Age of Consent a Slippery Concept in Texas

When it comes to what’s the legal age of consent for having sex, whether you’re committing a local felony or just enjoying legal lubricious fun depends on what state or country you’re in.

Texas now puts the age of consent for sex and for marriage at 17. Just a few years back Texans lived with 16 for consent. But the Texas Legislature raised it to 17, it’s said because Texas authorities wanted to snare themselves a passel of adult members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose polygamous presence upset nearby boondocks Baptists.

Next door in Arkansas you can consent to canoodle at 14, for getting hitched, at 16.

(See http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm for a worldwide and U.S. rundown of legal consent ages in hither and yon.)

The Fundamentalist Church guys, who apparently screw every young thing that comes along, plainly aren’t too smart. If they’d set up in Arkansas they’d have given themselves three extra years of legal joy–assuming they delayed the pretense of marriage.

However, they didn’t. Now Texas has 462 of their kids in custody while Child Protective Services there (as in most states, fumble but not humble prone) tries to figure out which child is whose and when did the birth mothers actually conceive and undergo a marriage, probably polygamous and therefore also illegal. All this after an armed raid obviously aimed to jug the males involved and so bust up the community disturbing to the orthodox.

No one should tolerate sex forced on anyone, and if Texas can prove that many of the girls had no choice but to “marry” their uncles or the lecher next door a few minutes before being thrown down on a nearby bed, then Texas should apply its rape laws to those who did the dirty deeds. In prison they will learn what rape is like.

Equally, no one should tolerate that anyone is forced to marry once, much less 10 or 15 times, as may be the case with this particular specimen of the insanity of religion. That’s involuntary servitude no matter how you dice it–slavery.

Finally, there has to be a cutoff age enforced by law for consensual sex, with sex with any person under that age being statutory rape–a term much more precise that the current “child abuse.”

It escapes me, however, why willing polygamous marriages among consenting adults are illegal.
It’s quite legal now for 15 women above the age of consent to wive without benefit of marriage with a likewise consenting man and, though unknown, for 15 men to husband one woman. It’s exhausting but not felonious.

The only argument I can reckon against the civil issuance of multiple marriage licenses is clerical convenience. But now with computers surely the state can keep track of one man with his 15 wives.

The religious aspect is plain. If a church says we allow only one marriage at a time, then that’s that for that church’s blessing. But if as with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a theology says as many marriages as you can service, then why should that be outlawed so long as the brides and grooms are adults who volunteer for that miraculous state? Why is that view less upright than that of the Holly Rollers next door who say that you can have only one marriage at a time but as many as you want so long as you divorce in between, that is, practice serial polygamy?

If Texas can prove females of any age were forced to marry and forced to have sex, then the state should hoosegow everyone involved for such rapes and slavery.

But I fear that’s only a secondary aim, that the first aim is rub out a deviant religion that upsets other godly folk. And that’s wrong.