Texans can now legally buy dildoes .... and presumably use them.

Dreamer's and Le Rouge Boutique, of Austin Texas and Adam & Eve sued in 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas in 2004 over the constitutionality of the State law (and also in Mississippi and Alabama ) that made it illegal to sell or promote "obscene devices", punishable by as many as two years in jail.

In a decision the day before St Valentine's day , the federal appeals court cited Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 opinion that struck down bans on consensual sex between same-sex couples and also overturned the statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas ruling that the statute violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

"Just as in Lawrence, the state here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct," the appeals judges wrote. "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the state is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification after Lawrence."

In Alabama Sherri Williams, who owns Pleasures stores in Alabama, sued in 1998 after state lawmakers banned the sale of sex toys there. A year ago, she lost her fight again when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider a lower court decision upholding the Alabama law as constitutional.

Joanne Webb in Clebane, 50 miles from Dallas, TX was charged in 2004 with a misdemeanor for hawking her battery-operated handjob helpers at her Passion Parties (Company tag line = ''Where Every Day Is Valentine's Day.'' ) a Brisbane CA nationwide party plan company, (she sold a vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid) — although the case (possibly as a result of an attempt to get her company made members of the local Chamber of Commerce) was eventually dismissed.

Apparently Rachel P. Maines meticulously researched ''Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction,'' will give you a run down on how sex toys have had an interesting commercial history in the United States. (Amazon US$45) She claims that ..."that the vibrator was invented in the late 1880s as a time-saving device for physicians, who had been treating women's "hysteria" for years with clitoral massage."