f the question of penal law.

How sexual questions lead to conflicts with penal law, how penal law
judges them, and how it ought to judge them after what we have just
said, I can only refer to what I have said concerning civil law. Our
present penal law is aware of singular sexual crimes and often
punishes them from curious motives.

When a poor imbecile, ridiculed by women and overcome by his sexual
appetite, copulates with a cow, the latter is not injured in any way;
neither is the owner. Moreover, the question of property does not
trouble the judge, for he punishes sodomy even when the culprit owns
the animal. How does the law obtain the right to punish an act which
does no harm to any one, nor to society, nor even to an animal? It is
evidently a vestige of religious mysticism, something like punishment
for sinning against the Holy Ghost. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah,
they say, caused the wrath of God, who destroyed these towns for this
reason. According to the legend, sodomy was a vice of the inhabitants;
is this why it is punished at the present day? But the masturbation of
Onan, according to the Bible, also caused the wrath of God; why then
do not our present laws institute punishment for those who practice
it?

In many of the Swiss cantons and in Germany, sexual connection between
men is prosecuted by law. The German legislators have even recently
discussed the question whether punishment should be enforced only when
the penis of one man is introduced into the anus of the other
(pederasty), or whether indecent contact and mutual onanism are
sufficient to justify punishment.

Our penal law is thus concerned with the question whether it should
punish or not, according as this or that mucous membrane or part of
the skin is used for the satisfaction of a morbid sexual appetite!
These are truly singular points for a legislator to decide, compelled,
in spite of his incompetence, to play the part of physiologist,
anatomist and psychologist!

If I am correctly informed, the German legislation is inconsistent in
punishing sexual intercourse between two men, but not between two
women. These examples suffice to show what blind-alleys a penal law
leads to, the basis of which is vicious and which is guided by the
traditions of mysticism.

Quite recently, in the Swiss journal of penal law, a jurist seriously
upheld the necessity for the conception of a crime against religion!
Ideas of this kind would lead us to punis