Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 17, 2019 2:45 pm
Despite the above, I do concede that in some cases it's "unfair" when certain people are labeled pedophiles, when what they've done involved, say, a 16 year old.
Technically, that's a ephebophilia... perhaps not as egregious as pedophilia, but still...
But still
what, exactly? What you are describing (a person over 18 having sex with a person who is 16 years of age) and implying is ephebophilia/pedophilia is quite legal in over half the US. What exactly is wrong with an adult having sex with a 16 year old? Surely you can see that a 16-year old is not the same thing as, say, a 16 month old? Would you call my dad an ephebophile (he starting dating my mom when she had just turned 17 and he was 34...this was in the early 1980s)...or my grandfather (IIRC from what he told me he started dating my grandmother when she was 15 and he was in his mid-20s...this was in the late 1950s)? How about Brigitte Macron (nee Trogneux)...the First Lady of France; apparently she started having sex with Emmanuel Macron when she was 39 and he was 15? What about Phil Robertson of
Duck Dynasty fame who suggested twentysomething and thirtysomething men should marry 15 or 16 year old ladies? Are all these people in the same moral category as pedophiles and child molesters?
For that matter, if someone had been a resident of Hawaii and did what Epstein did (had sex with 14 and 15 year old females) and did it before late 2001 he would have been--presuming they did not use drugging/blackmail/threats which was and still is illegal no matter the age of one's partner--perfectly within the law; the state of Hawaii didn't raise its age of consent from 14 to 16 before the end of 2001. Furthermore, had he been in British Columbia (or most of the rest of Canada, come to think of it) and had been a Canadian citizen and did what he did before mid-2008 then he would have been perfectly within the letter of the law as well. Or even if this had taken place in Spain before September 2013 (less than 6 years ago) and the female in question was at least 13 which up until then was 100% legal there. And none of this is even mentioning most of the rest of Europe, or Japan, or South Korea, or Mexico, or Philippines, or what the legal age of consent was before the end of 2007 in New Zealand for when the male partner was under-aged and the female partner was 18 or more (look that last one up and prepare to be rather surprised/shocked).
I certainly don't condone people having sex with young (as in prepubescent) children but I also don't understand this (to my mind's eye) kind of extremist mindset of "have sex with someone who is 18 years and a few seconds old...that's 100% A-OK; have sex with someone who is 17 years, 364 days, and 23.5 hours old and you are an icky disgusting child molesting pedophile/ephebophile scumbag who is the second coming of Albert Fish and Westley Allan Dodd combined and who should just be thrown in jail to rot for the rest of your life and/or put against a wall and shot" either.