Mel Gibson's The Passion, sparking concern from the ADL.

Tartarin

Those too are very good examples of the complexity of the issue. Add in the degree to which the law itself is commonly written from a perspective rich in stereotypes, and it doesn't get easier.

- Prior to 1847 - only Church of England marriages were legal in Ontario. "Unchristianized" aboriginal native marriages were given legal recognition, but only to the extent that they did not offend British Christian conceptions of marriage. Male ogokwe (same-sex) relationships were criminalized, however, with the imposition of the death penalty until 1861.

- 1847 - Catholic marriages became legal in Ontario

- 1857 - Jewish marriages become legal in Ontario

-1925 - Removal of double standard whereby a husband could sue his wife for divorce on the grounds of adultery alone, but a wife was required to prove that her husband had committed adultery coupled with another marital offence in order to obtain a divorce.

-1950 - Marriage finally permitted through a purely civil ceremony by a judge or other official, thus ending the religious monopoloy on marriage in Ontario.

-1968 - The Divorce Act simplified divorce, and marital breakdown was included as a ground for divorce.

-1970s - It was still legal for a husband to rape his wife

Well, since the criminalization of homosexual sex has been struck down by the Supreme Court in the U.S. of A., the state age of consent laws for heterosexual sex would probably apply.

This from the website, LEGAL AGE OF CONSENT:
http://www.ageofconsent.com/ageofconsent.htm

The lowest minimum age for sex with someone twenty-one years of age or older is 16 in most of the states of the U.S. of A.

In Utah and some other states the minimum age of consent is 16, if the partner is no more than 10 years older; otherwise, eighteen is the minimum age.

In Iowa and some other states the lowest age of consent is 14, if the partner is no more than five years older.

That's a gross absurdity. NAMBLA is about "man-boy love"--and it seems awfully damned silly and shallow to speak as though there were an issue of any "fundamental point of consent/coercion." Once again NAMBLA is about "man-boy love," not "man-young man love." That was a gross exercise in hair-splitting to avoid admitting you'd been nailed.

As far as I gather from what others more informed than I am about NAMBLA, it supports a concept while acknowledging illegality. Does it advocate ACTING illegally, or does it promote a change in the law? If the latter, what's the matter with that (however repugnant it may be to some, personally)?

I don't think there would be anything repugnant about it, i'm just saying that i think Scrat's comparison to rape is valid. An organization which glorified rape without advocating illegality would have, in my estimation, the same qualitative position, or "moral" position, if one prefers that tired old word, as the position occupied by NAMBLA. I would consider ludicrous any contention that there could be valid consent by a boy to sexual activity with a man--and it is a principle which is enshired in law in every jurisdiction in the United States in the concept of statutory rape.

I agree with Setanta -- there's no rationlization to warrant a direct focus (via NAMBLA or any individual or organization) on what basically is a fetish. I do question the willy nilly way the law deals with this and considering that it is likely that many of the children entering into such a relationship are run-aways we don't see many cases in the news. These children may or may not enter into such a relationship for security but it's hard to tell. At any rate, it's someone's instrinsic morality that should prevail and reject such a relationship. Interestingly enough and more to the point, that can apply to the Catholic church scandal as well.
I guess we're off the film and it's not my decision to split this off -- anyone care to ask a moderator to split this forum?

I think Gibson is worried he has a giant turkey on his hands and it's liable to gobble him up. If he edits the film and it proves to be a good film, I'd change my opinion but only if it is is viable cinema, not just another experiment that should have never been produced.

set

No, this wasn't a hair-splitting argument nor was it motivated as you suggest. How existing laws apply to this question doesn't much interest me because those laws are so universally founded on local prejudice (the present schism within the Anglican communities of North American and Africa/Asia over same sex marriage being a pertinent example, or the examples I listed above, or any number of other historical examples such as inter-racial marriage in the US). How those laws would play out in any given jurisdiction, then, seems a markedly less fruitful address to the questions at hand than trying to figure out what moral principles are engaged and why.

Scrat equated forcible rape with consentual 'man/boy' sex. But they are too dissimilar to be analogous. The first, by definition, entails a particularly intrusive physical assault (usually combined with threats) against the victim's wishes - coercion in as ugly and dehumanizing a form as we might witness it) whereas the second entails no coercion where consent is freely given. A more judicious analogy would be to the case in New York city where a policeman anally assaulted an African American male using his police truncheon.

Scrat's argument (and possibly yours) is that a 'boy' cannot reasonably be expected to be either mature enough, or independent enough, or knowledeable enough to provide consent that is knowing. That's a different moral question. And it isn't an easy one - unless one just goes with the highly arbitrary local custom (written into law or not).

You know enough about other cultures and other periods to understand that our standards on this matter are beset with questionable assumptions (Spartans or Athenians, present day Polynesian or Micronesian cultures, etc, etc) hold quite different assumptions. You also appreciate, I'm sure, the cultural inertia of such assumptions and notions - if valid psychological studies showed clearly that sexual relations between older and younger people were no less problematic than similarly aged interactions, those findings would be quite ignored by many.

(Although I support NAMBLA's right to advocate their position based on the Frist Amendment, I don't see it as a violation of the law no matter what I think of it as a personal moral question).

The reason I'm posing all these questions is that I come from a very different direction, evidently, than most Americans. My impression is that Americans are titillated by sex and in many cases frightened by it. That prompts a "control" attitude. I don't think real sex should be codified, controlled, in that way. Finding certain things about sex repugnant is completely understandable. When I was about thirteen and had no experience of sex, I could barely accept the idea of heterosexual sex using the missionary position. Anything different from that was definitely repugnant, frightening. So Texas was about sodomy. So we were once about "miscegenation."

We tend to reject what we haven't experienced and call it unnatural or foreign. We set up straw men: those homosexual men grabbing my kid off his skateboard and raping him, etc. etc. gets dragged into a conversation about homosexuality. I'd much prefer to see a less eek-a-mouse attitude, a humbler attitude which admits, Hey, I haven't tried that, I find it odd and somewhat repulsive, but, yes, it would be very hard to codify it, write a sensible law which outlaws it.

So my bottom line is coercion. Sex is by nature a consensual act, whether you're doing it with yourself or with a partner. So let's distinguish coercion from consent before we go any further.

By the way, I got to read the Frank Rich article in Sunday's Times (didn't get the paper till yesterday) and I think he's done a masterful job of describing the situation -- he depicts Gibson et pere wonderfully. My take is that this movie is yet another Gibson attention-getting device. His career has been punctuated by these devices; he's looking more and more like a jerk.

I would first expression my gratitude to LW for his forbearance. Next, i would like to note that I've been eating a lot of vegetables lately, I've even got a salad for lunch today, all to please Lovey who is concerned for my health. I am going to use that as an excuse for my ill temper-the lack of my normal diet of starch and large amounts of meat puts me out of sorts. I will acknowledge that i reacted perhaps too sharply to BLatham, but i cannot accept his arguments. My reading of history has taught me that the burden of social custom it toward the exploitation of youth, rather than its protection. The line between Man and Boy, or Woman and Girl is set too low, and not the converse.

In western history, "age of consent" has usually been consonant with the life expectancy of the society in question. Functionally, it has worked in one of two ways: in the days of the Roman Republic, young men of the Patres class entered upon public service at age 16, as they had at that point "beaten the odds"-whereas apprenticeship ages in most of Europe in centuries past have been 12 to 13 years of age, because the apprentice master could be sure of getting his sweated labor from the boy before the odds predicted his death. I don't know if I've mentioned this here at A2K, but certainly did at AFUZZ: i believe that the two greatest hindering pieces of baggage which society still carries in the west are the legacies of tribalism (such as religionism, nationalism, bigotry, ritualized violence), and "adolescent-ism." By that latter, i refer to the ancient tendance which has carried through almost to the present of adolescent boys and girls entering adulthood as quickly as they were reproductively viable. In fact, i believe that most of the bad aspects of tribalism arise from the repressively mandatory consensual participation common in adolescent social groups. One must, for example, participate in adolescent "rites of passage," often cruelly painful or violent rites, or face ostracism or even death-ritualized violence is part and parcel of this tradition. Later "ages of consent" such as 18 or 21 refer to the lengthening life expectancy of youth. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes comments on "the state of nature," a much ballyhooed concept at the time, all wrapped up in the false notion of "the noble savage," which was a "fashionable" concept in the 17th century. Hobbes wrote: "No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." We no longer live lives which are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." All the more reason to expand, not contract the age at which we recognize adult judgment in persons. Some persons are childish all of their lives (and therefore, might well fit right in with the adolescent, tribal nature of society's favorite beliefs), and others are "wise before their time"-i would estimate that neither circumstance is the norm, and that both represent insignificant variants. It is both proper and desirable that society should set limits upon the age at which persons can enter into the legal state of adulthood; further, it is proper and desirable that society legislate, as is ordinary in the never-ending process of the social contract, limits and penalties with regard to the treatment of those not yet considered to have attained their majority.

At the battle of Antietam, the Army of Northern Virginia was protected from disaster at one point by the service of the guns of the Richmond Howitzers. These three batteries of artillery were "manned" by boys from the orphanages of Richmond and elsewhere in Virginia and the South. The ages of the gunners ran from 13 to 17. As Burnsides' infantry tried to cross the middle bridge, they poured in a fire which stopped the assault before it could reach the center of the bridge-and they paid a horrible price in killed and mangled boys. One General commented to a battery commander that "Your men stand killing better than any I've seen." That remark is obscene, and it is noteworthy that boys were referred to as men-the old tribalism: if you are willing to kill and be killed, you are a man. Later in that war, a few hundred cadets of the Virginia Military Institute launched a successful bayonet attack on an entrenched battery of federal guns. It was the kind of attack veteran men would have balked at, or even refused. It was the kind of thing boys who know no better can be bullied or inspired into doing. Their casualties were awful in the brief moments it took them to cover the open ground, and the gunners abandoned their guns, as wise veterans would do, rather than face bayonets while unarmed; as an English officer said of Cossacks who assaulted a Turkish battery in the Crimean war: "There were few wounded, and many killed, as shot will kill at that range if it hits at all." In contrast, The Citadel, the military academy in South Carolina, despite the fire-brand reputation of that state in that war (for which Sherman made them "howl"), refused to allow their cadets to enlist, and expelled with dishonor any who ran away to join the Palmetto infantry. Theirs was the measure of wisdom and humanity, not those who put orphaned boys in artillery batteries, or sent beardless boys in pretty suits to stick bayonets in the guts of enemy gunners.

I cannot accept the argument that a new openness should lead us to reassess our values with regard to ages of consent. Hobbes also wrote: "The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame." The social contract, dedicated as it is to the greatest good for the greatest number, cannot operate "without shame or blame." We have the luxury of assuring the comfort, the health, the education and the safety of our children into the third decade of their lives. Were i in a position to make the decision, i would make 21 the age of consent-and no soldiers under that age, no drinking, no signing of contracts without a co-signature, no entering into adult relationships, whether by marriage or other means, without the consent of responsible guardians. I consider the blandishments which people apply to the immature to obtain the objects of "the secret thoughts of a man" to be criminal, and no better than the personal justifications, or total lack of any type of consideration, which motivates the rapist.

I did not ignore the issue of coercion, rather I assumed that you understood--as a civilized person--that inherent in the legal concept that a minor lacks the ability to consent is the belief that any situation wherein a minor's consent to sex is sought, coercion is almost certainly at play.

As to what specific age I think that line is drawn; that's where it gets complicated. I believe that pedophiles are people who need to be in a position of control in order to feel erotic love, and find that feeling they seek with children who--by definition--are incapable of entering into a relationship with an adult on a level field.

This type of unhealthy relationship can occur between consenting adults, but we assume that adults should have the requisite life experience to make informed decisions regarding relationships; decisions young children almost certainly lack the ability to make for themselves. (And more to the point, should not have to make.)

If an adult manipulates the emotions of a needy child to the point where that child "consents" to having sex with the adult, I call that coercion. I call that rape. The fact that the promise of toys and affection and the threat of the loss of affection or esteem in the adult's eyes are the tools and weapons of choice, the coercion is no less real than when a rapist threatens to beat a woman bloody if she does not submit. Coercion is just as much a part of pedophilia as it is a part of rape.

But keep in mind that I am not talking about adult men who prey on 16 year old boys, here. While I don't think that's right, it isn't pedophilia in my book. Pedophiles do not prey on young adults or teens. Pedophiles prey on prepubescent children. Hopefully we can all agree that there is never an instance where a child who is 8 or 10 years old can be thought to give consent to sex with an adult.

But Set, you seem to be assuming "exploitation" in what NAMBLA stands for. I agree with you that youth has been exploited, but can you assume exploitation in the matter under discussion? Isn't the exploitation of youth by corporate marketing in our country much more serious and real and affecting? And we brush it aside, saying personal, sensual relationships are so much worse?

Also, I think the American adolescence is already protracted, certainly in contrast with other developed countries. We give our kids a kind of freedom which is often far too free of responsibility and self-respect. (In the '80's and '90's, I spent fifteen years first a few blocks from Princeton University and then a few blocks from the University of Texas. I had to contrast what I saw with similar experiences in London, at Oxford, and Madrid. We definitely have a youth culture, and one which is often pretty unhealthy...)

Tart, like Ah-nold says: "Ah'll be bahck . . . "

Hasta La Vista

Tart - not sure the intention, but I'll take it as a compliment to be the prez's press secretary.

Yes, i am assuming exploitation by NAMBLA-and make the assumption by definition. Children who are by society's definition unable to give informed consent can definitely be considered as exploited when they are the objects of the unsolicited affections of grown men. For however NAMBLA may publicly demure from the advocacy of criminal relations between men and boys-for rather obvious reasons--it is so patently disingenuous that i would consider anyone who took at face value that the members simply wish to associate for share their bittersweet experiences of an unrequited yearning to be hopelessly naive. That society has laws to protect youth from such exploitation is fitting-and very widespread. I will quote Hobbes once again, as when first i read this, it resonated very much with me: it expresses precisely my belief in the core need which is fulfilled by the social contract. "The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame." The entire point of mores and a social contract is to protect the community of interest from the private interests of individuals. The making of laws, and the promulgation of morality by religious persons, is the process by which the community of interest is reconciled with the private interest-often in the form of prohibition of certain behaviors by individuals. That such individuals as those with whom we are here concerned have decided to associate by no means lessens the community's right to restrict or prohibit the behavior in which they wish to indulge. I don't know that i would assume that the attempt by corporate marketing to exploit is necessarily more serious or affecting. At any event, society also restricts the ability of marketers, individual or corporate, to act upon their desire to monetarily exploit youth: those under 18 years of age cannot sign binding contracts, they cannot obtain credit cards, their signatures are not binding on purchase documents, revolving credit charges (such as "900" number telephone calls, or subscriptions to internet sites) made by minors cannot be enforced.



I am less certain of this than you, as well. In the first place, as i wrote above, i would consider it a development of societal maturity to prolong the period of the minority of children. I also believe that if it can be asserted in this or that anecdotal case that a youth is allowed irresponsible freedom, or does not display self-respect, that this is a comment upon their home and family, and not society. Apart from the self-image problems which seem to torture nearly all adolescents, self-respect must be learned, and is the only avenue to learning a genuine respect for others. As for a sense of responsibility, this is once again something which is a part of their education at home. In French, education refers not to what one obtains in the school, but what one learns in the home. It has always appalled me when i have encountered young people who are unwilling to work, or clueless about what is expected of them in the workplace. I don't by any means assert that this is the majority case, although i have frequently seen it. More frequently, i have seen responsible behavior and self-application to the task at hand by young workers. But there are a large number of young workers whom i have seen who haven't the least notion of what it means to work on a daily basis, with a responsible attitude to the issue of "mine and thine" between employer and employee, and application to the completion of a task. I worked at home, from a very early age, and a "microcosmic" community of interest was the rationale for the assignment of regular tasks, and of special projects as the need arose. Although i am by nature a lazy man, I've always understood that "taking the King's shilling" means that one accepts the law of "the King" as it is articulated in the workplace. I am able to apply my energies and abilities in a manner not simply sufficient to be paid by my employer, but to be rewarded with pay raises and bonuses. This results from what i learned about work at home. The workplace is simply another "microcosmic" community of interest; public service, such as military service, or "volunteerism," represent an application to the tasks which inhere in a larger community of interest. One could adduce many anecdotes about other developed societies to prove either case-in many European nations, young people are allowed to consume mild alcoholic beverages from an much earlier age than is the case here-they may also be denied driving privileges for many years beyond the case in the U.S. Japanese students work like very demons in school from the earliest days until they have matriculated-they then frequently spend their entire university career either drinking, drunk, or recovering from the most recent bout. I have read, and observed in the ethnic Chinese communities i have seen, that the Chinese fawn over their children until they are about five or six years of age-and then the hammer comes down, sorry, party's over, time to get to work. One can find statements in western culture going back nearly 3,000 years about the decay of public morals-the popular Roman lament of "O tempore, O mores!" (Oh, the times; Oh, the morals!) echoes throughout every corridor of history. Sorry Boss, I'm not convinced.

Edited to remove evidence of incompetence.

Mores = customs I think. Which raises the question: the relationship of that hard discipline, morals, to simple habit, customs!

But I do take seriously the difference between American kids and others.

Set -- I always love your use of "Boss." Reminds me of something, makes me laugh every time!!