The American court system has seen some pretty strange cases in its time, from the time someone finally took Subway to court over their misleadingly named ‘footlong subs’, to the guy who sued Michael Jordan for looking too much like him, but this recently unearthed case has got to take the cake. According to Time magazine, back in 2015 a 66 year old Nebraska woman Sylvia Driskell decided to put her excess free time to good use by suing all (yes ALL) gay people.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Sylvia is a conservative Christian and is claimed to be acting on behalf of God, who she says was appalled by the recent uptick in gay people appearing on her TV screen. Unfortunately the all powerful creator of the universe couldn’t make it to the court hearing due to prior plans to not exist, so Sylvia will be representing herself in the case which officially proceeded as Driskell v. Homosexuals.
The case has come to light again recently in the form of a meme with Twitter users picking which lawyer they would have chosen to represent themselves in the case, with popular choices ranging from Rhys Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, to, well pretty much every character from How To Get Away With Murder. Unfortunately we will never get to see any of their choices come to fruition, as the case was thrown out by the judge on the grounds that it was completely fucking insane.
You might be surprised to learn that this is not the first time this has happened. In 2008 a group of Greek men also decided to take all lesbians to court for defaming the Island of Lesbos and its inhabitants.
The man spearheading the case, Dimitris Lambrou, claimed that use of the word ‘lesbian’ around the world to refer to lesbians “violates the human rights of the islanders”, presumably except for the lesbian ones, and he demanded that Lesbians find a new word.
After a protracted case in which Dimitris continually made a public idiot of himself for the world’s media, the court unsurprisingly ruled that absolutely nobody’s rights were being violated, least of all Dimitris, and the judge suggested that Dimitris find himself a hobby outside wasting the court’s time.
Oh, and there was also that time that a Russian man sued Apple, claiming that his iPhone turned him gay after he was paid in a crypto currency named ‘GayCoin’ via a smartphone app, and immediately fell in love with a man. “Now I have a boyfriend and I do not know how to explain this to my parents,” the man is reported to have told the court according to the BBC. He demanded one million rubles in compensation from Apple, and yes once again this case was laughed right out of court.
