Judd Legum of ThinkProgress writes about a story that’s getting a whole lot of attention all over the news:
Kaitlyn Hunt started dating a female classmate at the beginning of the school year when she was 17 and the girl she was dating was about three years younger. According to an account posted to Facebook by Kaitlyn’s mother, in February, shortly after Kaitlyn turned 18, she was arrested on felony charges at the behest of her girlfriend’s parents. The specific crime was “sexual battery on a person 12-16 years old.”
This has led to a petition on DailyKos and on Change.org, the latter of which has received over 286,000 signatures.
Wait a second.
It’s illegal for an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old to be in a relationship, especially a sexual one.
Doesn’t matter if they’re gays, lesbians, Vietnamese, vegetable, mineral—it’s illegal.
Can you imagine the outrage if the 18-year-old was male? He would be caught on To Catch A Predator and his face splashed across the news.
The younger girl’s parents called the cops when “[their] 14-year-old ran away from home on Jan. 4 and spent the night at Hunt’s home where, in the words of a Sheriff’s Department detective, the two teens ‘put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.’”
The 18-year-old committed a crime. You cannot be 18 and have sex with a 14 year old. It doesn’t matter if you’re “in love”, the 14-year-old cannot give consent—16 is the age of consent in Texas. According to the ACLU, it was just “behavior that is both fairly innocuous and extremely common”, which would be interesting to hear them say about any other sort of non-consensual relationship.
“If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way,” Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar told reporters at a Monday news conference.
This isn’t a gay issue. And frankly, we don’t care if an 18 and a 14 year old want to scissor—if they’re lesbians or just exploring, big whoop. If you want to argue that the age-of-consent laws should be changed, then that’s a separate issue. This relationship, which society has deemed as predatory, would not be encouraged or lionized if the genders were changed. Over 200,000 people petitioned the White House, along with multiple major articles, arguing that an underage relationship is ok…if you’re gay. This is “progress”. Cheers.
