Save the Tomato Children!

Say what you will about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, you have to give him credit for signing a bill to forbid necrophilia. Now sex with a corpse is a felony punishable by up to eight years in a California prison. Claiming that the act was consensual will not be considered as a legal defense.

State district attorneys will no longer be stymied by the lack of an official ban. According to Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia, "Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that."

Here, from my "Great Moments in Necrophilia" file, is a dispatch from the Associated Press:

"The prosecution in the insanity trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer rested its case. Dahmer has confessed to killing and dismembering 17 young males since 1978. A jury must decide if he will be sent to prison or a mental institution. The final prosecution witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist, testified that Dahmer wore condoms when having sex with his dead victims, showing that he could control his urge to have intercourse with corpses."

I smell a public service announcement there: "If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?"

Whether necrophilia is a victimless crime may still be open to debate, but to arrest a sick person for using medical marijuana undoubtedly transforms a victim into a criminal. States' rights-it's not just for racists anymore!

During the Supreme Court discussion of this issue, Justice Stephen Breyer sure sounded like he'd been smoking some pretty powerful stuff himself: "You know, he grows heroin, cocaine [and] tomatoes that are going to have genomes in them that could, at some point, lead to tomato children that will eventually affect Boston...."

Chief Justice William Rehnquist wasn't present. He's undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer. One of the plaintiffs, Angel Raich-who uses marijuana every few hours for a brain tumor, scoliosis and chronic nausea-said she hoped Rehnquist's chemotherapy "would soften his heart about the issue. I think he would find that cannabis would help him a lot."

However, there was a definite agenda permeating the unhigh court. Justice Antonin Scalia sarcastically stated, "I understand there's whole communes in California planning on using marijuana for medical purposes."

Justice David Souter said that making an exception for patients could open the door to widespread marijuana use and to fraudulent claims of illness by recreational pot smokers in California and the 10 other states that allow medical marijuana.

Justice Stephen Breyer said, "Everybody will say mine is medical."

Substitute the word "Viagra" for "medical marijuana," and the Three Stooges' anti-recreational-use position becomes a double standard. Maybe because you can't grow Viagra-or Prozac, or Vioxx-in your window garden.