After international outcry about officials measuring how hard the penises of supposed gay refugees get in order to determine whether they’re truly homosexuals, and thus deserving of asylum, the Czech Republic says it’ll stop attaching meters to wangs while porn plays in the background.

To ensure men claiming to be gay and oppressed in their homeland, Czech officials turned to “phallometry” tests, which measure the blood flow into the penis to gauge arousal. (It can also be used on women. Clearly our photo does not depict this actual test.) So the thinking goes, if a self-professed refugee doesn’t get hard watching a penis enter a butt, then he can’t be gay and isn’t worthy of protection. GlobalPost reports the test actually measures the “physical reaction” to heterosexual porn, with the thinking that gay men should not get aroused by it, which is — as any gay man who’s ever watched straight porn can tell you — an idiotic theory.

Of course this test ignores the fact that these men have already been traumatized, and being told that if their penises do the wrong thing they’ll get screwed out of asylum … well, that’s not exactly the sort of thing to make your body react normally.

The test, which was developed by Prague sexologist Kurt Freund and has been implemented since the 1950s, has been used by officials when they suspected an applicant might be lying. But now it will no longer be available to these officials — unless refugees request it. The new rules say if applicants want to bolster their case by showing officials they can get hard (or stay soft) to the right type of porn, they can volunteer to have the test performed. Which is sort of like offering a criminal defendant the chance to take a lie detector test: you don’t have to, but taking it will supposedly make your claim of innocence more concrete. Except: Even offering the test on a “voluntary” basis means people who refuse it are immediately suspected of having something to hide.

And so, the test — which no other European Union country uses in the asylum process, and has been used about ten times in the Republic — should be banned entirely. Not to mention, human rights advocates claim the test violates the European Convention on Human Rights’ Article 3, which prohibits inhumane treatment and torture. Which makes sense.

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