The Suddenly Prudish Sluts Of The Left
Anthony Bouchard once did a [sort of] bad thing.
One of Liz Cheney’s chief Republican opponents in next year’s House race in Wyoming recently admitted that he impregnated a 14 year old young woman when he was 18. The MSM is pushing the story hard, in an effort to protect Miss Cheney, a darling of the lying press, a vile neocon, and a fierce ally of the Cultural Marxist superstate and all its appendages.
Keep in mind, this was a long, long time ago for Mr. Bouchard. It is of course not even remotely relevant to his fitness for office today. If you need to go back four decades to find bad conduct by a political candidate, he ain’t that bad. Still, is his conduct good conduct for an 18 year old? No. But is it really bad conduct? No, not really. It is the conduct of an 18 year old, about what one would expect truthfully.
The truly abhorrent conduct is all the hand-wringing associated with this kind of thing. It drove me crazy when Roy Moore had to suffer it, and it drives me crazy now. The moral posturing, the over-the-top invective, calling people pedophiles and what not — — it is idiotic, insufferable nonsense. Mr. Bouchard went on to raise this kid by the way. At age 19, he stepped up to the plate & became a father, despite being in a very precarious financial situation. That is commendable if anything.
Furthermore, in traditional societies, nothing Anthony Bouchard did would be considered odd, let alone awful. You really can’t call yourself a traditionalist if you think consensual sex between a 14 year old girl and an 18 year old boy is something unthinkable. Girls are considered adults at age 12 under traditional Jewish law (boys at 13). In Medieval Europe, girls were routinely married off in their teens, and the marriages were consummated, I assure you.
Only someone supremely ignorant of history would be shocked and outraged by Mr Bouchard’s actions. 18 is an arbitrary age, a line drawn by cumbrously weighing various interests and by consulting one’s intuition, but it is not necessarily the right line. And what most Americans don’t realize is that in most states the consent age is not 18, but 16. And honestly, 16 is about right. Maybe a bit high even.
Frankly, the fact that girls can go into porn at 18 is far more unthinkable than somewhat younger teenagers simply having sex. Selling one’s body for money is not just sex. Not even close. Given all the personal, professional, psychological, medical, and spiritual repercussions of doing that, 18 actually seems far too young. The consent age for pornography should be 22 or 23.
But to simply have sex? Again, 18 seems old. It always has. It is utterly depraved to arrest or prosecute teenage boys for simply having sex with teenage girls. It is futile, the wounding of the young for naught, and as such constitutes a gross abuse of state power. This is a parenting issue at most, not something the heavy hand of government should be involved in.
A 15 or 16 year old girl is as physically developed as she will ever be. There is nothing wrong with an 18 year old male who is physically attracted to a 14 year old female. That is healthy and normal. He is not some sicko or pedophile. We should not be pathologizing his conduct. It is not pathological, nor is it necessarily predatory for an 18 year old boy to have sex with a 14 year old girl. Girls mature physically and emotionally significantly earlier than boys. From a developmental standpoint, they are a lot closer than the four years between them might suggest.
Mr Bouchard went on to describe these events as a “Romeo & Juliet” story of sorts. After all, they fell in love, and he married her. Nevertheless, that description left many apoplectic. How dare he! But how is he wrong? It literally is a Romeo & Juliet story, except Juliet wasn’t 14, she was merely 13. Romeo was probably about Mr. Bouchard’s age at the time, by most scholars’ estimates. So, as a matter of fact, nothing he said was so much as false, let alone ridiculous or offensive. Indeed, throughout history, these were perfectly typical ages for young people to marry and copulate. Regrettably, it increasingly seems like the most awful thing anyone can do in the Western World, is speak the truth, directly and plainly. Even statements like, “boys are boys and girls are girls”, have somehow become inflammatory.
Thusly, here is some more truth for you: The consent age in China, today, is 14. The consent age in Japan is 13. Sweden: 15. Italy: 14. Moreover, throughout the 19th Century the consent age in every U.S. state was either 10 or 12. 10 or 12! Except for Delaware that is. It was 7 in Delaware. Granted, I am not arguing the consent age should be 10 or 12 or 7, or 13 for that matter, but, again, the issue is primarily one of what we are willing to tolerate as a society, and more importantly, whether or not the conduct in question is so terrible that the threat of imprisonment is truly appropriate.
My personal view is that the consent age should be 15 everywhere, and that criminal penalties should not attach when the younger participant is 14 and his/her partner is within 7 years, within 5 years when the younger participant is 13, and within 3 years when the younger participant is 12. Furthermore, in advanced nations with developed legal systems, and even in many American states, this is what the criminal codes look like already. They make exceptions when the consenting parties are close in age, as they should. Those exceptions are even colloquially referred to as “Romeo and Juliet” clauses ironically, and interestingly, they are more common in more liberal regions. Unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, it appears conservatives don’t get to avail themselves of those perfectly sensible exceptions.
So, the next time you feel like engaging in over-the-top moral preening, how about educating yourself? Mr. Bouchard’s story is not scandalous. It’s just not. It is normal, and it always will be. Teenagers experiment, they have sex. Get used to it. Prosecuting them for having sex is wrong. Flipping out about it is stupid. That is what wokesheviks and other aspiring totalitarians do. It is the harebrained denial of human nature. It is base and ignorant.
People between the ages of 12 and 22 are not adults to be sure, but nor are they children exactly. They are in a transitional zone of sorts. They are growing into adulthood. An 18 year old boy who dates a 14 year old girl is not a monster or a pedophile, and pretending he is either, is sick. That is predatory actually. I understand that people take pleasure in shaming others, that it makes them feel morally superior, especially when those they are shaming are their political foes, but all these folks prove is that age is no guarantor of wisdom or maturity, just as a lack of it is no guarantor of folly or naivete.
