[PREV - BURROUGHS_LOST] [TOP]
January 12, 2022
I think issues revolving around CLEARENCE
"age of consent" are pretty
interesting because they're such I usually can't resist trying
emotional hot-buttons people to step in and bug people to
tend to shut their brains off think these things through a
when they get near them. little more. This is typically
recieved about as well as you
would expect.
Re-working some commentary from reddit:
[link]
About this article:
"'Why Is Child Marriage Still Legal?':
A Young Lawmaker Tackles a Hidden Problem"
by Erick Trickey
This is about Cassie Levesque, who is in
the NH state legislature.
This piece is objecting to
young-teenage of marriages,
which are legal in some places Peeve: using emotionally loaded
with with-parental-consent (or words like "child" when there's
a judges approval). a specific definition involved
that they make you work to find out.
My first impression was it
was specifically about Arguing against "child marriage"
raising the cutoff to 16, seems like an intentionally
but the activists involved deceptive debating technique.
would prefer 18 in every Most of us would think a "child"
state. They just had to is younger than a teenager, so
settle for raising it to "child marriage" sounds extra-bad.
16 in New Hampshire.
Though in *some* places when
And while 16 is still pretty they say "child" they really
young, at least there's still mean it, e.g. this case with
a requirement for responsible a 9-year old in Afghanistan:
adults to be be involved...
[link]
And one hopes they're
responsible responsible adults--
the irresponsible ones are a
problem in lots of ways, but
it's not an easy one to fix.
And just to be clear, I
*personally* would not care When you wade into these
if they raised it to 18. waters, someone always
accuses you of being
It also wouldn't bother me interested in Jeffrey
if we had consistent rules Epstein's business model.
across all states-- or for
that matter a consistent So consider me asterixed,
world-wide standard. not that anyone ever seems
to care-- why drop a
Though in the United States promising line of attack
there's the usual technical when it's easy enough to
issue of whether the feds can dismiss any explanations
take the issue out of states and excuses, and just
hands-- insist that the defensive
behavior is obvious proof
Reagan got a 21 drinking of guilt?
age by threatening state's
highway funding, which In romcoms, particularly asian
still seems pretty sleazy romcoms, "cinderella" plots are
to me, particularly for pretty common, and I end up
Mr. States Rights. researching age-of-consent laws
because it's helpful to know how
close the main characters are to
legal violations.
It is, needless to say, a little
awkward to ask around about things
like this. "Hey guys, does anyone
know if it's still technically
legal for thirteen year olds to
have sex in the Phillipines? Uh--
asking for a friend. A fictional
friend. I mean, a friend in
fiction."
It struck me that some of the
arguments presented in favor of
making this legal change seemed
to revolve around cases where
there's a big age difference Here, I'm referring to
between the spouses-- this line of argument:
This is a fairly common attitude, but I "The typical American
have to say seems at least a little child marriage isn’t a
questionable-- a clueless teenager and an Romeo-and-Juliet story of
adult is taken to be very bad.. so is it a teenagers in love, they
formula for a successful marriage to have say; more than 80 percent
two clueless teenagers involved? involve a girl under 18
marrying an adult, often
someone several years
older."
There's evidently a
recognition that at
least in some people's
heads two teens are
better than one.
I understand that they're
trying to deflate romantic
fantasizes-- that cinderella
plot I mentioned is
*tremendously* popular-- and
get people to focus on
actual cases... teen marriages
that work out well are
evidently a tiny minority.
I can't claim these cases
are common in my experience,
but it is indeed hard to
imagine one where I would think
"Oh sure, what a good idea."
I'm more likely to react "Uh,
why not just wait a few years?"
So my suggestion:
Try to think through what it is we really
care about, and do our best to craft laws
to go after that.
If you really and truly want to ban
large age differences, do that.
Though I gather the direction the consent
laws have been going is age cut-offs, but
with "close-in" exceptions written in, so
violations between people that aren't that
far apart in age are regarded as less bad.
Hard to see how to apply
something like that to
marriage laws.
--------
[NEXT - GOBLIN_AGE]