So here are the facts for today's problem:
An 18-year old dates a 14-year girl. The child's parents confront the adult about the relationship with the minor, but the adult – who can not only drive lethal motor vehicles and serve in the armed forces, but also vote and sit on a jury competent to decide whether people should be put to death – ignores the parents. One day, the minor's mother enters her little girl's bedroom only to find her missing. She panics: where could she be? Who has her?
Of course, it's her adult lover who has her.
Do you have any doubt what happens to the person who is having sex with the child?
Normal Consequences Are Harsh:
Not if you've been awake any time in the last century. If you have, you've noticed that 13-year-old and 14-year-old children's "consent" is of no consequence at all as a defense against sexual offenses that require legal consent to make non-offensive. You recall that when adults have sex with teens in school, they end up in the news. While it sometimes involves an unwilling child, but as often it involves repeated contact with a willing victim. Even victims aged 17 years create fact situations supporting felony prosecutions, sex offender registrations, and so forth. Even if the two later marry. We are totally unsurprised at the prosecutions: we don't expect adults to be using our children for sexual gratification
This isn't a new policy, and it's directed against male adults and female adults – both of which make the news and both of which appear in the links above. It seems a fairly gender-indiscriminate law, and it seems to be applied to either gender when sex-crime prosecutors discover a case.
So, what should we do with the facts of today's little lesson?
Weird Discrimination Claims
If you're Change.org, you apparently host a petition in support of the defendant, claiming that felony prosecutions of the type that are absolutely routine in the criminal justice system are somehow a private beef against the perpetrator because of the perpetrator's gender or gender-preferences.
Say what?
Oh, and "the online global hacker collective" Anonymous will demand law enforcement officials' resignations.
Prosecutors offered the offender an opportunity to plead to felony less severe than the sexual assault charges ordinarily supported by repeated sex with a child of 14. The defendant rejected the offer of a 2-year in-home "incarceration" that left open a possibility of avoiding sex-offender registration. Where I come from, hetero perpetrators would kill for a plea deal like that. This case is supposed to somehow represent anti-gay discrimination?
CNN's reporter says, "This may have been a consensual relationship in high school ..."
But that description completely misses the fundamental issue underpinning the criminal case: a 14-year-old cannot legally consent to sex with an 18-year-old. And after the parental communication with the defendant that the conduct must stop, it's pretty clear that the defendant acted with complete knowledge that the child's guardians believed the adult was behaving improperly toward their daughter. (And guess what? There's a statute making the conduct a felony – so the parents were on to something.) When the minor disappeared, what was her mother supposed to do, if not seek aid from law enforcement?
Now, imagine the opposite occurred. "No, ma'am, we won't prosecute the adult's seduction of your minor daughter, because we think lesbian relationships are not as serious as heterosexual relationships, or we think pairs of girls are cute and that only sex involving males can be a punishable offense. If your minor daughter goes missing, but we think she's smooching a girl, we won't try to return her, either." We'd be howling, no?
Some reporters, learning the facts, are backing off of initial support for the perpetrator. Apparently, the perpetrator's family lied about things that mattered – like whether the perpetrator was a minor or not at the time of the charged conduct.
If you want an example of idiots discriminating against women for being women, look at school dress code enforcement (even regarding hair; video here, gives a better view of the hair). Now, that's discrimination.
