Judges and juries judge the culpability of minors all the time for considerably more serious offenses than having consentual sex.
If you meant “all 27 year olds who knowingly fuck prepubescents are scumbags”, like you sound like you are saying, then you’d be right.
But you are actually saying “all 27 year olds who are honestly trying to fuck 18 year olds and fuck a 17 year old by mistake are scumbags”, which is a stupid position.
You wouldn’t know bullshit if you wallowed in it. I know this, because for this entire thread you have been wallowing in bullshit.
That said, while it wasn’t bullshit, it was hyperbole; waiting merely four years would likely be sufficient for moderate certainty, to make sure that somewhat dim eighteen year old isn’t actually well-developed and mentally advanced fourteen year old (which despite the bullshit you’re shoveling, she could in theory be). As you’ve discounted documentary evidence, and since nobody’s buying your stupid bullshit that all fourteen year olds are mentally average or stupider, or that they’re incapable of lying, the only way to be absolutely certain they’re not underage is to wait.
Since you’re not allowing for any exceptions even in extreme cases, after all.
So you know that your position is inherently self-contradictory and (thus) obviously wrong, and you don’t care; you’ll argue the position anyway. There’s a word for that. Several, in fact; let’s just stick with ‘cognitive dissonance’, since it is probably the most accurate and least pejorative of possible options.
Sometimes I envy the ability to ignore titanic levels of cognitive dissonance. Of course the reason I’d want such an ability would be so that I could irrationally justify away morality so I could do evil without compunction. And not the relatively minor evil of unjustly slandering and excessively punishing men who made a justifiable mistake; such cases are rare, and aside from the self-rightous fun of frothingly hating people there’s little profit in it.
I doubt many people have serious conversations with their one-night stands.
It’s spelled “consensual,” and it’s not an offense for a minor to have sex with an adult.
Five minutes of patter is all it would take.
Eh. I can see a moral stance that doesn’t see such a wide age gap at such young ages as perfectly okay. The 27 year old may be legally clear with an 18 year old, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent someone from thinking of them as a scumbag.
ETA:
There are more than a few adults who don’t see in shades of grey. Plenty of them on this very board. And though I know it’ll be handwaved away as Doper exceptionalism, I sure as hell understood the moral nuances in that example at a young age. Robin Hood ring a bell? Steal from the rich to feed the poor? The kid who thinks Robin is a simple crook and not even a bit of a hero is going to be very rare indeed, while there’s tons of adults who’ll steadfastly maintain that no matter how noble Robin Hood’s goals might be, the fact is he stole and he should be arrested as a criminal.
I understand your point and your general defense of the concept of statutory rape is valid. But you say that 15 year old can’t possibly look 21, then you are taking a pretty absolute position that runs counter to a lot of people’s experience (if we went to a high schools these days, I bet I could pick out a few that look old enough to drink).
There’s one in this very thread.
Most of these underage girls aren’t cops. Being encouraged to commit a crime by a cop is a bit different than not even knowing you are committing a crime.
Mens rea is not an element of statuory rape. Are you imputing some sort of mens rea on anyone who commited statutory rape?
Five minutes of patter about particle physics, maybe. :rolleyes:
No. I have already said that mens rea has no application to statutory rape. I was replying to a post that the victim might be guilty of “entrapment.”
Five minutes of patter about anything will tell you if you’re talking to a 5th grader. Do you agree, or do you think it’s possible that an 11 year old can convince you she’s 21?
What about that one guy in Florida that got 10 years in jail for getting a blow job from a 16 year old when he was 18.
If this is a true story then it demonstrates exactly what I’m talking about.
Don’t you think that mens rea should be a prerequisite for a crime that can land you in jail for a decade and label you as a sex offender for the rest of your life?
Yeah it was a big deal because there were charges of racism because he was a popular black football player (I think he was a good student too) who was headed to college on a scholarship and the girl was white and the daughter of someone important.
What is the esarliest age that puberty can start? Add a couple of years to that and that is my answer.
With that said, I think that the “I didn’t know” defense should have to overcome some pretty high barriers (say by stacking the jury with the fathers of pubescent girls /jk).
I know lots of adults who act like fifth graders. They lower the bar considerably - ditzes can happen at any age and are a severe impediement to being certain that somebody is young just because they’re a moron.
And, define “possible”, because when people start talking about 21-year-looking-and-sounding 11 year-olds, they’re obviously talking about a vanishingly small percentage of the population. So running into one of them at the bar deliberately impersonating an adult would be kind of on the order of winning the lottery. (The you are about to shaft yourself lottery!)
So let’s look at the lottery as an analogy. On the one side there’s us, saying that a person would be perfectly rational if they believed that they’re not going to get the megajackpot when they bought a lottery ticket - but we also assert it’s still possible. You, on the other hand, are saying that nobody can possibly ever win the lottery. Guess who’s wrong?
Given the presumable vanishing rarity of precocious eleven-year-olds, it’s fair to ask why they’re in the discussion at all. The answer of course is that they’re here to disprove your groundless wild assertions that no reasonable person could ever be decieved by a fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, or one-day-shy-of-eighteen year old. Clearly if an eleven year old -any eleven year old- can look and/or sound eighteen or twenty-one, then it disproves your claims that a high-schooler can’t pull it off.
When you then turn around and atart arguing as if anybody thinks that fifth-graders are swarming the bars, you have completely missed the point.
Well shoot that explains everything. My brother-in-law who has been anti-gun his entire life started cleaning guns in his living room when his daughters started dating.