About Me
- Name: L. Craig Schoonmaker
- Location: Newark, New Jersey, United States
I am an intellectual with nothing of the nerd about him. I'm also the guy who in 1970 offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used.
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Saturday, August 13, 2005
Legal Sex Discrimination. A 28-year-old female teacher in Tennessee who had sex with a 13-year-old boy has been sentenced to nine months in jail:
she will be on supervised probation for the rest of an eight-year suspended sentence. The judge also ordered her to surrender her teaching certificate and said she would be registered as a child sex offender. The sentence prohibits her from profiting from the case and does not allow interviews.
How would a 28-year-old man who had sex with a 13-year-old girl have been treated? Michigan toughened its laws in April 2003:
Teachers and school administrators could face up to life in prison for having sex with a student under one of the new laws.
The measure would prohibit the practice as criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to life in prison, even if the student was 16, the age at which a minor is judged capable of knowingly consenting to sex.
The conduct would be defined as first- through fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, depending on the sex act involved and the age of the student. A first-degree charge is the most serious.
Plainly there is huge variation in sentencing from place to place. It seems to me that a very good case can be made that such crazy variation deprives people who are similarly situated of "the equal protection of the laws" required by the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal Constitution.
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Sexual abuse has, in this antisexual Republican age, become a focus of extreme alarmism and draconian legislation. Law professor Douglas A. Berman of Ohio State's Moritz Law School observes:
the broader story is the new social panic about sex offenders which is, like so many criminal justice developments, driven by headline-making anecdotes of horrible individual cases rather than by refined data-driven policy analysis.
You see, Berman reports, sex offenses had actually declined 40% from 1992-2000, before the recent legislative changes that made penalties for sex "crimes" far worse than for almost any other category of crime.
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Moreover, some of the laws are insanely at variance with our constitutional scheme. According to Save our TexSons:
it is our goal that any young man accused of a sex crime be allowed to offer a defense. The way the laws are written today, if the "child" is more than 36 months younger than the "perpetrator," there is no defense, conviction is automatic. The law does not care that there may be mitigating circumstances such as the alleged victim's past sexual history, her willingness to participate or, as in many cases, her misrepresentation of her age.
If that is true, the authors of the legislation should be flogged and the law repealed.
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This country has really got to grow up about sex. Consensual sex, no matter the age of the partners, is not awful; it is wonderful. We do not flee from sex but expend enormous energy trying to get sex. Our laws should reflect our actual carnal nature, not some crazed antisexual obsession derived from willful misreadings of the Bible. "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them" — Jesus's teaching in the Golden Rule — plainly smiles upon consensual sex.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,847.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:31 AM
