While you were watching the Comey hearings, the lower house of Congress, the US House of Representatives, snuck through a vote which would impose mandatory sentencing of up to 15 years if minors try to sext each other.
If you follow me on social media, you know I’ve been ranting about the unfairness, if not the outright monstrosity, of imposing a potential 15 years prison sentence on random clueless teenagers whose bodies are kicking out sex hormones and filling their brains with secret random lusts.
In trying to rectify an embarrassing fail where the court system bungled a child exploitation case and to further curtail certain sleazy types of behavior — whether it’s an adult sexting a minor or a minor trying to avenge a failed relationship with revenge porn — the House has overstepped all reasonable legal and moral bounds by now turning the typically horny and sexually inappropriate teenager into a sex criminal who may serve more time for sharing a nude pic of themselves than the typical adult rapist serves for committing a brutal crime.
You can read up on the full coverage of this story in Teen Vogue or visit Reason, which got the scoop on just how screwed up and malicious this new piece of legislation is. The ACLU is up in arms about it too.
Only 2 Republicans (Justin Amash of Michigan and Thomas Massie of Kentucky) opposed this GOP-sponsored bill. On the Democratic side, the most vocal opponent was Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), who was appalled by the idea that judges will now be obligated to inflict long mandatory minimum sentences on teenagers. Can you imagine being that judge and sentencing a weeping child to 15 years because she or he sent a friend “2 girls, 1 cup” or “goatse”?
Teenagers who engage in consensual conduct and send photos of a sexual nature to their friends or even to each other may be prosecuted and the judge must sentence them to at least 15 years in prison — Bobby Scott
Porn is in the eye of the beholding Censor and the Censor now has totalitarian-like powers over your family. Under such a law, lawyers and judges will not be deciding whether your kid even understood he or she was sending a sext, but only how much time in prison they will get for having done so. The expansive definition of “sexting” now includes indiscreet selfies and fully consensual chat among anyone not of legal age in their state, which means up to age 18 in some US states. That’s right: your typical horny or prank-loving college freshman could be yanked out of school and put into prison. Literally anything a kid sends through text that can be legally interpreted as sexual could become evidence in a court suit that could send them to prison until their 30s.
As Rep. Scott put it, “Under this law, teenagers who engage in consensual conduct and send photos of a sexual nature to their friends or even to each other may be prosecuted and the judge must sentence them to at least 15 years in prison.”
This includes sexually active teenagers who share nude photos with their significant other. Lawyers will not be allowed to defend them by saying they mutually consented to the exchange, and parents will not have the right to get their kids sprung on the basis of parental consent either.
The most horrible part of this is that if the Senate does pass this piece of legislation, it will be like a murder of segments of the US population. I am sure the various Senators who cited Scripture on the House floor, flouting the First Amendment, feel convinced that once passed, all good Christians will be spared while all the heathens who allow their kids to experience normal sexual development will finally be punished. However real life does not work the way people who don’t understand sex or human nature think it should.
Here is my socio-sexological assessment of what the future for US sexual health and economiics will look like if this legislation is passed.
- We will have a new class of criminal: horny children, 12 to 18. Every boy and girl — regardless of religion or cultural identity — who enters a normal phase of physical development in puberty and experiences the hormonal storms of adolescence will become a potential criminal. Sorry, House of Reps, but even Evangelical kids are going to fall victim to this law as often as us heathens. Privileged classes will have no privileges here.
- As sex criminals, boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 who have been successfully prosecuting for sending a cartoon of a penis to a friend for a giggle will now be forced to enter a correctional institution for a minimum mandatory term of 15 years.
- The US will have to build all-new facilities to accommodate millions of non-violent sext offenders and deploy a new generation of prison institution geared to their needs. That’s a taxpayer’s and a civil libertarian’s nightmare.
- The Courts will have to build all-new housing and personnel infrastructures for family courts and family services to work with criminal courts in order to process millions of children through the system and provide counseling to families torn asunder. The Public Defenders’ office will have to build all-new infrastructures to defend minors, and build staff to accommodate millions of minors whose families can’t afford high-priced lawyers. And who gets the bill for all this? Tax-payers.
- US children will become so terrified of sexual expression the rate of suicides will increase as will STIs and pregnancies. Teens won’t sext, they’ll just have more sex and probably without access to proper sex ed either, like in the old days. This happens every time you attempt to control access to and information about healthy sexuality.
- Parents who allow their children any sexual freedom of expression may become ancillary defendants down the road since they have custodial duties and may be charged with failing or enabling. Thus expect children to be removed more frequently from family homes prior to sentencing. You thought Family Court was bad before?
- Families will be torn apart. On every level. Marriages will fall apart under the stress of losing their children. Non-offending children will have nightmares and grieve the loss of a sibling. Parents will start turning unruly or unwanted children in. Some children will develop a life-long hatred of parents and U.S. laws. There is no possible happy outcome: this law pits kids rights against adult rights, turns parents into sex cops 24/7, teenagers into toddlers, and will engender dysfunction and disruption within American families, along with increased family violence.
- Families will be financially drained by the costs of defending their children in court and subsidizing appeals. The middle class will be the biggest victim, as they will be the most likely to try and pay for private lawyers they cannot truly afford. Expect the financial stability of homes with sexting criminals to crash and burn as people mortgage their homes to finance a fancy lawyer out of desperation to save their child’s future.
- Millions of youngsters will lose their future: at an age when they should be going to high school, making plans for marriage, having babies, planning to attend college or a technical school, or serving their country in the military, they will be in prison. They won’t get out until they are 30 or older. A potentially significant percentage of our military forces and our skilled work-force will be behind bars for a dick pic.
- Sexual health for all Americans will plunge. Consider that HIV in prison populations are 5 to 7 times higher than in the general population. Now consider millions of horny teens forced to spend their most sexually active years in prison. What’s that spell? Disaster!
As saner minds have argued, effective enforcement of the EXISTING laws against child exploitation is the solution. The fact that a case was tragically bungled should be an indictment of prosecutorial weakness. Children should not have to pay for adults’ screwing up with a law that punishes them for having a teenage body and a teenage mind. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for this disaster. And anyone who understands anything about human nature and what being a teenager is like should know better than to support such a vile and counter-productive law.
