"Peter Meter" Protest
You can’t be too careful when it comes to immigration and national security. Someone could claim to be gay and persecuted in their homeland, often an Arab country where homophobia is rampant, only to gain entrance for nefarious purposes.
Ironically, in Iran, where homosexuals are treated harshly, a fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini declares that anyone who wishes to change sexes suffers from a legitimate disease, which is treated by granting the procedure. The government evens pays one-half the cost for those who can’t afford the hefty price. This offer applies to both sexes and includes a new birth certificate. Only Thailand conducts more gender re-assignment operations.
To prevent a potential terrorist or cheater from hoodwinking authorities, the Czech government is using the plethysmographic machine, dubbed the “peter meter,” to determine if declared homosexuals are the real thing.
The Human Rights Commission of the European Union has just issued a public condemnation of the practice.
The device was invented in the Czech Republic and the government stands firmly behind it. It’s regarded there as a work of simple yet elegant science. The genitals are hooked up to a device that monitors blood flow to the penis while subjects are shown explicit heterosexual action. No pain, but arousal=back to homeland. The results are susceptible to manipulation. Without going into unprintable details, there are other “sensors” designed to prevent cheating, as well as special tests for women. One commentator notes that a negative reading could have a positive result: the departed country might consider the recently returned as having a clean heterosexual bill of health.
The Czech inventor of the plethysmograph, Kurt Freund, set up shop in Canada, which has a tradition of “scientific” trolling for sexual deviation. In the 1950s and 60s there was a campaign to eliminate all gays from the Canadian civil service, police and military, ostensibly because they could be subject to blackmail. While an individual viewed arousing films, a device measured the pulse, perspiration, and the diameter of the pupils. Volunteer subjects were informed it was a simple stress test.
Until a few months ago, British Columbia hooked minors convicted of sexual crimes to a phallometic machine to gauge reactions to child pornography and other “aberrations.” It took sexual abuse by an examiner against a subject to bring a court order against the practice.
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