BootmanLA

You're still adjacent to a huge metro area with 19 million people (and there's overall a lot of transit to get around there). That's almost 15 million more than my entire state. It's about 35 times as many people as Wyoming. I get it that you may not be able to walk next door for sex, but you're still closer to a wealth of options more than a shitload of people in this country.

You live in a huge city. Those of us in places with 80,000 or 8,000 people in our city/town instead of 8 million may not have the same options you do.

Actually, the lynchpin was a case many years before Roe, Griswold v. Connecticut, in 1965. Griswold is the case that established the notion of a right to privacy in one's personal affairs, despite that right not being explicitly named in the Constitution. Griswold involved a Connecticut law that forbid anyone - even married couples - from using artificial contraception (the pill, condoms, IUD, etc.). The Court held that there was a zone of privacy inherent in a marriage into which the government could not intrude, and contraception was one such area. Roe built upon Griswold (and other intervening cases). When the first challenge to state sodomy laws reached the Supreme Court in 1986 with Bowers v. Hardwick, the Court held that privacy did not extend to same-sex acts, even in private. Seventeen years later, the Court expressly overturned Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, holding that, in fact, sexual relations (a) between persons over the age of consent (b) in private that were (c) consensual were, in fact, also included under the right to privacy. Of note, the farthest right portion of the Court, in 2003, rejected that entirely. Of the dissenting justices, only Thomas is still on the Court, but Rehnquist was replaced by Roberts and Alito was replaced by Gorsuch. Worse, though, Kennedy (who wrote the opinion striking down Bowers) was replaced by Kavanaugh, who is nothing like his former mentor on gay rights. O'Connor was replaced by Alito, who is as far to her right as Thomas is from Thurgood Marshall's. Ginsburg was replaced by Barrett. So that's three votes from the original 6 who would, if voting anew, would almost certainly have upheld Bowers (whether they'd vote to reverse course again is another matter). Whether there are now five votes on the Court to allow states to recriminalize gay sex is uncertain. There are certainly two (Alito and Thomas), probably three (Kavanaugh), and possibly up to three more (Gorsuch, Roberts, Barrett).

I would like to point out one thing, NOT in defense of this guy at all, but to clarify: I don't see in any of the indictment or in the news reports surrounding it that there are any images or videos of Wolf himself having sex with anyone underaged. Rather, he's charged with possession of and distribution of child pornography. It may well be - or not - that he's never actually molested someone underaged, even if he's been willing to receive and send pornography of others doing exactly that (which, of course, is illegal). So, for the sake of argument: it's possible that his own partners have always been of legal age to consent, even if he prefers them as close to that age as possible. I'm not saying this is likely (or unlikely), but there have not been any official indications of his personally being IN any of the porn he was receiving or sending. Those details could, of course, come out later, and even if they don't, it's possible such images/video do exist. But we don't, technically, KNOW that he's in any of them.

To be fair, mental health professionals are divided on this; I fall into the same camp as you do, but there's no question that sexual compulsion, as I would phrase it instead, can be as destructive (and as controlling) as addiction to a substance.

A convention requires 2/3 of state legislatures to call a constitutional convention, and if one is called, ratification requires 3/4 of those same state legislatures. So practically speaking, not any easier. If there's a push among red states for a convention, the blue states will refuse to sign on; and vice versa. As for increasing the number of justices: first, we'd need to capture both the House and the Senate; and then we'd have to jettison the filibuster to pass legislation in the Senate with a bare majority, to change the law specifying the number of justices. It would be great, but as long as there's a GOP House, or a GOP Senate, or a GOP President, it won't happen (unless there are all three, in which case they might pack the court to ensure that there are 10 conservatives to 3 liberals).

Granted. But Biden will be surrounded by competent people who are loyal to the country, and if it becomes necessary, I think he'd step down during a second term to let his VP take over. Trump will be surrounded by true belieber MAGAts and the cynical anti-government forces (Stephen Miller, et al.) who will be given free rein to do whatever they want as long as Trump's in power. Even IF Biden's feeble - and I believe he had a bad night, not that he's going to fall apart soon - he's still a safer bet for the country.

For starters, there's no agreement among mental health professionals that "sex addiction" is even a thing (in the medical sense of "addiction"). Assuming there is some sort of compulsive behavior involved, however, there's also no evidence that compulsive sexual behavior and attraction to the underaged are connected whatsoever. What IS possible is that he has two separate issues (sexual compulsion and attraction to underaged) that interact in a dangerous way. You're correct that the U.S. prison system isn't set up for rehabilitation except (barely) incidentally. It's one of our many failings.

It's almost certainly a legally separate company, possibly with multiple layers of partnerships and/or LLCs and/or other entities to provide some legal distance between him and the company. What that means is that it's possible the company could survive, depending on how fast and how thoroughly it cuts ties with him, but there's no guarantee that will be successful. The more 4mf and he are "associated" in people's minds, the harder it will be.

News out of Indiana today: a federal court there granted a preliminary injunction against that state's law which would require adult web services to require age-verification from Indiana residents. In essence: Indiana wanted to require adult sites (those with >one-third of content being "adult") to verify the age of anyone logging into said sites from Indiana. In a very thorough and clear opinion, the court essentially said "this is bullshit". The decision can and will be appealed, of course, but sooner or later this issue is going to come up again before the Supreme Court. I used to be confident that even with conservatives in charge there, the First Amendment was still clearly understood, but with Alito and Thomas willing to say "they didn't allow this stuff in 1787 so the US doesn't have to either" for just about anything, I'm no longer confident that the position that adults should be able to view adult content would get any traction there. Opinion here: [think before following links] https://assets.freespeechcoalition.com/documents/legal/FSCvRokita/PIgranted.pdf

My belief is that we will never see another amendment to our constitution; either at some point, the country will collapse in on itself, and whatever takes its place will write a much longer (and hopefully better and clearer) constitution, or we will hobble on until such time as the whole idea of originalism is so discredited that the Court abandons it as a major juridical underpinning. Right now, I don't think you could get 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states to agree that the sun rises in the east, and I see no path forward that would produce those necessary majorities.

Reading over the reports of his arrest and the charge against him, I'd say you're right (at least as far as it affects him directly; porn itself will carry on).

My point is: Unless I'm mistaken, every one of these decisions had Trump's three appointees in the majority, and most were either 5-4 or 6-3. If the asshole Democrats who whined that they couldn't bring themselves to vote for the email lady because they just didn't like her enough had actually VOTED for her, especially in the three critical states (PA, WI, MI), those appointments would have been hers, not Trump's. (Or at the very least, two of them would have been - the holdover vacancy for Scalia's seat and the one opened up by Ginsburg's death). Roe wouldn't be overturned, nor would any of these other horrible decisions have been made. We wouldn't be waiting for the inevitable case that guts most of the protection that Obergefell gave to same-sex marriage. And so on. So for god's sake, people: LEARN THE LESSON. I don't care how much you think Biden's too old, VOTE FOR HIM. I don't care if you think he's too soft on Israel; VOTE FOR HIM. Even re-electing him won't solve all these problems, but if we DON'T re-elect him, the oldest conservatives are going to retire and get replaced by Trump-appointed young judges who'll be even more thoroughly vetted to go along with whatever the administration wants. And we'll be screwed for another 30 years.

I know many people who watched the debate last night may have concerns that the President isn't as sharp (or wasn't last night, at least) as we'd hope. People can argue whether he was overprepared and tired, or not, but two things stood out to me about last night, and a separate one this morning. First, there's still no comparison between the ranting lies of the GOP candidate and the perhaps unsteady performance by the Democrat. Aside from the fact that the latter will be surrounded by competent people giving him sound advice and guidance, compared with the idiocy and vindictiveness that would permeate a second Trump White House, one man was clearly a better person than the other, and that's really never been in doubt. Second, we're still months from the election, and I don't see any way Trump's mental state is going to improve; we're in for months of batteries on electric boats electrocuting people trying to escape shark attacks and not being able to get water to the washing machines we use for dishes, and how anyone could, in good conscience, put that kind of babbling idiot in charge of licking stamps, much less the nuclear codes, is beyond me. And now for today. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week, the Supreme Court announced assorted opinions, and given that Trump appointed one-third of the justices currently serving, it's well worth laying at his feet some of the utter destruction they're levying. Here's a quick run-down of some of the most dreadful. SEC v. Jarkesy. The Court gutted the ability of the SEC to levy civil penalties for securities fraud - ruling that you have to have a jury trial. It's already very difficult to schedule federal jury trials even under ordinary circumstances (which is part of why so many cases get pleaded down); now, the guys on Wall Street who commit fraud will go scot-free except when there are sufficient resources to get a jury trial. Moreover, this is the kind of decision that tends to "spread" to other agencies, so look for a massive gutting of the government's ability to fine wrongdoers across a huge swath of agencies. Ohio v. EPA. The Court blocked enforcement of EPA rules that sought to step in when state rules did not adequately protect neighboring states' environments under existing federal law. Basically, states with impermissibly lax environmental laws can keep polluting even if it affects other states, until a final determination by the courts - the EPA can't intervene in the meantime to limit the problem. Snyder v. US. The Court held that federal bribery law for state and local officials only applies if the government can prove that the bribed person agreed to take an action before taking the bribe. So shaking down someone for a bribe after the fact, once you took action to benefit them, is perfectly kosher as far as the federal bribery law is concerned. Even when, as in this case, the local official went to the company he "helped" and openly declared he needed money. City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. The Court held that a local government can completely ban outdoor sleeping/camping within its limits, even when no homeless shelter exists, thus allowing them to simply either imprison or export its homeless population. Fischer v. United States. The most severe cases arising out of the January 6 insurrection involved charges where the defendants were convicted of attempting to interfere with an official proceeding. Despite the fact that the intent was clear - they wanted to force a change in the counting of electoral votes - the Court held that a conviction therein had to involve either destruction or falsification of actual records (like shredding documents or forging signatures). And now the big one - Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This is what you'll see called the "Chevron" case (although Chevron isn't a party to this case; it's a reference to a case from decades ago). Back in the Reagan administration, Chevron sued the feds over a regulation that interpreted a statute Congress had passed, a statute that was ambiguous on certain points. The Court in Chevron said that when federal law was ambiguous, courts should defer to the interpretation of the federal agencies as long as those interpretations were reasonable (because the agencies have experts, which the courts are not). At the time, conservatives LOVED Chevron, because the GOP had the presidency and they thought they'd have it forever (remember the boasts of a "permanent Republican majority"?). And in the early 1980's, the federal courts still had lots of moderate Nixon appointees and a lot of Carter ones, so the GOP didn't trust the "liberal" federal courts to rule for them. Better to cut them out of it and let our agencies decide things! But then reality intervened, and Bush I only managed one term (followed by two terms of Clinton). Skipping past Bush II for the moment (he won re-election primarily because we were at war), we then had two terms of Obama (followed by one term of Trump). In other words, the GOP is having trouble maintaining control of the executive branch. And since most of the officials in the executive branch agencies are career civil servants, not political appointees (for now), it turned out that experts didn't always agree with what the right wing/big business wanted. So targeting Chevron became the big cause for conservatives. What Roe was to the pro-forced-birth crowd, Chevron has become for big business. And today, with Loper Bright, Chevron has been expressly overturned - federal courts now can decide for themselves what the "right" interpretation of an ambiguous federal law is. Which, in practice, means that every time big business doesn't like a decision of a Democratic administration agency, they'll run to a hand-picked Trump-appointed judge, usually in Texas, and get an injunction against enforcing that regulation. Then he'll rule the entire set of regulations is unconstitutional, the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which oversees Texas) will uphold him, and only the most egregious cases will make it to the Supreme Court for consideration, and even then it may still uphold the decision. Make no mistake: this is HUGE. As in HUGE. The ability of the feds to require insurers to cover PrEP? That's a regulation, interpreting federal law, that's being challenged. Now the agency's interpretation gets no more weight than any one else's. Hundreds of decisions over the years have been based on this Chevron deference - and in one push, all of that legal jurisprudence is gone. And we're still waiting on a few more decisions on Monday. I shudder to think what additional damage they could do (especially considering one of those cases is whether Trump has immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while he was president (even if he wasn't acting AS president when he committed them).

I've said this before, but at the risk of being repetitive: 1. Any particular site/app is only as good as the local community where you are. If you live in a city where most of the guys are flakes and timewasters, then it's highly likely on ANY site/app, most of the guys there will be flakes and timewasters as well. But with the sites/apps, you also get the ones who cheerfully catfish from a distance, hiding their location and pretending to be more local, even if they'd never do that in person. 2. Likewise, if you live in a city where there are about 35 openly gay men, no site/app is going to suddenly uncover a trove of hundreds of never-before-seen gay men just waiting to be discovered. If you like a particular KIND of guy - bear, daddy, twink, hustler, whatever - a site/app for that kind of person might be a little better targeted than a general-purpose one like Grindr, but my experience has been that most guys have profiles on all the apps that are relevant for them.

FWIW, you're almost certainly NOT going to find those on OF. OF has a very restrictive policy about content, to the point that even relatively mild fetishes like watersports result in content removal. JFF is much more liberal in that respect.

I don't think this site has EVER had "location features". You can search profiles (or at least, the subset of profiles that users have bothered to fill out) for locations. But importantly: since so many states are blocked from accessing this site (because of restrictive state laws about accessing sites with sexual content), a huge number of people are using VPN services to get on, which is going to mask where they actually are, anyway. And since this isn't a personal-ad site, but a discussion forum, I don't think you're going to ever find this as a particularly fertile ground for "finding cumdumps".

Some thoughts, kind of at random: 1. I'm sure this happens, and more often, perhaps, than @hntnhole thinks. 2. There are undoubtedly some people for whom this is a kink, but I think the greater number are people whose self-esteem is such that they feel it's the only way to get the validation they're seeking, even though it's a very superficial kind of validation. I see this mostly among guys who think they're unattractive by any conventional standard and so have to go "above and beyond" to get the validation they seek. (And usually, it fails long-term because they become convinced other people are only interested in them for what they can get, so they blow up those associations, and then the cycle repeats.) 3. I think the phrase that @norefusal was referring to when he wrote "partner who likes to watch his husband get fucked by strangers" is "cuck" (short for cuckold). That's a separate kink.

And actually, this isn't the standard applied to either judges (for recusal) or jurors (for disqualification). Judges are supposed to recuse themselves when there is something (that they've said, done, are, etc.) about them that would make a reasonable person doubt that they could be impartial. I don't think any reasonable person would think a sub-$50 donation to a single Democratic organization renders that judge unable to rule impartially. In fact, the judge bent over backward in Trump's case, giving him multiple opportunities to stop violating his gag order, for instance, before finally holding him in contempt. And even then, he postponed punishment until AFTER the trial, for when sentencing will occur, so that there was no chance the jurors would see him being punished during the trial. Any other defendant would have been taken to the holding cells at the courthouse by the second offense. And anyone who'd done it as many times as Trump did would have been serving 30 days or so, not postponed until after the trial. As for jurors: the standard is similar: the court, on its own, can dismiss any number of potential jurors if they indicate they're unable to render an impartial verdict. In fact, from among the 96 people in the initial jury pool in Trump's case, over half were dismissed that way before either side began striking jurors they thought would be unfavorable. Notably, jurors do NOT have to have never heard of Trump, or even never heard that he has been charged with criminal offenses. They just have to be able to deliver a verdict based on the evidence. And to that end, the prosecution and defense hammer out, with the judge, what are known as jury instructions. Those instructions explain the charges, and what precise things the jurors must - unanimously, since it's a criminal jury - find in order to render a guilty verdict. That language is precise, and it's drilled into the jurors' minds during instructions, and they're free to ask the judge to call them back into explain any instruction again. Moreover: even beyond the "for cause" challenges (which are unlimited) to jurors, Trump's team was allowed ten "peremptory" challenges - that is, striking up to ten juror candidates for any reason at all (save for a "forbidden" reason such as race or sex or ethnicity). Trump's team didn't even use all its peremptory challenges available.

I think "appropriate" is best left to the organizers of the event, as they're the ones who decide what's acceptable and what's not. If they want to permit OR forbid, require OR discourage any particular activity, they certainly should know how to do that. I certainly understand the disappointment you experience, but it might be that for some people, using a dildo is the only way they're going to get penetrated at all, and if they want that in a group experience... well, as you say, there are events for that type of play in some places, but not all, and not necessarily all timed to fit with particular schedules.

And I'm sure guys thought that was helpful, but it's actually perfectly legal for a cop to deny he's a cop. Undercover work would be impossible if police had to identify themselves upon asking or demand. And insofar as entrapment goes: it's very, very hard to allege "entrapment" as a defense for something you actually did. The courts have never exactly outlined the contours of how far law enforcement can go, in terms of tempting someone to commit a crime, but it's fairly far. The legal definition of entrapment comes from a case called Jacobson v. United States, which held that "Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute." That breaks down to two elements: the government's origination of the criminal design (that is, they made the plan) and inducement of an innocent person into committing said crime. With respect to being arrested for cruising: a gay man caught sucking dick at night in a park known for sex is never going to get away with an entrapment defense, because there's really no reason for anyone to believe he was there for completely innocent reasons, and given the park's reputation, the government didn't originate the criminal design. Contrast that with, say, government agents deciding to cook up a bribery scheme and dangling information about (for example) a lobbyist willing to make substantial campaign contributions in exchange for votes on a bill. In that case, the government originated the scheme, and set out to entice people who otherwise might never have even considered taking a bribe. That presents a much tougher prosecution, especially if the politician resists being bought off until after steadily increasing pressure is brought on him.

I'd like to add: just because I think same-sex marriage rights could easily be hollowed out doesn't mean that outright overturning that decision isn't a possibility. Remember that the central holding of Roe - that the right to privacy including the right to abortion (at least some of the time) - was explicitly upheld in the Casey decision in 1992. Then, after twice finding this right existed, the political shift of the court meant precedent could be tossed aside simply because one side won the right election. The Obergefell decision included current justices Alito, Thomas, and Roberts voting against it. On the other side, Kennedy (who wrote Obergefell) was replaced by Kavanaugh, who is no friend of LGBT rights. Ginsburg was replaced by Barrett (likewise). And Scalia, who also voted against it, was replaced by Gorsuch, who likewise is no LGBT supporter. There are already five votes to end same-sex marriage rights on the Court, even if we don't include Roberts (who might vote against overturning), if the right case comes along. And as we've seen with the hard-line conservative movement, they're not above manufacturing a case that puts the issue square and central back in front of the Court to give them that opportunity. My point, though, is that we don't even have to reach that point to have our civil rights eroded drastically. Just as Roe had been eviscerated in many states with 6-week limits on seeking an abortion and the like, the right to marry could easily be undercut to the point that in some places it's almost meaningless. And once you get to that point, ending it completely becomes a lot easier, politically. And bear in mind: Thomas is 75, Alito is 73. If a Republican (ie Trump) is elected this November, both are likely to retire during his term and the nominees to replace them will be 30+ years younger. The opportunity to move the Court to the left at all will be gone for another 20 or so years, until Kavanaugh or Gorsuch, both in their mid-50's, reaches retirement age. And if something happened to Sotomayor (who's 69) while we have a Republican president, make that 30 or more years before the Court returns to sanity.

I (and others) have speculated here that the current Supreme Court is hostile to the same-sex marriage right recognized in the Obergefell case, and more specifically, I've pointed out that the Court doesn't have to outright overturn Obergefell to render much of it meaningless. We got a hint of that this week in an unrelated case, Department of State v. Munoz. In Munoz, the Court held that while Munoz (a female American citizen) has a right to be married to her spouse, an El Salvadoran named Luis Ascensio-Cordero, that does not give her the right to live with him in the United States if the State Department refuses to give him a visa to enter the country. Moreover, the State Department wouldn't even provide a reason to the couple as to why he was ineligible for a visa. And of course, if you don't know WHY the visa was declined, it's a lot harder to challenge the refusal in court; in fact, under ordinary circumstances, the decisions of an executive official to grant or deny a visa is final and unreviewable in court. In essence, the Court applied a precedent known as Gluckberg, which protects citizens from infringements on their fundamental liberties when that liberty is not explicitly spelled out (as, for example, the right to freedom of speech is). Under the Gluckberg test, the person must assert a specific fundamental liberty interest, and then demonstrate that said interest is "deeply rooted in this nation's history." Here, the Court said that the liberty interest being asserted was not marriage per se, but "the right of a citizen to have her non-citizen spouse enter and remain in the United States" - and that, the Court held, was not a liberty deeply rooted in history. So: let's say a president is elected who's hostile to gay rights, and appoints a Secretary of State who, in turn, directs his visa-granting officials to reject applicants who are same-sex spouses of citizens. That decision is unreviewable unless a fundamental liberty interest is involved, and this Court has just told us that there's no fundamental liberty interest involved in a non-citizen spouse being admitted to live in the US because it's not deeply rooted in history. Certainly, in that case, same-sex marriage (which has only been a thing for less than a dozen years, under the federal government) is not deeply rooted in our history either. Then - imagine all the other ways in which marriage ordinarily grants certain rights and privileges and liberties - and imagine for how many of them this Court could say "Well, extending THOSE to same-sex couples isn't rooted in our history, even if we have to let them marry; same-sex couples aren't entitled to X or Y or Z" and see how quickly same-sex marriage is gutted even without repealing it, much as how Roe was hollowed out long before it was actually overturned.

You use your words. You say "I'm into rimming (or being rimmed). Is that something you'd like to do?" And so on. If you want, you can preface the discussion by saying "I know we're basically very compatible in terms of what each of us likes, broadly speaking. But there are things I'm interested in (or "I've done that I'd like to do with you") and I'd like to talk about those and see what's on the table."

1. The standard for a court finding the defaming a public figure is much harder to meet than for an ordinary person. 2. Not everyone who is actually defamed feels the need to rush to court and file suit to defend his reputation, especially from a crackpot nutcase like RFK Jr. 3. Defamation requires making a false statement about someone, and opinions are, by definition, neither true nor false. I could say "X person, in my opinion, is a traitor who deserves to be shot" and that, being my opinion, is completely un-actionable. If I said "X person stole $100,000 from me" and he did not, in fact, steal that from me, that WOULD be actionable.