July 24, 2007

Sex Offenders?

Let’s be honest: I am a leftist, a true liberal to my core. But there are some things that must be enforced: the right to one’s person is part of a free society. We are our own property; our bodies are not the property of the State, the Church, or God or the Devil. I believe that laws regarding the violation of a person’s sexual boundaries are well placed and deserve to be fairly enforced. I am the father of daughters: God help anybody that hurts them. I may be a leftist, but I would become the very hammer of God where their welfare is involved.

An item on the news today: a middle-school boy was charged with a felony – yes a felony – for having playfully smacked a girl on her bottom. Was this appropriate behavior? No and Yes. Preadolescence is where we learn about our bodies and sexuality; should a person be touching another person’s “intimate body parts”? That is a matter of consent. Kids do dumb things. They touch each other and begin to learn what is appropriate and in what context. Context and relationship make all the difference.

To have charged this child with felony sexual battery is the triumph of the absurd. I’ve watched kids this age. Both sexes do things that they would be less apt to do later in life unless they understood that there was consent. A boy smacks a girl on the butt and he is a rapist? Pardon my Y-chromosome, but doesn’t this trivialize rape?

I had a friend who was raped. She was a friend; trust was part of our platonic relationship. There was nothing trivial about the pain or the humiliation that she felt. It took her at least a year to be able to think about sex without violence being attached to it. This was terror and theft of that which was most intimate and personal. We trivialize the most revolting acts by lowering the bar that defines what is truly horrid and what is merely in bad taste.

We have to get past our cultural pre-pubescence and see that sex is natural and good. The natural process of development is not a bad thing. We all have done some dumb things. I smacked a girl on her bottom, made jokes about tits, talked about what I wanted to do in the locker-room like all boys that age did. But that does not make me a sexual predator; it made me a thirteen year old boy that was curious about girls, who were curious about boys.

If there was a rape with that incarceration it was a rape of justice and a slap in the face of people that have suffered sexual violence.

Ah, but I am only a fool…