This Stupidity Is What You Get When Puritanism Meets Sex Hysteria

Americans can't get sex right. We deny facts about sex to teens, thus guaranteeing that they will fumble in ignorance into sexually-transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies.

And when we find out that they have been doing what human teenagers have been doing for a million years, we freak out and throw them into the criminal justice system.

Yes, adults must be kept from sexual contact with minors; such contact is and should be crimes and appropriately punished.

But consensual sex between minors is natural and should not be prosecuted.

Especially when that prosecution reinforces medieval freakazoid ideas about male predators and female virginity.

Bruce Schreiner, AP:

Kentucky's highest court considered (two weeks ago) whether teen-age couples should be treated as criminals when they have sex and send nude photos to each other. If so, a third of America's teenagers could be exposed to felony sex-offense charges, the 15-year-old boy's lawyer said.

In this case, the legal fallout was one-sided after a mother spotted nude pictures on her seventh-grade daughter's phone, and discovered that she was having sex with her eighth-grade boyfriend at her house.

Both teen-agers could have been charged with the same offenses, but the full weight of Kentucky's law landed on the boy, who pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors for having sex and exchanging the photos. Then, despite his plea, a judge designated him a sex offender, removed him from his home and sent him to a juvenile detention center.

SNIP

The state's high court is expected to issue a ruling within a few months.

Read the whole ridiculous thing.