Chinese Swinger Gets 3.5 Years in Prison at Schema : more than ethnic

Chinese Swinger Gets 3.5 Years in Prison

If you thought that China considering prostitutes more trustworthy than government officials was odd, I've got something that might give your eyes a good stretch. I was going through the news and saw this article that was too good—or odd, not to share:

Chinese Professor Jailed for Organizing Swinger Parties.

Have I caught your attention yet?

A 53-year-old computer science professor at Nanjing University of Technology, Ma Yaohai, is causing a public stir in the Chinese media. On the outside, he seems like just an educator who has been twice divorced, and lives with his mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. In his private life, he is calls himself Roaring Virile Fire or bighornyfire, a member of an informal swinger's club.

For the past six years, he has been involved in at least eighteen orgies. He organizes most of them and recruits through the Internet. Most of these orgies were presumably held in his apartment.

The government apparently found this unacceptable "crowd licentiousness." Him and twenty-one other individuals were arrested for their participation in these events. Professor Ma got three and a half years for pleading innocent while others pleaded guilty and received less for "good attitudes."

There are suggestions that the law under which they were persecuted has been inactive since 1997. A law in which peoples who have sex outside of marriage are persecuted, especially those in group settings (aka orgies).

Another issue that seems to be of discussion is that he was not causing a public disturbance because it was in his private house with consenting adults. Of course this is hardly disagreeable. How could an event held at your own home be public?

There are also strong arguments that believe that Prof Ma's bedroom life and those of the other swingers are not the government's business. It is an invasion of privacy where the government is stealing away the basic right of any individual.

Of course there are opposing views, some residents of China have called his partner-swapping immoral and unethical. Some believed that regardless of privacy issues, he caused social chaos.

The arguments go on and on. Personally, I don't know what I find more odd, a man charged under a law that hasn't been active for over a decade, or the fact that some random educated man organized swinger parties in communist China. I bet Prof Ma earned that extensive sentence because his stubbornness began to annoy the judge.

Is it odd that my biggest concern is his poor mother who was probably in that apartment room while he was holding those parties?? Diagnosed with Alzheimer's or not. China or not, that poor woman.

To read more visit: News.Scotsman.com or The New York Times