It’s a love story as old as time itself. Man meets laptop. Man fills laptop with pornography. Man sues state for the right to marry his masturbatory aid.
In 2014, former Tennessee lawyer and Christian electronic dance music producer Mark “Chris” Sevier filed a motion in Florida arguing that if same-sex couples “have the right to marry their object of sexual desire… then I should have the right to marry my preferred sexual object,” in this case his “porn-filled Apple computer.”
The motion was dismissed, of course, but Sevier is back again with a new Texas lawsuit demanding that he be granted a 14th Amendment right to wed his laptop.
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As the Houston Chronicle reports, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed, arguing that “the right to marry one’s computer is not an interest, objectively, deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.”
At the very least, Sevier appears to be monogamous. The laptop named in this new suit is the same 2011 MacBook that he asked to marry in 2014.
But Sevier, who has said that “the Constitution is being hijacked” by same-sex marriage, does not seem to actually be in love with his computer. The EDM artist has a long history of bogus legal actions designed to undermine marriage equality.
He also has a lengthy arrest record, including a 2013 aggravated stalking charge for—among other things—allegedly sending what the Associated Press could only describe as “a half-naked picture of himself draped in an American flag and covered in a substance that represented blood” to country music singer John Rich.
Sevier wasn’t always so enamored with his laptop. In 2013, he sued Apple in federal court claiming to be “a victim of Apple’s product that was sold to him without any warning of the damage that pornography causes.”
In the “Facts” section of that suit’s 50-page complaint, Sevier tells the tale of his star-crossed meeting with his aluminum bride-to-be. They found each other at an Apple Store in Tennessee, where Sevier purchased the laptop so that he could “create music” for his musical group “Ghost WARS” and also so that he could “log onto the Internet.”
All was well for a brief honeymoon period but then, one day, Sevier “accidentally misspelled ‘facebook.com’ which lead him to ‘fuckbook.com’ and a host of websites that caused him to see pornographic images that appealed to his biological sensibilities as a male.”
Sevier claimed that he “had never seen pornographic images” prior to purchasing the computer and that he quickly developed “an unwanted addiction with adverse consequences.”
To be clear, porn addiction is not a legitimate psychological diagnosis but Sevier claims nonetheless that his “addiction” made him “prefer the cyber beauties over his wife, which caused his marriage to fail.” All of this he blamed on Apple for not including a “safe mode” on the computer that would protect him from the dangers of pornography.
It didn’t take long, apparently, for Sevier to accept a lifelong future with his mechanical companion. In May 2014, he filed a lawsuit in Utah claiming that a county clerk had denied his request for a marriage license, noting that “one man and one machine” did not a marriage make.
Sevier didn’t take “no” for an answer, arguing in his suit: “Those of us whose sexual orientation has been classically conditioned upon orgasm through the straightforward science of dopamine to prefer sex with inanimate objects and animals do not have public support, like the gays, so we are especially vulnerable here.”
But the full Utah motion (PDF) does not make it seem like Sevier actually wants his relationship with his Mac to be legally recognized. He speculated that, if the court ruled in his favor, then “we will progress into a Nation that gives equal protection to all classes of sexual orientation allowing everyone to marrying anyone and anything to suit their appetite in the name of ‘tolerance,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘love’—becoming slaves of our glands, not slaves of virtue.”
His rapidly dismissed Florida motion was filed around the same time.
If Sevier’s MacBook were capable of feeling human emotion, it would likely be heartbroken to learn that it is being used a political pawn.
In an email interview with The Daily Beast, however, Sevier insisted that he would indeed go through with marrying his laptop if a court ruled in his favor. Asked what kind of wedding he would hold, he replied, “Your question is not substantive to the legal proceeding at hand and is reductionistic and irrelevant to these matters.
“The case is not a ploy to undermine same-sex marriage rights,” he claimed. “It is a demand that the courts restore Constitutional integrity.”
Sevier was more direct with the Houston Press, which asked if he was comfortable with the possible but improbable outcome of “destroy[ing] marriages and families across the country” by undermining Obergefell v. Hodges. Sevier reportedly “said yes.”
“The state is not doing anyone any favors by encouraging people to live that lifestyle,” he told the Press. “We have to define marriage.”
If Sevier is seeking a definition of marriage, he should avoid consulting the MacBook dictionary, which notes that marriage is a “formally recognized union of a man and a woman” or of “two people of the same sex” depending on the jurisdiction.
