[As best they can determine from the scribblings in the family bible and my oldest uncles claims about his age] my grandmother had her first child when she was 14. Now if they had hauled my grandfather off to prison back then you would not have to contend with my kibitzing. San and BA would be so much happier today.

Was she married?

Back then, when a man had sex with a young girl, the parents came with shotguns and forced them to get married.

With the divorce rate and the ability to escape from taking care of a girl or her children, thats no longer a fitting punishment.

Different times, different circumstances. Nowadays you can't even get a decent job without a college education, much less a high school diploma. What kind of job can a 14 yr. old get to support their child? Having a child comes with responsibilities. Having a roof over their head, clothing on their back and food in their stomachs which are the necessities. Can a 14 yr. old provide that? Do we make the parents responsible even though they have no say in whether or not their child is having sex or whether or not said child decides to keep the baby? What about the constant care a baby needs? What happens when that 14 yr. old is tired of being a mommy and decides to hang out with her friends and ends up neglecting her child? Granted not all will do that but it is possible. Even somewhat responsible adults will do that.

There are so many different variables compared to when your grandmother was 14 yrs. old.

The responsibilities we place on parents today are much greater than back then. With the invention of the nuclear family, where only the parents are expected to care for the child, all the responsibilities that would have been passed to extended family etc. have been placed on two or often one person's shoulders.

Not to mention the diasporic nature of families today. Your great grandmother probably lived within walking distance of many people who would help look after and raise the child. Today, parents, grandparents and grown children live geographically far from each other, reducing the options available for non-institutional aid.

(This also kind of ties in to the previous debate on parents being the main beneficiaries of public and business policy.)

However, I think that this story is a rare beacon for sexual ethics in the states. It's not new that teens have been having sex and procreating -- what is new is the social environment in which these parents operate.

"The responsibilities we place on parents today are much greater than back then."

Really? Society condemed the whole family and viewed them with shame if they let their daughters have sex before marriage.

I think the responsibility was much greater back then, when people actually had respect and honor, and could lose that.

You're right. I should have said "The responsibilities we place on legitimate parents today are much greater than legitimate parents back then." I was speaking in terms of married, socially endorsed couplings.

i'm not sure how old you are, but it's not weird that people had kids younger in the days where they died earlier. at one point in history it was quite normal to marry off 13 year old girls. basically as soon as they "became a woman". but we do not raise our children to be able to run households by the age of 13 anymore. higher life expectancy would naturally lead to people having children later in life.

there's no reason to compare the situation today to that of 50 years ago, much less 100 years ago. the truth is that kids today as a whole are not emotionally capable and responsible to be having sex and dealing with the ramifications of it. in fact, most people i knew in late teens and early twenties (hell some never emotionally mature!) had no business having sex either.

the problem i have with giving kids birth control is 1) i'm an adult and i have to go to a doctor to get on the pill. if a school nurse can give it out, then i say just make it accessible withOUT a prescription. and 2) when i was 11, my mom didn't trust me to be responsible enough to get contact lenses and take care of them (and rightfully so, i'm still notoriously lazy with taking care of them). do you really think most 11 year olds will be responsible enough to take a daily pill?

if a person shows themselves to be mature enough to deal with all the outcomes of sex- to deal with all the prevention techniques that need to be employed and not to become an emotional wreck as a result, then i have much less of a problem with someone under eighteen engaging in these activities. however, i know of few adults and even fewer teens that fit this criteria.

if i ever have kids, i will repeatedly tell them the mantra that i used growing up. there is a time and a place for everything- and that place is college.

(because if you're going to condone kids doing stuff before they are 18, then i say you can't keep holding the parents responsible for the "kids'" actions.

lured to a room at the local inn by 4 strangers, plied with liquor and opium to make her more compliant, then had her various activities with the men recorded on a moving picture camera for the entertainment of other strangers, eh?

bet your GREAT grandma might have had a thing or 2 to say about what happened to your grandma, then.

i actually have no problem with girls of 15 having consensual sex with a "boyfriend". i lost my virginity at 15, also. what i object to is the 48 hour "party" in a hotel room rented by older men who she was not familiar with, the presence of other women, the use of alcohol and narcotics to speed up their compliance, etc.

if you don't see anything wrong with these factors, then you should be serving your daughter up for this sort of fun, eh?

On New Year’s Eve in 2003, Mr. Wilson and several friends rented a hotel room for a party at which they planned to have plenty of alcohol, marijuana and sex. One friend, goofing around with a video camera, captured much of the action on videotape. A 17-year-old girl reported after leaving the party that she had been gang raped. The tape showed that she was severely intoxicated.

A second girl, 15, also attended the party, but did not drink or smoke. She had what she later said was consensual oral sex with Mr. Wilson. But according to the law, a 15-year-old is below the age of consent. Mr. Wilson went to trial on charges of rape and aggravated child molesting.

After watching parts of the tape, the jury decided that Mr. Wilson had not raped the older girl. But it was bound by law to find him guilty of molesting the 15-year-old. Jurors said afterward they did not know that the charge carried a minimum sentence of 11 years, including 10 without parole.

so. i dont know where you got the opium angle from, but i didnt read about it in this article. nor have i read anywhere that opium makes lose control of your mental faculties.... alcohol, however. regardless, the 15 year old DIDN't even DO any of that stuff. yet you want to make her out to be a victim. perhaps you don't remember being a teen, or perhaps it was different when you were a teen. but oral sex is nothing to a lot of these kids now. some of them even stupidly think that it means they're still virgins and not "sinning", etc. (now, admittedly, the allegation with the older girl was much more serious. if anything i'm interested in what happened THERE. could they just not prove it because she was drunk?)

THIS is why i have a problem with mandatory minimums. and, the fear of unfair sentencing might be why there are problems trying to get a jury to convict sometimes. i know if i were on a jury i'd have an issue finding someone guilty if i thought they were going to be in jail for an unfair period of time.

we need to stop treating these kids like victims, though, and teach them about responsibility and consequences. then they can make informed decisions. but acting like they are completely incapable of thought only keeps them stupid, unaware, and yes... potential victims for the rest of their lives.

Hey BA,

From a Fox News (a source I chose just for you) article:

>>The then 17-year-old and a group of friends made the ill-fated decision to ring in the New Year [2003] on a drug, sex and alcohol-fueled bender at a Days Inn in suburban Atlanta. Among the partygoers in the adjoining rooms were two girls, ages 15 and 17.

The next morning, the 17-year-old girl told her mother that she had been raped, according to court documents. Police searched the motel and found a video camera and a tape of the previous evening's events.

The tape showed Wilson having sex with the "apparently semiconscious" 17-year-old and the 15-year-old performing oral sex on him, according to documents.

Douglas County District Attorney David McDade took the case before a grand jury and came back with indictments against six boys.

Wilson and four others were charged with the rape of the 17-year-old and the child molestation of the 15-year-old. Georgia's age of consent is 16. A sixth teen was charged only with rape.

Five of the defendants decided to plead guilty to charges of child molestation and the lesser sentence of sexual battery. In exchange, they received 15-year sentences, of which they would only have to serve five years in prison, [Douglas County Assistant District Attorney Eddie] Barker said.

Wilson, who had no prior arrest record, chose to take his case to trial.

"The jury acquitted him of the rape charge, but convicted him of the aggravated child molestation charge," Barker said.<<

No one that I'm aware of is saying that what happened that night was morally defensible. To my knowledge, no one is saying that any of it was even legal. As I've highlighted above, five of the six charged (Wilson being the sixth) decided to plead guilty. The point isn't that what happened was okay, it's that the particular boy we're talking about was 17 at the time and the girl was 15. It's the age of the "perpetrator" that matters here (to a lot of people, maybe not you) as well as the difference in age (which is to say not much) between the participants.

I heard something on the news that the reason why they didn't charge the people with possessing child porn, was that if they did, it would legally go to the Feds, and the Feds would have to charge the Legislature and others who watched the video tape in order to determine if the crime was right (the Legislators supposedly watched it to see if they should have a law not apply to 17 year olds, whatever nonsense).

I still think people need to be charged with child porn.

What a pathetic person you are.

Talking out of your ass again, San.

Child Porn laws were written to address what was, mistakenly, believed to be a wave of cult molestations of small children for fun and profit, by perverts.

They were not written to address idiots who not only break the law by serving intoxiicants to minors, but then have sex with said minors, and THEN, just to prove what idiots they are, videotape the whole thing so the tape can be used as evidence against them.

Idiots or, as they are more commonly known, "teenagers."

The titillating aspect of this trial was the sex part. We have a generation gap between kids who are pretty casual about oral sex and older types (like me, for instance) who remember ALL sex as being pretty exotic and hard to come by, and oral sex as something people did in some other country, like Sweden. maybe. But big deal, that's not what this whole issue is about. it's about the fashion of trying kids as adults.

There was a fantasy that haunted the middle class for a while in the waning years of the last century: predatory, sociopathic children. There was the "wilding" incident in Central Park. Everybody remembers that, but most seem to have forgotten that the kids were actually innocent, but went to jail anyway. only getting out some years later when DNA and a confession proved the whole thing was done by a predatory rapist working alone.

What happened in response to that imaginary wave of child criminals was a real wave of bad law designed to destroy the juvenile justice system. It isn't such a novelty to try kids as adults. it was pretty common back in the eighteenth century, and even well into the nineteenth. Should we go back to hanging children for petty crimes against property? Shouod we also go back to ear cropping and public flogging?

And i won't go into the additional matter of the defendant being black. Oh, why not? Well, because reactionary tools like San and BA will jump on it to cloud the issue which is, as Saletan noted, all about age, and treating chldren as children, even when they don't have the sense to do so themselves.