I realize I'm starting to sound like a bleeding heart liberal in my old age. I don't know if my libertarian leanings are taking over, or if the complete lack of common sense in our bureaucracy is just sending me over the edge.
Male Teen Has Consensual Sex with Female Teen. He Gets 25 Years as Sex Offender, Banned from Internet.
Facts of the case:
Male 19 meets Female online. The decide to "hook up" which means they both wanted to have casual sex. The girl told the boy she was 17. She wasn't, she was 14. The girl has epilepsy and when she didn't come home on time her mom called the police thinking that there was a medical reason for her being late. The cops busted the kids and now the boy's life is ruined.
One other fact: The girl and her mother asked the court to drop the case because they admit full responsibility for the deception and the consensual nature of the "hook up".
I'm not in favor of kids having casual sex. I understand the need to protect young people from older people who are seeking to use them sexually. This case wasn't one of a predator seeking out his pray. This is a case of two kids wanting to "do it". He thought she was attractive and she was into attracting an older guy.
The plot of the crime revolves around a 8th or 9th grade girl who wanted to see if she could bed a college guy. The college freshman (being a computer major) probably didn't have tons of chicks hanging on him at school and a cute 17 year old is a legitimate score. Two teenagers wanted to get lucky with what they thought was a great catch. That's the crime. Two kids wanting to screw and now one of them has to do 25 years on the sex offenders list and have no access to the internet or computers.
I can't see any justice in this. Does that make me a bleeding heart liberal?
In Res's perfect world we would promote marriage. By promote it I mean we would encourage young adults who have reached sexual maturity to get married. As a society we would expect it of them.
People want to have sex. This starts at puberty not age 30. The ancient cultures recognized this. They planned for it. They incorporated it into the culture and the expectations of the young. When the time came, the parents helped set the kids up and got them going in their new life together.
Instead of a hook up, what if our 19 year old and 14 year old had met on line and they were honest about their desires? What if the parents had arraigned for the kids to get married?
If they had married, she would have achieved her status lay. Her girl friends would be jealous. She would have succeeded in getting her man and he would be a smart college guy with a future in a growing industry. Life would have been equally attractive for him as well. Regular sex with a horny teenage girl is it's own reward.
Depending on how careful our two lust birds were, it might be a couple of years but they will slip up and get pregnant. Once you get started having kids there isn't any real reason not to have a couple more. Kids do lots of things for a marriage. For a guy it can really sober you up and get you focused on providing. For a women it can really change the focus to her children. These things are net positives for both the couple and society as a whole.
One other benefit, you can't go to jail for having sex with your wife.
Maybe I'm not a liberal after all. I don't want teenagers to go to jail if they have sex. I just want them to get married first. That doesn't make me a conservative either. I guess that makes me a retrogressionist. I need a better word for it.
A good friend of mine shared a similar story. There is a registered sex offender living in his neighborhood. As it turns out the offense was the case of a 19 year old having consensual sex with a 17 year-old. His life is, for all intents and purposes, effectively ruined.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to 'sex offenders', as far as society is concerned, their sins are unforgivable and a life of condemnation is about almost all of them have to look forward to.
I don't think your view has anything to do with liberalism or libertarianism, but simple common sense.
A number of years ago we had an unmarried young couple (both 18 at the time) who ended up pregnant. With the father's consent, shotgun wedding it was. The young man did the honorable thing and he will spend the rest of his life making it up to her. That was ten years ago, they're still together, have a couple of kids, and are doing well.
Nothing is irredeemable. Kids (and others) make mistakes and the Bible anticipates those mistakes and directs us on how best to handle them. Ideally, they are best avoided, but we shouldn't be afraid to step in and help them where and when we can.
The young man did the honorable thing and he will spend the rest of his life making it up to her.
DeleteI was going to quip about his suffering horribly for it.
In America today its not normally a case of the guy taking advantage of the girl. I'm not sure that was very often the case in any time period. Humans want sex. The attraction is so strong that we mess up the how sometimes. The best way not to mess this one up is to get married young and go at it like horny rabbits on Viagra.
In addition to being fun this method has the benefit of being God's plan for how we are to live, love and reproduce. Marriage is a great idea. I wish more teenagers would follow the plan as given, rather than corrupt it by pretending that other things should come first.
If they were two fags nothing would have happened.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 80's, Ann or Abby had a column or two on this subject. Only it was moms who were shocked at how horny girls were regarding their teen sons. These girls were sexually aggressive Res. Aggressive. They wrote the filthiest mash notes and stuck them in the boys backpacks and the moms found them.
ReplyDeleteReading the columns, I felt so bad for these moms. You don't realize until it hits you in the face how much peer pressure there is out there for both genders to have sex.
We are talking anywhere from age 10 to 13 or so Res. With all the sexualization of girls in this society, and make up products and all, it is getting harder for guys of all ages to tell if a girl is legal or not.
The media tries to make most of these girls seem like naive little victims. Maybe a few are, but Res I am telling you these girls are aggressive, about as much as boys are in many cases. Society is still stuck in "blame the boy first" mode. But these girls go trolling for excitement and wind up finding more than they bargain for.
If you were truly liberal Res, you would not be entertaining such commonsense ideas. You would be thrilled with how far down the slippery slope society has gone instead. Instead, you still have something called morals and commonsense.
Thanks Susan.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was sixteen I told a girl that I had been seeing that I didn't want things to get sexual with her. She took it as a challenge to see if she could bed me and she told her girl friends about it too. For the next two years I had her and several other girls actively trying to seduce me regardless of who I was dating at the time. I saw lots of boobs but only ever had to undo one girl's bra on my own initiative. They literally stripped and offered themselves.
That's why I believe this 19 year old. I think the girl did say she was older and how would he know anyway? If she had boobs and hips and looked female exactly how was he to know if she was too young to do what she was asking him to do? The girls undress themselves, they rub a guy up and down. It's hard to say no with a nipple in your mouth.
Girls have always been sexually aggressive, probably more than guys. This is not a peer pressure thing.
ReplyDeleteThe difference is that girls tend to fixate on one guy, and think they're going to spend their life with this guy, and have lots of kids, etc - this feeling lasts until another guy comes along. Guys, obviously, don't think this way. What guys want is intimacy, and sex is widely viewed as the physical manifestation of this, but, generally, guys are more in touch with what they actually want than popular culture leads us to believe.
And all of this is why divorce is initiated by women about 80% of the time.