many morons out there equate the law with morality, which is such a stupid mistake to make if you spend even five seconds in a grade 9 history class. Hell, you don't even need to be a historian to understand that sometimes the law is bad. So much media revolves around how actually sometimes the system is wrong. If you've ever cheered for an underdog in a society, chances are what they were doing was probably illegal. Laws don't exist to tell us what's right and wrong, they exist to maintain the status quo. And, they change to fit the whims of what society wants all the time. Gay rights are a great example. Being gay wasn't just kind of illegal, it was incredibly illegal. Sex, marriage, lifestyle. Even just a group of gay people congregating. All of those things were illegal in their own rights. Is your argument that before being gay became legal that nobody should have scissored because it was morally wrong? And hey, while we're at it, if it was illegal to be gay, what do you think was the right way to protest against those laws? Because saying "I'm definitely not gay but I have some questions" probably isn't going to be that great for your social standing. If you are gay, then it's also lying, which is also illegal in courts and many other contexts. 
 
But hey, being gay isn't the only thing that used to be illegal! I sure hope that you've never smoked pot in your life before! That's the devil's lettuce. In fact, it's a class B narcotic! That's pretty damn illegal! But don't forget about alcohol. It had its illegal stint as well. I sure hope you've never gotten drunk before, that'd be bad! How about interracial marriage? Those laws were made in the 17th century, and only removed in in 1967. That's a whole lot of illegal there. How about women driving, or owning property? 
 
But wait, I can hear the children crying on Twitter saying, all those things used to be illegal, but now they're not!
 
And you're absolutely right! 
 
Actually just kidding no you're not. Of course you're not. Because if this is an argument you're making you probably haven't been right about anything ever. If that were true, even if being gay was correct now, that would still mean that every gay person before 2015 (yes it was that late) was morally wrong for wanting to get married. And fuck, what about now, in the year of our lord 2024? Because smoking weed is still a federal crime. Some states may have legalized it, but there are some states where bestiality is legal too, so clearly we've gotta be looking at this from all applicable levels, right? And what about abortions? Abortions are federally legal, but not to the extent that states can't make them illegal. So, fellow hog fuckers, are we pro or anti abortion?
 
And god forbid you don't live in the United States of America, the paragon of truth and justice. Because in plenty of other places, those same crimes that are now legal here are still illegal there. In early June, Uganda just signed a bill into law giving the death penalty to gay people. Thank god they're so on top of things, right? It's now, of course, immoral to be gay in Uganda, right? The punishment fits the crime? And I sure wouldn't want to be a woman in the Middle East, where your personhood is legally less valuable than the personhood of a man. But hey, it's the law. It is what it is right? It's fair because it's legal?
 
Thankfully, you're a moral paragon of justice and haven't broken any laws yourself. You've never once jaywalked across the street to save time. You've never driven above the speed limit on an empty road. You've never connected to an unsecured wi-fi network (yes that's illegal if you didn't explicitly check whether you had permission to use some store's network), or sang along with the radio (it's copywritten music after all, and copyright law is very complicated and pretty much has to be decided case-by-case in court), or done any of the many many illegal things that we just so happen to do all the time out of convenience. Because you, you're a law abiding citizen, who cares so much more about whether or not the government says it's okay to do something than whether or not it even fucking makes sense. 
 
Using the law as your moral compass is like letting anime define your understanding of history. The law is a story created by the government in order to empower them to keep things from changing. There are absolutely good laws, I'm by no means an anarchist. But to assume that the law is some infallible doctrine that needs to be followed to the letter is to ignore basically everything about the law. Even the law itself doesn't claim to be eternally perfect, hence why there are numerous mechanisms written into the law to be able to change itself. And those changes happen because people are brave enough to face against the system and say "No, that's wrong." And whether or not you're a zoo, if you believe in any of the underdog-y things that this article has talked about, you have to agree that sometimes the law is wrong. If you want to hate zoosexuality for any other reason, go right ahead, and we can have that conversation with the maturity that it deserves. But please stop trying to tell me that the law is what matters here. Because if you believe in the law 100%, you better be ready to give up everything fighting against the law has gotten us. 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (January 2024) 
Questions, comments or concerns? Check out our Discord server at discord.gg/EfVTPh45RE