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Pro domme court case reflects LGBTQ struggle

The LGBT community has tried to get prosecutors out of our bedrooms for decades.
For two years, Mistress Golden has fought to get them out of her life.
While on the surface the prosecution of a professional dominatrix doesn't appear to be a gay issue, Mistress Golden's struggles, and ours, are cut from the same cloth.
The sexual rights that LGBTQ folk rally and put our lives on the line for are the same rights that Mistress Golden has spent a very expensive pair of years defending.
The laws that criminalize her former profession are the laws that oppress us all.
And the same people who demonize us because of our sexuality would gladly put all of us, kinky straight folk and LGBTs alike, behind the same bars.
Although Mistress Golden ran a no-sex dungeon and worked primarily with heterosexuals, the legal fallout from her court case has a direct impact on the gay community, said Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation.
"It's important we are concerned about it, pay attention to it and are supporting her because it's a great illustration of how any of us – gay, straight, bisexual – face inhumane persecution for something that should be considered a basic right of everyone … to express yourself sexually," Montgomery said.
Whether it's two men engaging in consensual sex, or a pro domme flogging a willing submissive, the government has no business legislating what goes on behind closed doors between consenting adults.
FreeDomme 2006, set for Saturday at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, is an excellent forum for people all of sexual orientations to examine and celebrate our differences. This fundraiser is also an opportunity for all of us – LGBT and straight, kinky and vanilla – to gather in support of the fundamental rights we all share.
In overturning Bowers v. Hardrick and ruling that consenting adults do, in fact, have the right to engage in sodomy in the privacy of their own homes, the U.S. Supreme Court said, "…this Court's obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate its own moral code. The Nation's laws and traditions in the past half century … show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex."
Speaking of anti-sodomy laws in general and the Bowers decision specifically, the Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that such laws, "seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals."
Unfortunately, the state of Michigan seems in this case to not only be behind the current times, but behind the times of the last half century.
If we don't come forward to support others who are oppressed, no one will be left when the religious right and their laws come for us.
They came for Mistress Golden, and she fought for all of us. Now it's our turn to come together to support her.

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