Henry Haller wrote:
HH) what right is at stake here? (HH
Those who are not competent to give consent have the right not to be taken advantage of by those able to elicit from them the superficial appearance of consent.
HH) It seems to me that the state should not be legislating at all regarding ability-to-consent conditions (HH
So if a parent or guardian talks his 12- or 7- year old into learning about sex hands-on -- or into supplementing her allowance through sexual commerce -- then the state has no business prosecuting such a parent or guardian unless the kid swears out a complaint? I don't want the Platform to say that, and I don't want our presidential nominee to write that in a published book.
This is not just a hypothetical issue. Here in my county we have a perennial LP candidate who served time after pleading no contest in 1990 to two charges of attempted child pandering -- i.e. "offer[ing] to give, transport, provide, or make available to another person, a child under the age of 16 for the purpose of any lewd or lascivious act as defined in Section 288". To defend himself from what he calls "entrapment" for talking about organizing a sexual encounters between an undercover female cop and his 14-year-old son (and allegedly the 10-year-old boy living with him), he explains:
JW) Why I am a Politically Incorrect Parent : I had my first pleasant sexual experience at the age of five -- a kind of group orgy/sexual-discovery/fondle get together of about four or five kids of various ages and both sexes. I had long since decided that if at all possible that I would like to arrange a similar pleasant sexual experience for my own children. [...]The details of three incidents where some could claim that I had been inappropriately affectionate with a child: a minor incident in 1969 (it was inappropriate since the child was not my own and I didn't have the parents okay), and two in 1982 with my own daughter. All incidents were intended by me as affection, and most importantly were received as affection by the child. (JW
In 2004 we had to run a normaltarian against this guy in a state senate primary and we only kept him off the general ballot by two votes -- luckily, not many people know about his record.
