[lbo-talk] Susie Bright on Foley etc

[Matt]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 03:48:01PM -0700, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Vis a vis 18 and maybe 20 year olds, 16 year olds
> aren't _entirely_ kids. (They are largely kids -- you
> will see, Doug!) Vis a  vis 50 year olds, I think they
> are just plain kids.  Lines are hard to draw but
> there's a difference between 16-18 year olds and 12-13
> year olds and younger. It's futile to expect teens not
> to boff each other, and absurd to make it a crime (I
> had one girlfriend in HS with whom part of our
> entertainment was counting up the statutes we were
> violating, not being lawyers we probbaly got it wrong)
> but it's not futile to expect grownups to not to
> squeeze the Charmin -- if you are over 21, make passes
> at people 18 or over, please. The older the grownup,
> the worse the, uh, indiscretion. Morally speaking.As I
> say, the severe criminal penalties we impose on sex
> with minors seem excessive, but I also don't know what
> to do about undeterrable and essentially incurable
> sexual predators like Foley.

Yeah, but there's not much nuance in the law here, is there?  At least
not Federal.

I don't know how to express it other than to say it is fucked up that
the law thinks a 50 year old hitting on a 16 year old is "more like" a
50 year old slipping into his 6 year old's bedroom and molesting him
than it is "like" the 50 year old hitting on an 18 year old.

It seems to be all a part of America's sexual repression and
prudishness.  A teenager who didn't grow up in a repressed society
would be well equipped to recognize the questionable nature of the
power imbalance vis a vis an affair with Foley, and if there wasn't
such a stigma associated with gay sex, and sex with a teenager (!), it
might be water cooler chit chat ("Foley likes em young, don't flirt
with him...") instead of the kind of drama that wastes time which
could be spent talking about the shitty laws he votes for.

Matt

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