Jury Nullification’s Effects On American Statutory Rape Cases [Part 2]
[Please Read Part 1 Of This Article Before Reading The Segment Below]
C. Societal Fundamentalists And Fake Feminists Use Whatever Junk Science They Can Find To Promote Their Agenda Regarding American Statutory-Rape Laws
In her article, Ginny Brown eventually jumps into the ways that people justify adults having sex with teenagers. Her first described “way” is that the teenager initiated it. She uses the poor example of the book titled Lolita to back up her argument. However, here is the problem I am having with her example. Both of the Lolita movies were very different in content from the actual book itself. I have never read the book titled Lolita; but from what I know of it, the Russian author who wrote it did so with the intention of getting even with the late Charlie Chaplin inasmuch as the late Mr. Chaplin had married a girl almost as young as the female character described in the book titled Lolita and the author of this same book wanted to make the late Mr. Chaplin look as bad as he could.
Ms. Brown links her article up to another article on the same writing platform that has an anonymous author who is undoubtedly a woman. Herein I won’t waste too much time on this imbecile, but I would like to call her out on some of her statements in her article. Most of what this author rambles about therein is offensive to men and shows how very little she knows about how the male mind works. One of the most ignorant statements she makes therein regarding teenage girls is:
Sexual curiosity and exploration is perfectly healthy for children. The key is that they should be free to explore this part of themselves with other children and people who are age appropriate for them.
In other words, she is one of those femi-Nazi extremists who have the delusion that the American culture should mirror their make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection. Also, notice how she just loves misusing the word “children” to describe teenage girls who may even be married and raising a baby.
Bristol Palin followed this woman’s flawed school of thought, and all it got her in the long run was a deadbeat baby daddy named Levi Johnston whose current wife (Sunny Oglesby) is just as much of a swine as he is. Among other things, that is. This same flawed school of thought did not get Maddie Lambert anything more than an unwanted pregnancy at the age of thirteen and a baby daddy who believes that he now gets to walk all over her whenever he pleases. On the other hand, I can name a whole myriad of women and young girls whose relationships started out as adult/adolescent ones and ended up much better off than Bristol Palin and Maddie Lambert did.
I do not understand how this same anonymous author can remain oblivious to the epidemic of deadbeat teenage fathers that is plaguing the United States of America like a deadly cancer. Also, as I explain herein, boys as young as 13 years old have progressively been getting involved in more heinous and violent sex crimes than in previous years. If this anonymous author actually believes that every adolescent girl, 12 to 17 years old, is going to find herself entering into some kind of Harlequin-romance-novel-type of relationship if she exclusively hooks up with a same-age or similar-age boyfriend, then this same anonymous author is undoubtedly living in a fool’s paradise. Such a teenage boyfriend could be the next Philip Chism or the next Nathan Walker, Avion Lawson or Jakaris Taylor.
This anonymous author obviously believes that every adult man over 21 years old who has ever developed extra-Platonic or non-Platonic feelings for an adolescent girl (12 to 17 years old) has only lust on his mind, and she calls it the Lolita Complex. She preaches that men who fit the “Lolita Complex” should back away from “children” and try dating women their own age. However, the reason that these men may gravitate toward adolescent girls is because they didn’t get to experience teenage romance when they were teenage boys themselves, and this same void in their life has resulted in a domino effect that has caused love and romance to become a rare commodity to them. No adult woman who has been through four or five different marriages and has a household full of small kids is going to be able to give a man that kind of back pay in life if he has become absorbed into that same undesirable vortex of inceldom or perma-virginity. Furthermore, none of us men are under any obligation to fit the kind of “Tony Danza” mold that this same anonymous author so glorifies as a universal standard of true masculinity.
Okay, Ms. Brown. You link your article to some disgracefully unreliable sources as shown above. Perhaps your encounter with Harrison Ford or Pierce Brosnan would not have played out the way you wanted it to back when you were a teenager, but you are only one person among billions of people in this world. Bo Derek was of high-school age when she met then-40-something-year-old John Derek back in the 1970s, and their forbidden romance flourished into a long, happy marriage. If you read my Steemit article titled “Was Zola Taylor Of The Platters A Cradle Robber?” regarding Zola Taylor’s forbidden romance with Frankie Lymon when Ms. Taylor was 22 years old and Mr. Lymon was only 13 years old back in 1956, you will realize that nothing exploitative or wrong went on between the two despite that they both were sexually involved with each other. The Puritanical Establishment is not always right about these matters. In fact, the Puritanical Establishment has been more wrong than anything about these matters nowadays, but society has been too stubborn to wake up and smell the coffee.
Ms. Brown? You cannot seriously believe that you are going to get someone intelligent like me and others like me to buy into that same lame and cliché argument that so many others like you use to support your position in that you state in your article that adolescent brains are different from adult brains. I’ve come across this same argument in different forms, and you’re not fooling me into buying into it this time either. If such an argument truly warranted the oppressive and Draconian age-of-consent laws that we have here in our nation, prosecutors would not be so hypocritical in that they always turn around and make every effort to prevent criminal defense attorneys from using that same argument to keep their underage clients from being wrongfully tried as adults in criminal cases.
Teenagers are not waiting until their twenty-fifth birthday to start living, and society should not expect for them to do so. Ms. Brown? There are so many holes in your arguments and in your article that you really should not have published it at all, but, nonetheless, it only gives me more ammunition to alert other Americans like myself that we need to fight these unfair statutory-rape laws by means of jury nullification in statutory-rape trials.
Therein Ms. Brown states:
When it comes to sex, teens need adults who will give them appropriate information and freedom to explore their sexuality in healthy ways, always centering the teen’s needs. Having sex with that teen is not the way to do this – even if they say that’s what they want.
How idealistic of you, Ms. Brown. What exactly do you mean by adults giving teenagers appropriate information and freedom to explore their sexuality in healthy ways, always centering the teen’s needs? Heather Corinna is also a feminist as you proclaim yourself to be, but she doesn’t appear to have a problem with teenagers hooking up with older sexual partners as she conveyed in her article titled “Rage of Consent.” In fact, back when she was a teenage minor, she had an adult boyfriend and he loved her very much and vice versa. So, what exactly do you mean when you suggest that adults give teenagers the tools to explore their sexuality in healthy ways? Are you one of those know-it-alls who actually have faith in their make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection where adolescents only have sex with other adolescents in their own age circles so that everything is magically foolproof? It appears that you are.
I’m not a big fan of the Quora forum. However, once in a while I will see something on it that is interesting and catches my eye. The other day I came across a Quora forum in which someone asked the question, “Is it appropriate that I want to have sex at 14 or 15 years old?” Therein a sex educator named Julia Reece responded to the question and stated that she was sexually active at those same ages. She added therein that she went on to live a successful, healthy, and rewarding life as an adult. One of the interesting points that she made was that her parents were liberals and they had no problem with her having basement make-out parties with boys when she was 13 years old while her parents were also there in the residence.
When other people on that same Quora forum chimed in, it appeared that their main concern was whether Julia Reece had invited anyone over the age of 21 to attend those make-out parties and have sex with someone who was her age at the time. Chastising lectures and sermons about what the law and society had to say about such sexual activities could be found everywhere on the forum.
Then I immediately found another Quora forum that asked the question, “I’m a 14 years old boy and I had sex with a 12 years old girl, with her consent. Is there anything wrong?” In that forum, a Brazilian gentleman named Thassae Santos described the statutory-rape laws in Brazil, and what he typed was interesting. He stated that in his nation (1) if “both partners are underage and the intercourse was consensual, there is no crime. If one of the partners were coerced to do it, the parents can be sued for damages”; and (2) if “only one is minor, the sex is legal if it is consensual, the minor is above 14 years old and the consent was not a product of a “questionable behavior” by the older part. Crime can also be dismissed if the minor induces the older part to error (like a 15yo girl looking like a 20yo girl and not informing beforehand).”
This same law in Brazil makes perfect sense. The people who enacted this same law in Brazil obviously understood that there were bound to be people on opposite sides of the legal age line that fell in love with each other and shared intimacy together. Therefore, if I were to come face to face with Ms. Brown, I’d have to ask her why this law couldn’t work in the United States of America if it works perfectly well in Brazil. That is, in light of Julia Reece’s description of her adolescent years in the first above-described Quora forum, a 14- and 15-year-old girl could bring a 25-, a 29- or even a 35-year-old boyfriend to a make-out party that one of her friends was throwing on and she could still leave the party with her boyfriend completely unscathed from any sexual contact she had shared with her significantly older boyfriend in an empty room in that same house. Eighteen years old should not be a standard for any given nation or society in terms of what is age-appropriate for adolescents, because it creates more problems than it remedies.
Also, there will be unusual situations in which the teenager did initiate the sexual contact and the fact that the teenager was still a minor not yet legally old enough to consent was beyond that adult’s control. Take the example of a 13-year-old girl named Alisha Dean in Florida. In 2008, she was presenting herself on the Internet as a 19-year-old woman, and she had lured adult men in their twenties into having sexual intercourse with her. Later on, these men were charged and prosecuted for “statutory rape” simply because they were fooled into believing that this girl was well above both the statutory age of consent and the legal age of majority at the time that they had sexual intercourse with her.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 16-year-old boy offered to walk a 34-year-old woman home who was under the influence of alcohol. This boy walked her home and then he raped her while she was unconscious. The 34-year-old woman was unaware of it until this same punk had the audacity to report her to the police and falsely accuse her of statutory rape afterwards. In other words, she was prosecuted for a sex crime, even though she was the one who had gotten raped. Ms. Brown? You’ve been watching too many reruns of Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show, and, in reality, not all teenagers were really as innocent and impressionable back in the 1950s as they were depicted to be on both of these same television sitcoms.
Back in 1997, the press and the media was having a field day over a story about a 22-year-old man named Kier Fiore who hooked up with a 13-year-old girl named Jessica Woehl on the Internet and ran off with her. Since then, there have been heated debates regarding the pros and the cons of what happened. Now, I understand that such a story would attract a great amount of attention from the American press and the media. However, what angers me is that there was yet another story in the late 1990s about a 14-year-old girl who misled a 23-year-old man in an online chat room into believing that she was 19 years old so that he would agree to meet up with her and have sexual intercourse with her. After that same girl had sexual intercourse with this man, she went home and cried to her aunt about the tryst despite that she was the one who had fooled this man into believing that she was above both the legal age of majority and the statutory age of consent in New York.
Nevertheless, because the statutory-rape laws of New York apparently did not allow individuals arrested for having sexual intercourse with a minor below 17 years of age to use an ignorance-of-age defense, this poor man’s entire life was subsequently destroyed after his arrest for the sexual contact. What infuriates me is that the press and the media here in my nation buried this story shortly after it was released to the public. They conspire with our criminal justice system in misleading the public at large to believe that our statutory-rape laws throughout our nation are completely flawless and perfect, and they have done so for a very long time to serve special interests.
Statutory-rape laws tend to be difficult to understand in our nation, because each state jurisdiction has its own set of such laws. A good example to this effect was a situation not too long ago in which two 17-year-old boys were accused of forcibly raping a 15-year-old girl in Montana. The judge in that matter dismissed the criminal charges against these two boys inasmuch as they both claimed that the young girl had consented to the sexual relations. However, the judge in that matter made a major error in that regard, because Montana has no Romeo-and-Juliet provision in their statutory-rape laws and the statutory age of consent there at the time was 16 years old. Therefore, the alleged female victim was legally incapable of consenting to any sexual relations regardless of whether these two boys were above or below the legal age of majority in that particular jurisdiction. However, if these two 17-year-old boys really did force the alleged 15-year-old female victim into having sexual intercourse with them, this particular error in the system may have deprived her of the justice that she so deserved. If this crime also involved substantial violence, then this poor girl may never heal from the emotional scars of her ordeal. The judge in that matter should have studied up on the law before he erroneously acquitted those two 17-year-old boys of the criminal charges.
As you can see, I am not endorsing the complete elimination of the statutory-rape laws here in our nation. I understand that these laws are necessary to protect the youth of our nation from very dangerous situations. However, I don’t believe that “statutory rape” should be treated as a strict-liability offense whenever it pertains to an adolescent who is 12 years of age or older. That is, if an adolescent below the statutory age of consent goes aggressively seeking a sexual relationship with an adult and fools that adult into believing that he or she is legally capable of consenting to such sexual activity, then no criminal charges should be brought against that adult. Furthermore, if there was no criminal intent on the adult’s part and nobody got hurt during the sexual contact, then there should be no criminal case either. Moreover, forcing a teenager into a witch-hunt-style statutory-rape trial as a victim witness may do more damage to that youngster than good. Law-enforcement and government officials in our judicial system also need to stop going lightly on teenage boys who sexually assault underage girls simply because those boys are not yet old enough to vote in a presidential election here in the land of milk and honey.
I don’t believe that a prosecutor has the right to charge an alleged teenage “statutory rape” victim with contempt of court if that teenager chooses not to testify against their older boyfriend or girlfriend in such a criminal case, because then our society is allowing such a prosecutor to engage in blatant hypocrisy in that he or she is treating what she has labeled an alleged victim as a criminal. Therefore, it is though the law is giving that prosecutor permission to make a mockery out of our court system by means of such hypocrisy and to exploit the alleged teenage “victim” for his or her own professional advancement in his or her legal career.
In her article, Ms. Brown cites the second “way” that adults justify sexual intercourse with teenage minors is that the teenager is very mature, “though age is just a number.” My initial response to her point is that if a 15- or 16-year-old girl has a better physique than a 23-year-old woman, it is only natural that men in their twenties and older will find her attractive. And, yes, Ms. Brown, I agree that age is not just a number. However, I also do not agree that the question of whether an adult has the right to be with a teenage partner should be treated as one cold, mathematical equation in the manner that you believe it should be treated.
Ms. Brown? Your argument actually fuels my position that underage adolescent marriage should remain legal here in every state jurisdiction of our nation. If every state jurisdiction has a fair process in place to determine whether a teenager is prepared to handle the emotional challenges that go along with being married, there is no reason that such a teenager cannot get legally married. If that teenager wishes to marry someone older than them, then having a marriage option allows for such a relationship to become legal in a healthy and wholesome manner.
If an adult male is gravitating toward a mature adolescent female and forming a romantic relationship with her, it could very well be that he is more compatible with her in terms that he is mature in areas where she is not and she is mature in areas where he is not. If he is incapable of having that same experience with a woman his own age and the teenage girl is incapable of having that same experience with a boy her own age, it doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t do justice to force either one of the two individuals into same-age relationships that will do nothing but leave them empty inside and devoid of any happiness in the long run. Therefore, your argument about relationships of unequal strength doesn’t hold very much water, Ms. Brown.
Ms. Brown? In your article, you don’t present yourself as someone who is focusing purely on the facts but rather as someone who is preaching about how adult men should live their lives according to a book of morality that you invented in your mind for the most part. Your article is aimless and brings nothing to the table. Moreover, assuming just for the sake of argument that you are correct in your assertion that an adult/adolescent relationship is one of unequal strength, it would not necessarily mean that the adult is going to take advantage of such inequality between him and his teenage girlfriend or that he has intentions of doing so. There have even been relationships of unequal strength that were happier than ones of equal strength. To say otherwise is like concluding that no opposites have ever become attracted to each other and have had long, happy relationships that have flourished into successful marriages.
Ms. Brown states in her article that the third “way” that people use to justify sexual intercourse between an adult and a teenager is that the teenager is already sexually active. Okay, Ms. Brown. I don’t like anyone viciously slut-shaming a teenage girl any more than you do. In fact, it disgusts me whenever someone does so. However, if a teenager is more sexually experienced than an adult, then perhaps it could explain why the adult is gravitating toward that teenager instead of toward another adult whose significantly greater sexual experience could be so intimidating to him that he would not want to be involved with that adult. However, I will go ahead and respond to Ms. Brown’s points in that same argument.
I would first like to point out that so long as there are sexually active teenagers, there are going to be teenagers that stray outside their own age circles in pursuit of romance and not necessarily without legitimate reasons to do so. It has been this way since the beginning of time, and no societal fundamentalists or self-righteous do-gooders are going to change this reality with oppressive laws and nonsensical social conventions that promote a make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection.
Ms. Brown states that:
The number of sexual partners a teen has previously had doesn’t change the power imbalance of a teen/adult relationship, nor does it remove the adult’s responsibility to put the teen’s needs above their own desires.
She presents a slippery argument here in that there would not really be a power imbalance in a teen/adult relationship if the adult were an incel or a perma-virgin who had never experienced love and the teenager had several sexual partners before becoming involved in a relationship with that adult. Moreover, even if we were to assume solely for the sake of argument that it is the adult’s responsibility to put the teenager’s needs above their own desires, an adult’s romantic involvement with a teenager doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is not doing so. When an adult asks a teenager’s hand in marriage, he is demonstrating that he really does care about that teenager and wants to build a life and a future with her.
Over the course of the past so many months, a story has hit the press and the media regarding a couple (Michael Barnett and Kristine Barnett) who adopted a Ukrainian orphan currently named Natalia Grace Barnett back in 2010. This same couple abandoned her in an apartment in Indiana when they moved with their three underage kids to Canada in 2013. The controversy of this situation greatly focuses on the fact that the court system has been unable to determine whether Natalia is currently 16 years old or 30 years old.
Natalia is a dwarf, and people are going to say that it will not be easy for her to find romance in the near future. However, I have witnessed stranger events to happen throughout my life. Anyhow, because Natalia believes that she is 16 years old rather than 30 years old, she could possibly hook up with a boy between 15 and 17 years of age in the near future and the boy’s parents will probably have no problem with it inasmuch as they will trust her when she tells them that she is only 16 years old. However, if it later comes out that she is 30 years old despite that she believes herself to be 16 years old, then it should be interesting how her relationship with such a teenage boyfriend is going to turn out. If the young boy’s parents urge him to break up with Natalia because of their age difference in that event, it is going to be needlessly rough on both the young boy and Natalia inasmuch as they will have strongly bonded with each other in their romantic relationship by that point in time.
What is even more outrageous is that there could be every bit of evidence that Natalia and such a teenage boy have a relationship in which a possible power imbalance has no bearing on its success and healthiness, and the boys’ parents may still be stubborn about allowing the two to be together inasmuch as society frowns upon their relationship because of their age difference. It only goes to show you that social conventions that stigmatize such relationships based purely on the age factor do more harm than good to our culture.
Ms. Brown? I don’t completely agree or disagree with you that a person’s sexual history and behavior is not consent. I’m not mindless of your argument that “a teen’s sexual history and behavior does not magically make it okay to commit statutory rape.” However, if a teenager has engaged in criminal sexual conduct in the past, then I believe that a court has the right to know about it and that it should be considered as a defense in a statutory-rape case if that teenager is the alleged victim.
Back in 2007, ten young men broke into the home of a 35-year-old woman and her 12-year-old son in West Palm Beach, Florida. They subjected both of them to physical and sexual atrocities. Three of the ten assailants, who were between 14 and 16 years old, were subsequently captured and arrested. Somehow I would not be able to buy into the assertion that adolescent boys who have committed these same heinous crimes against adult women could ever be victims of statutory rape. Moreover, our nation’s statutory-rape laws are defective in comparison with those of other nations inasmuch as they allow for no shades of gray in them that would alleviate the injustices that currently take place in statutory-rape trials in American courtrooms. I remember that so many years ago Maryland used to have a law that allowed criminal defense attorneys to use an alleged victim’s prior criminal sexual conduct as a legitimate defense in a statutory-rape case. This same law may still be in effect in that state jurisdiction.
In her article, Ms. Brown states that the fourth “way” that people justify sexual intercourse between teenagers and adults is that “the adult isn’t a bad person.” Okay, Ms. Brown. I watched numerous clips of the trials against Larry Nassar on YouTube, and I realize that he committed his heinous sex crimes against young girls and even a young boy behind the guise of his medical profession. I can appreciate any argument that you may wish to present to your readers that Mr. Nassar got away with his sex crimes against his adolescent victims for a long time because he had a reputation as a pillar of the medical profession. Nonetheless, this man was and still is evil on its face. However, also keep in mind that the case of Larry Nassar was a very extreme case of sexual victimization. He was never in love with any of these underage girls he sexually assaulted. He didn’t care about the suffering and the pain that he caused them. He only wanted to fulfill his own warped and depraved pleasures.
Nevertheless, many statutory-rape cases in our nation involve two parties who are both in love with each other and are unfortunate enough to be on opposite sides of the legal age line in a state jurisdiction where overzealous prosecutors thrive off of inundating the court dockets with frivolous and malicious carnal knowledge cases involving a minor. The people who should have a say in these statutory-rape cases are seldom ever given a true voice in them, and miscarriages of justice occur more often in them than not.
Ms. Brown? I don’t believe that your analogy with the swerving car in your article was a really effective one, but I’m not going to pretend that wolves in sheep’s clothing do not exist. They do exist. However, if two people are truly in love with each other and they so happen to be unlucky enough to be on opposite sides of the legal age line, it makes no sense to treat their relationship with each other as a heinous crime; and prosecuting the older partner needlessly with statutory rape is exactly to what that same couple should not be subjected. If the older partner sincerely wants to be with the younger partner in that same relationship and they want a future together, justice will not be served if that older partner is treated like a sex criminal and wrongfully absorbed into the vicious vortex of incarceration and sex-offender registration.
Ms. Brown? You ask the question, “Is having sex with a fifteen-year-old a good thing for an adult to do?” You emphatically answer NO. However, legislators in Brazil, Austria, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria don’t appear to agree with you. In those nations, the statutory age of consent is 14 years old instead of 18 years old. You complain about adults risking tremendous harm in having sexual intercourse with teenagers. However, I’ve witnessed teenage girls suffering much more significant harm in having sexual intercourse with boys their own age who purposely get them pregnant and then try to use their situation as a way of controlling their lives.
In her article, Ms. Brown states that the fifth “way” that people justify sexual intercourse between adults and teenagers is that they argue that it is ageist to say that teenagers cannot consent. Then Ms. Brown further states therein:
Many of the above arguments could be used to claim that teens cannot consent to sex at all. If their brains are prone to making risky decisions, and if teen sexuality is really such a vulnerable thing, then shouldn’t we insist that teens abstain from sex with their peers as well as with adults?
The problem I’m having with your arguments, Ms. Brown, is that they are very faulty and are also lame and cliché. Moreover, I have witnessed teenagers suffering much greater consequences on a personal level from having sexual intercourse with their peers than with someone outside their age circles. She further states:
Or, on the flip side, people may argue that it’s ageist to say teens can’t consent to sex, and that the age of their partner shouldn’t matter as long as the teen is consenting.
The major point that you’re overlooking, Ms. Brown, is that the United States of America has become the deadbeat teenage dad capital of the world. Our nation has the highest teenage pregnancy rate of any nation in the industrialized world. Our laws and our society go way too easy on teenage male minors who get their thrills out of ruining an underage girl’s life by getting her pregnant and then manipulating her vulnerability as a teenage mother to assert control over her life and subject her to unnecessary humiliation and torment. When there are numerous situations in which girls as young as 13 years old have been better off with a significantly older boyfriend than her female peers are with boys the same age who turn into another Levi Johnston or Isaac Frausto on them, it doesn’t say very much positive about the parents of these teenage boys inasmuch as these teenage boys’ parents usually do nothing to set their sons straight.
Ms. Brown? You may believe that an adult having sex with a teenager is still making, at best, a negligent and irresponsible choice. However, if that adult wishes to marry that teenager and he goes through the proper legal channels to make it happen, he should at least receive the same respect as someone who weds someone of the same age. Your argument only opens the door to the controversy over whether underage adolescent marriage should continue on being legal anywhere in our nation. Also, when our statutory-rape laws are being constantly challenged and criticized as being despotic and tyrannical, then intelligent individuals like me have the right to question how logical people like you are being in presenting arguments that demonize all adult/adolescent relationships, especially when experts may only choose to back you up if they have dollar signs in their eyes or a hidden agenda up their sleeves.
In the rest of Ms. Brown’s article, she insists that any sexual contact that occurs between an adult and a teenager most likely has to be based upon lust rather than actual love and that such an adult only wants to exploit that teenager for his or her own sexual gratification. Ms. Brown cheers on the American statutory-rape laws as being flawless and meaningfully beneficial to all teenagers, when fact has it that many teenagers end up detesting the same well-meaning people in our criminal justice system who pretend to have their best interest at heart and are really only looking to serve their own interests upon forcing these teenagers to testify against their older partners in frivolous and malicious statutory-rape cases.
Ms. Brown blatantly overlooks the fact that despite any benefits that may be derived from the statutory-rape laws in their present form throughout our nation, too many innocent people are getting needlessly harmed in the line of fire of these same laws. Ms. Brown? Don’t talk about any adults being given free passes to “justify” pursuing teenagers for sex. Way too often I have come across stories in which a teenage boy, still a minor, has gotten off the hook for violently and brutally raping and even impregnating an underage girl simply because the prosecutor and law-enforcement officials involved in the matter provided the excuse that boys will be boys. Also, whenever an adolescent boy below 18 years of age gets an underage age girl pregnant and then becomes abusive toward her about their baby, it is NOT normal adolescent behavior despite what any pseudo-intellectuals may say.
Way too many male teenage juveniles have gotten a free pass to harm underage girls, because somehow our society appears to believe that an underage adolescent boy can do no wrong in any crime he commits against an underage adolescent girl so long as sex is involved in it. On the other hand, there have been other situations in which two individuals who happened to be on the opposite sides of the legal age line drove many extra miles to prove to the court of public opinion that their relationship was genuine and non-exploitative, but society simply refused to see their situation as anything other than a rape or a sexual molestation.
Matthew Koso went above and beyond to prove to the world that he truly loved his wife, Crystal Guyer Koso, and was seeking to build a future and a life with her despite that he was 22 years old and she was 14 years old when he married her. He did everything he could to be a good husband to her and a good father to their children. However, the former attorney general of Nebraska, Jon Bruning, simply would not leave well enough alone in that he launched a witch hunt against Mr. Koso, but, luckily, it costed Mr. Bruning the victory in an election in 2011.
Many adults should not even need to justify sharing intimacy with their teenage partners, because the statutory-rape laws in our nation are far from perfect; and Ms. Brown appears to be having a difficult time realizing this same fact. Lastly, Ms. Brown states in her article that:
Above all, we need to get much, much better as a culture in helping our adolescents explore sexuality on their own terms, in ways that meet their needs and not ours.
I find myself laughing at the fact that Ms. Brown actually linked the words “explore sexuality” in this same paragraph to the Scarleteen website, because the person who operates that website is none other than Heather Corinna, for whom I have very much respect, by the way.
Ms. Corinna is someone who has sharply criticized state legislatures for setting the statutory ages of consent way too high throughout our nation. Ms. Corinna does not condone the efforts of pedophile activists to lower the statutory age of consent to 8 years old anywhere here in our country. However, she makes it no secret that she doesn’t believe that 18 years old really benefits anyone as the statutory age of consent in any given state jurisdiction of our nation. She has expressed her wishes that state legislatures would revamp the statutory-rape laws throughout our nation and customize the statutory ages of consent to the fact that adolescents are beginning to have sexual intercourse at younger ages than in previous decades and are doing so not necessarily with their own peers. As a matter of fact, in her online article titled “Rage of Consent,” Ms. Corinna stated:
In countries, where the age of consent is as low as 12, their rates are far lower in terms of pregnancy, disease and sex crimes than they are here (though teen pregnancy rates have been decreasing in the past decade, they are still higher than in other nations). And sadly, our age of consent laws and our cultural taboos have done nothing to halt widespread sexual abuse.
Ms. Corinna published this same article on the Internet back in 2001. In any event, Ms. Brown walked right into that one. That is, she selected the website of a feminist who wholeheartedly disagrees with her school of thought that she sets forth in her article, and, in that respect, it has backfired on her. In fact, what Ms. Corinna stated in her paragraph cited above contradicts almost everything that Ms. Brown claimed in her article regarding this topic.
Ms. Corinna probably would not appreciate that Ms. Brown used her website “Scarleteen” in vain for her article in the event that she were to read Ms. Brown’s article, because she doesn’t agree with her school of thought and she doesn’t share the same opinion with her on how the statutory-rape laws in our nation should remain as they are rather than being reformed to cater to the times. Ms. Corinna acknowledges in her writings that “statutory rape” in our culture is nothing more than a legal construct, whereas forcible rape is an actual act of sexual brutality. In her article, Ms. Brown tries to fool her readers into believing that she thinks on the same wavelength as Ms. Corinna, but ultimately she reveals that her opinion regarding this topic resembles more that of Eve Lawter whom I’ve mentioned previously herein. At best, Ms. Brown’s article is a specious opinion editorial rather than an actual impartial piece of journalism.
In her article, Ms. Brown leaves out the fact that the oppressive and Draconian statutory-rape laws that we have in our nation and the higher-than-normal statutory ages of consent throughout it has flooded our court dockets with frivolous and malicious statutory-rape cases that have eventually led to the overcrowding of our penal facilities. These same laws in their present form are needlessly putting people’s names and addresses on sex-offender registries throughout the country, and this problem is taking a toll on our national economy inasmuch as these same individuals who do not belong on sex-offender registries often find it difficult to secure employment and housing and, therefore, end up on welfare. Ms. Corinna has brought up these concerns in her articles on her Scarleteen website, but Ms. Brown, on the other hand, continues to have a blind faith in our nation’s currently defective and faulty statutory-rape laws.
D. My Conclusion To This Topic
Intellectuals and researchers have uncovered information and facts to show that the statutory-rape laws here in the United States of America are far from perfect. State jurisdictions in our nation that have a statutory age of consent of 18 years old experience far more miscarriages of justice than state jurisdictions that have a statutory age of consent of 16 or 17 years old. However, there are pseudo-intellectuals like Ms. Brown who believe that both society and the law are always right about their actions to segregate teenagers from adults in the romance marketplace, for a lack of a better term. This school of thought is leading to unjust convictions of adults, mainly men, in frivolous and malicious statutory-rape trials. Therefore, our only powerful line of defense against such unjust convictions that continues to remain at our disposal is the doctrine of jury nullification.
If you are summonsed to jury duty in a statutory-rape trial and you do not feel that the court system is treating the defendant fairly despite that evidence in that trial proves that he did have sexual intercourse with an adolescent minor below the statutory age of consent in your state jurisdiction, you still have the right as a juror to vote him to be NOT GUILTY. When a law is not completely fair and state legislatures are stubborn to change it because of friction from special-interest groups, it is the people’s right to assert their disapproval of that same law by engaging in jury nullification. Because the statutory-rape laws in our nation are among the most unfair and oppressive of criminal laws, we now all need to be hypervigilant in our roles as jurors of predatory prosecutors who misuse these laws to further their own legal careers selfishly with no regards for justice.
Statutory-rape trials now reek with prosecutorial misconduct throughout the American court system because of how special-interest groups have swayed state legislatures to expand the sex laws throughout our nation insofar as the wrong people are being unfairly punished because of them. It is time that we all take a stand against this travesty of justice throughout our nation and utilize the tool of jury nullification to its fullest capacity to put an end to this madness and travesty of justice. If enough frivolous and malicious statutory-rape cases are acquitted by jury nullification throughout our nation, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors are going to stop pursuing these cases as aggressively as they have been after they realize that these cases have become a waste of their time and of the taxpayers’ money and that their efforts to seek convictions for them have become futile. We, as Americans, have the power to get our criminal justice system right and to take back our court system. Let’s do it!
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