Evanescent Youth, Predatory Persistence

Posted on | June 29, 2013 | 152 Comments

“Now there is what appears to be a concerted effort to lower, or even obliterate, the age of consent; but I suspect the culprits engaged therein are less interested in long-term relationships — children eventually grow up, after all — than in simply getting their hands into some poor kid’s Garanimals.”
— Charles G. Hill, Dustbury.com

Our friend Mr. Hill has zeroed in on exactly the problem with this particular perversity. Pedophilia is the fetishization of youth, wherein a person is persistently obsessed with sexual objects of a certain age. This dehumanizes the object of the obsession, and is the opposite of the “one life, one wife” permanent pair-bonding that is the social ideal.

Because youth does not last, neither can the “relationship” between the pedophile and his prey. One may point to the unusual exception: After her release from prison in 2005, Mary Kay LeTourneau married Vili Fualaau, with whom she began her involvement when he was a 13-year-old middle schooler and she was his 34-year-old teacher.

Mary Kay LeTourneau in court, 1998.

But this merely highlights how such relationships transgress the lifelong pair-bonding norm: First, LeTourneau abandoned her husband and four children to pursue this relationship and, second, she is now 51 and her second husband (the father of her two youngest children) is 30. How much longer may we expect this fellow in the prime of life to remain a devoted husband to his elderly wife?

If the LeTourneau case is exceptional in many ways, nevertheless it is typical in others. The adult who pursues illegal sex with minors is always — invariably — a troubled personality, either (a) the maladapted misfit unable to find a satisfactory and enduring adult relationship, or else (b) a sort of sexual opportunist seeking a new thrill to relieve the boredom or soothe the disappointments of adult life.

Some who have been more sympathetic to LeTourneau have pointed to problems in her marriage to Steve LeTourneau, seeing her as the victim of domestic abuse. And while this background may to some extent explain LeTourneau’s problems, it cannot excuse her illegal actions because if we were to accept such an excuse even once, no student would be safe from the predatory sexual interest of any teacher discontented with the quality of their adult relationships.

“Your honor, my client ‘s wife is a nagging bitch, so you
can’t blame him for boning that 15-year-old.
And, hey, it was consensual.”

This commonly heard rationalization, that illegal sex with minors is not really a crime when it is “consensual,” is invalid because (a) it ignores every advantage that the older offender may employ to obtaining such illegal consent, and (b) it ignores the fact that young people are not competent judges of their own best interests.

Point (b) is something that every responsible parent understands. If I were to let my children do whatever pleases them, they would never do anything except watch TV and play video games. Some children are more mature and responsible than others, but their superior qualities cannot be used as evidence against them, as it were, to argue that they should be treated as sexual “fair game.”

“Your honor, the alleged victim is fully developed —
just look at the rack on her, will ya? — and she’s so
emotionally mature that it was only natural she
wanted to get naked with her sophomore gym teacher.
Like I said, it was consensual.”

All age-of-consent laws are to some extent arbitrary: One day a young person is jailbait — off-limits, taboo, the Forbidden Fruit — and then they hit the Magic Birthday where they can legally do anything they want (consensually) with any of their fellow adults. Police, prosecutors, judges and juries may in every case use their discretion in regard to the enforcement of these laws, considering all circumstances in determining how severely any specific infraction should be punished.

One summer day in 1974, I arrived at high school band camp to find all my hoodlum buddies in the trombone section abuzz with the excitement provoked by a certain freshman majorette. Tanned and brunette, with high cheekbones and the brilliant white smile of a carnivore, Sally on that hot Georgia day wore pink short-shorts tightly encasing a pelvis that was a casus belli — hips to kill or die for — and she had legs of perfection beyond the power of mere words to describe. Completing her ensemble of adolescent irresistibility, Sally wore a tight white midriff top, exposing her lean abdomen and emphasizing the pert firmness of her breasts.

Nearly four decades later, that splendid vision remains embedded in my neural cortex, and I doubt any other alumnus of the 1974 Douglas County High School Marching Tiger Band can say he’s ever forgotten what Sally looked like that August day. Her smile so bright, her body so temptingly lithe — oh, every male within eyesight of Sally the Freshman Majorette must have struggled to restrain his inner pirate: “Arggh, what a comely young wench you are! You will be mine!”

Sally was eventually wooed and won by our band’s drum major, a former trumpet section leader who was a senior that year, and the last I heard they were still married. I invoke the vision of Sally her first day at band camp — when all the guys were asking each other, “Who the hell is that chick in the pink hot pants?” — to say that there are entirely understandable urges which the law nonetheless requires us to resist.

Dude, the Pope would have hit that.

Like a diesel locomotive at full throttle on a downhill grade.

Why Do You Think They Call It ‘Jailbait’?

It may therefore seem unnatural for the law to place such a precocious specimen of nubile perfection entirely off-limits to the universe of men who could not help but desire Sally in her short-shorts. And if you think I’m exaggerating, you obviously weren’t there in August 1974.

What the law prohibits, however, it prohibits for a reason and, while certain of these prohibitions may seem unfair or illogical, our imaginations are not always far-reaching enough to perceive the potential consequences of changing or abolishing these laws.

“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
— Dave Wooderson, Dazed and Confused (1993)

Not much imagination is necessary to the common-sense understanding that if there are no laws against having sex with 14-year-olds, the Dave Woodersons of the world will run amok. Therefore any appeal for leniency in the enforcement of these laws must be balanced against the consideration of what might result if such leniency became customary, and young adults banging jailbait could be confident that, even if they got caught, they most likely would be let off with a trifling punishment.

Indeed, the culture of the 1970s portrayed in Dazed and Confused — where Dave Wooderson’s hoodlum life involved a seemingly infinite parade of hot-to-trot high-school girls — was a very real phenomenon. Hoodlums in that era had more fear of the cops catching them with a bag of weed than with a 15-year-old girlfriend. If the prosecution of such crimes has become more severe in recent decades, this is not merely a “backlash” of the legal pendulum swinging away from permissiveness, but rather a sober and realistic recognition of the dangers that can result from failing to be vigilant in the protection of youth.

And it is this actual knowledge, I believe, that caused such an alarm when the “Free Kate” movement sprang forth with its arguments for non-enforcement of Florida law on the basis of “rights,” a nationwide crusade portraying Kaitlyn Hunt as a victim of homophobic discrimination.

“Wait just a minute here,” said every adult with enough sense to tie their own shoes. “Are you trying to tell me that prosecution under this law — which makes it a felony for anyone 18 or older to have sex with anyone 15 or younger — is invalid because some perpetrators might be gay?”

Liberals Now Arguing for a Lesbian’s Right
to Have Sex With a 14-Year-Old Girl

That was my first headline on May 22 about the Kaitlyn Hunt saga and, no matter how many evasions and justifications the “Free Kate” mob has offered during the past five weeks, they cannot escape the basic reality that they are trying to make homosexuality a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” for sex offenders, as Matthew Philbin said. Nor can the “Free Kate” mob deny that, should they succeed in thwarting the prosecution on such a basis, it would have the effect of voiding the age-of-consent law in Florida for everyone — male or female, gay or straight.

Some of them are even honest enough to admit this:

“Get rid of numerical age of consent laws. … Get rid of arbitrary numbers. No one should have to do math to love another person.”

Dave Wooderson never had it so good, man.

Caution Lights on the Road to Sexual Anarchy

We have been told by the apologists for Kaitlyn Hunt that consensual sex between an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old can never be wrong and, even if the 14-year-old’s parents disapprove, the law that makes these acts felonious is inherently unjust because it was all just an innocent “high school romance” and anyone who disapproves is a bigoted hateful hater.

OK, suppose we stipulate this. If we cannot draw the legal line at 14, what’s to prevent the goalposts from being shoved back to 13 and let Joshua Measroch argue that he is likewise being unfairly persecuted by hateful haters? And then once you say 13-year-olds are fair game, who will say that a 12-year-old should be off-limits to Omar Abdelbadie?

She was “dressed provocatively,” you hateful haters.

Perhaps you can describe a logical stopping point on the road to absolute Sexual Anarchy, but if these perverts don’t respect the laws we have now — and authorities say they have evidence that Kaitlyn Hunt knew it was wrong for her to have sex with a 14-year-old — why do you think they’ll respect your “reformed” age of consent?

Those who in all seriousness compare accused sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt to Rosa Parks, thus portraying her as a heroic activist, would have us believe that fingering a 14-year-old in a school restroom toilet stall is an act of civil disobedience against unjust laws. And the manifestation of this Jailbait Rights Movement has been actively applauded by the political Left. Kate Hunt’s affair with a 14-year-old was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union as “behavior that is both fairly innocuous and extremely common.” The gay-rights group Equality Florida demanded that prosecutors “drop felony charges” against Kaitlyn Hunt, describing her case as “an outrageous misapplication of the law.”

So if your 14-year-old daughter runs away from home to spend the night playing Spin the Dildo with an 18-year-old lesbian . . .

But is Kaitlyn Hunt a lesbian or an opportunistic sexual outlaw?

Her own mother says that, until Saint Kate of the Blessed Finger became involved with this 14-year-old girl, Kaitlyn had “always dated boys.” Indeed, one of her classmates at Sebastian River High School asserted that Kaitlyn Hunt was so enthusiastically heterosexual as to be “known as a whore throughout the school.” Isn’t there something weird about this? As I wrote on May 27:

So . . . precious Kate was a happy, popular heterosexual until her senior year in high school, when she met this irresistibly hot freshman girl and — boom! —  Instant Lesbian.

At that point, I had no idea what the younger girl looked like, but I’ve since seen photos and she’s a nerdy-looking kid with glasses.

While it is unwise to judge a book by its cover, it’s extremely difficult to imagine anyone looking at that awkward geek-girl and thinking, “Wow, that’s some smokin’ hot lesbian action there.”

Sally the Freshman Majorette, she was not.

Exactly why this 14-year-old became the sapphic inamorata of Kaitlyn Hunt, who according to her mother had hitherto been entirely straight, is something the “Free Kate” crowd has never bothered to explain. This mystery — Sudden Onset Jailbait Lesbian Syndrome — has provoked speculation by sex-abuse survivor S.J. Reidhead. And one wonders what therapeutic experts might say about the impulsive personality that swerves so inexplicably from heterosexual promiscuity to a helpless craving for underage geek girls.

Allegedly, I hasten to add, even though the arrest affidavit says Kaitlyn admitted her crimes and her defense does not argue she didn’t do the deed, only that her crimes aren’t really criminal.

‘Send an Innocent Young Girl to Prison’

Kaitlyn Hunt’s defenders say it is wrong to describe her as a “predator” or a “pedophile.” Certainly no one can presume to know, absent further evidence, whether she has any persistently perverse tendency that would make her likely to re-offend in the future. Such judgments are best left to those most familiar with the case, rather than debated among strangers who only know of this situation what they read on the Internet. Yet we have been confronted with a crusading movement on Kaitly Hunt’s behalf and it is this movement — which aims to prevent the enforcement of Florida law — that commands our critical scrutiny.

In seeking public support, the “Free Kate” movement condemned in no uncertain terms the parents of the 14-year-old girl who called this case to the attention of authorities in Indian River County, Florida. Nine times in her May 17 Facebook post, Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother Kelley Hunt Smith named those parents, accusing them of  “vengeance,” saying they “were out to destroy my daughter” because they “are bigoted, religious zealots.” The younger girl’s parents “fought dirty,” Kaitlyn’s mother said, and “are trying to ruin my daughter’s life . . . trying to send an innocent young girl to prison because they are full of hate and bigotry.”

On and on it went for 1,500 words. Nothing that Kaitlyn Hunt did was wrong, her mother said: “They are teenagers in high school experimenting with their sexuality, all teens do it in one form or another. They are teens, it’s healthy and normal.” It was a “mutual consenting sexual experience,” Kelley Hunt Smith said. The real problem, she said, was the attitude of the younger girl’s parents:

“Her parents can play the ‘victims’ and ruin my daughters life. … These people’s delusional stand, their hate and bigotry is tearing our daughter apart.”

And just to make sure that everyone reading her Facebook post knew who to blame, Kaitlyn’s mother named these parents nine times.

The Kaitlyn Hunt sex crime case was featured on NBC’s ‘Today’ show, May 23

Most people would be content to have had Kaitlyn Hunt’s case remain strictly a local law-enforcement matter, but on the basis of her mother’s Facebook rant, instead it became a national movement, part of what Charles Hill calls “a concerted effort to lower, or even obliterate, the age of consent,” and some of her supporters are only interested in “getting their hands into some poor kid’s Garanimals.”

We may recognize a difference between the two phenomena, but the rationalizations that true pedophiles offer for their criminal acts are not really all that different. Lifelong perverts engage in the same patterns: Minimizing their crimes as essentially harmless, claiming that they are misunderstood and unjustly persecuted, and asserting that their victims weren’t really victims at all, but willing participants who actually enjoyed having sex with the pervert.

“Your honor, this so-called ‘victim’ is very mature for a fifth-grader.
He has admitted he wanted to help my client find his lost puppy.
Why else would he get in the van? Obviously, it was consensual.”

As ridiculous as such an argument sounds, how much further down the slippery slope do we have to slide if now parents can be denounced as “full of hate and bigotry” simply because they expect the law to protect their daughter against the Hunt family’s weird ideas about what is “healthy and normal” for 14-year-olds to do?

[The 14-year-old] ran away from home to spend the night [of Jan. 4] in Kaitlyn’s bedroom where, to quote the affidavit by Sheriff’s Office Detective Jeremy Shepherd, the two girls “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.”

Happy 14th Birthday! (Batteries not included.)

Having been a sophomore trombonist that day when Sally the Freshman Majorette arrived at band camp, I certainly cannot be accused of lacking empathy with hormone-crazed teenagers. But parents have an obligation to protect their kids from corrupting influences, and shouldn’t the law side with parental protection rather than with those who make excuses for corrupting influences?

Can any rational person accept the claims that this behavior is so “innocuous” and “common” that it is “outrageous” to enforce the law?

It doesn’t matter whether we approve or disapprove or, in my case, are utterly mystified by Kaitlyn Hunt’s peculiar interests. Maybe there is a lesbian geek-girl fad in Indian River County that is as unfathomable to me as the fashions of 1974 would be to any teenager today.

Similarly, I cannot explain why Mary Kay LeTourneau, at age 34, suddenly developed an insatiable appetite for 13-year-old boyflesh. Or why Elizabeth Miklosovic wanted a seventh-grade pagan child-bride.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Nevertheless, without being unfashionably judgmental of these, uh, “fairly innocuous” preferences, the law does not punish desire or affection. Despite the claim by Kaitlyn Hunt’s father that his daughter faces prison for a mere “high school romance,” even in Florida the law does not criminalize poetry or long walks in the moonlight.

It was not her sentiments but her actions for which Kaitlyn was arrested. Shall we quote the famous words of a film director?

“Judges want to f–k young girls. Juries want to f–k young girls. Everyone wants to f–k young girls!”
— Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski is considered a “creative genius” in France, but the last time I checked, Indian River County is not in France, and Kaitlyn Hunt should have taken the plea bargain.

 

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