Woman faces jail for cussing at toilet

Toilets are curious devices.

You can cuss out a commode all you want if the fixture displeases you, and no harm done! You see, you don't have to worry about the toilet's feelings getting hurt, because toilets aren't living.

But you may want to be careful what you say to a toilet anyway. It's BushAmerica, ya know. These days, what everybody says and does is everybody else's business - even if they do it in the supposed privacy of their own home.

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, a woman may face 90 days in jail and fines up to $300 costly dollars for allegedly yelling profanities at her toilet when it overflowed. Somehow, someday, some way (as Marshall Crenshaw would say), an off-duty cop discovered that the woman cussed out her toilet and charged her with disorderly conduct. This despite the fact that the woman's swearing took place in her own home.

Evidently, the crude language seeped out an open window and happened to fall upon the ears of the off-duty officer.

This is exactly like the time about 15 years ago when some couple in Florida had sex in their own bedroom and got charged with public lewdness because somebody looked through their window and saw them. Nobody ever would have heard the woman cussing out the toilet if they weren't standing right outside her bathroom window.

It sounds to me like the cop cussed more loudly than the woman did. According to the woman, the cop standing outside the window yelled, "Shut the fuck up!" This prompted the woman to reply, "Mind your own business!"

The woman's response (give or take one word) was actually one of the first national mottos to be used on American coinage. Incidents like this are exactly why it was the nation's motto. In a free country, the police aren't supposed to be peeping in windows of private residences to see if anyone cusses. But the toilet incident didn't happen in a free country. It happened in BushAmerica.

What's more, it appears that the cops charged the woman under an old colonial statute against cussing - not under a law that's actually been enforced in the past century.

When cops can stand outside a person's window and charge them because they hear them cussing inside, then the right-wing police state is no longer some distant worry but a reality. The police state is here.

(Source: http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18920981&BRD=2185&PAG=461&dept_id=415898&rfi=6)