This is often a terrible mistake.
OK, I’ll play along. Ten year old people don’t have the experience to make an informed decision, parents have an obligation to protect their children from the depradations of rich old creeps, it doesn’t matter whether I’m male or female, and Richard Hanania is a gross scumbag who ought to be watched carefully.
Isn’t it nice that he bought a blue checkmark from that other creepy fuck, Elon Musk?
I knew he was a Nazi, but now I know he’s a libertarian.
(the pedo-to-pedo pipeline)
Would Jesus approve this? This being a Christian nation and all, or so we are told.
What kind of person thinks up shit like this? The guy had to sit down and ask himself, “is there a hypothetical situation in which it’s OK for a grown man to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, and if so, what would it be?”
And then he answers himself. “Maybe if the guy is really, really, rich and he pays her millions. Maybe that would be morally acceptable. I’ll ask my followers.”
And the question he’s really asking is, “should the ultra-wealthy be allowed to buy their way around the law, and re-define the moral questions if they pay enough money?”
Yeah, keep an eye on that guy.
Great Xitter is normalizing child rape.
The Fuck?
What The?
Minor point? Necrophilia much too? Epstein is dead regardless of who killed him himself included yeah?
Also memo to relevant authorities here – might be tim to investigate Elon Musk really, really closely given this..
That “pedo guy” tweet starting to look a lot like projection huh?
Remember :
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter
If person X (X? Huh.) wants to rape a baby and pays enough can they do so? FUCK NO! Its a crime.
Go directly to jail.
Can this be the end of Elon Musk now please?
Or end of Richard Hanania definitely – & Musk too – because again. What the Actual.. FUCK.
Is that post still up? Still showing and being asked as an actual fucking question? Not y’know reported and reported to the relevant authorities to act upon?
Never buy sex from someone who’s too young to handle the amount of money you’re paying them.
Also, never have sex with someone so young that parental approval becomes a relevant mitigating factor in some people’s eyes.
Never buy sex from people of any age, if their parents are involved in it. That’s a huge red flag for trafficking and invalid consent.
There’s your problem (D’uh!) – she literally legally & ethically cannot agree. Because she is F N fourteen years old.
Shorter version of the question here = should rape be legal if a rapist pays enough money to which the answer is obvs as fuck. NO.
How is this even…
@feralboy12
The same kind of person who wanted the same hypotheticals after Dawkins went on about sexual assault not being so bad. I remember more than one person who just had to make rape related ticking time bomb scenarios.
I think it’s a ln attempt to get people to accept the micro-macro aggression, the exact thing doesn’t matter, just find a way to make light of the terrible thing others want taken seriously.
Both her parents agree? That poor girl is an orphan in the truest sense.
I hope Hanania doesn’t have kids!
Sam Harris?
Is that you again?
This is a classic Sam Harris implausible scenario.
Situations like this aren’t realistic and have nothing to do with reality.
Let’s try a more realistic situation.
Richard Hanania the youth pastor, makes friends with a troubled 14 year old from a chaotic family.
On day, after giving her some drugs and drinking alcohol with her until she is nearly comatose, he has sex with her.
Should this be allowed?
How many years in prison should Richard Hanania get?
What should happen. Conviction for attempted rape (or rape if it actually goes through) and convictions of child trafficking and accessories for the parents. Confiscation of 20 million dollars from him (twice what he offered) which is put into trust for her.
I note btw that in some states the offer might be legal (assuming marriage and a judges approval of the marriage). California, Washington, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Mississippi have no minimum age though require a judge’s consent below 18 for California, below 17 for Washington, below 16 for New Mexico and Oklahoma, below 15 for Mississippi.
I’d never heard of this guy.
For good reason, he is a generic fascist.
He is a white racist and generic right wingnut lunatic fringer.
Ironically, he isn’t even very white.
He is a Palestinian xian.
This is someone you don’t want around small children, teenagers, adults, pets, or house plants.
In Germany age of consent is 14 (with some limitations), but as soon as payment is involved, it’s 18.
So, undead Epstein would land in court here.
Another thougth experimenr, if Epstein had been imprisoned as soon as he aproached his first victim, would that have made the world a better place?
The sex based gatekeeping on the answers is notable.
Yeah, this guy is a real creep with quite a few red flags.
Hates Black people, women, liberals, progressives, and I’m sure a lot of other groups.
A fascist who hates democracy.
feralboy12–
It’s a cottage industry within the edgelord social media sphere. They try to think of some horrible thing (in this case, sex with a minor) and then imagine some benefit to offset the harm, thinking they’ve made a serious challenge to the original moral position that the horrible thing (in this case sex with a minor) is really bad. It is just sophomoric utilitarianism from people who understand neither utilitarianism nor its limitations. And it’s pretty clear what’s really going on in their heads because it’s almost always about justifying non-consensual sex.
Well, since it’s $10 million to rape, how much would it cost me to vivisect Richard?
Would that be cash or via cashier’s check?
There are times that I honestly believe that I cannot drink enough to tolerate humans.
Chrislawson @ 19
-Who would wake up one morning and think “I want to be an edgelord and be despised by 99% of all humans”?
Weird. Very weird, but I did not understand the Incels either.
It’s a nonsense scenario. Epstein (or any other rich fuck) wouldn’t pay anywhere close to ten million dollars for sex with an underage girl, he’d just bully and terrify her into being quiet. If she had parents that slimy, he might pay them a pittance to shut up.
@ birgerjohansson, #21: They get off on the hatred, it gives them a feeling of power. Imagine being able to say horrible things that piss people off and thinking they can’t do anything about it. (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson…) Some people just suck.
Did I read that correctly?
14 y.o. paid to have sex with old man, and someone thinks that that’s OK because her parents knew about it.
I’d jail the parents, the old guy and take the girl into care.
Who wants to bet he’s a Q Anon devotee?
Christoph @ 23
We have some terrible trolls and kooks in Scandinavian social media too. Usually, when a woman writes something they dislike they get “rape threat tourettes”.
The police are overwhelmed and rarely track down the worst ones even when they blatantly break the law.
This is a kook that is using his own name? Do his neighbors know what he is doing? Turning the “acts have consequences” back on him would be a good deed.
Who would wake up one morning and think “I want to be an edgelord and be despised by 99% of all humans”?
I suspect the thinking may be more like “99% of all humans hate me ‘cuz I’m such a #BraveHero edgelord, what can I say to feel smarter then everyone else and make them hate me more?”
…If she had parents that slimy, he might pay them a pittance to shut up.
If even that — they’d be unable to demand anything, or call the cops on him, without admitting they’d knowingly pimped out their own daughter.
Fuck no!
You might be willing to pay millions to sleep with a child, but I’d kill you for nothing if you tried to harm any child in my care.
gonna go with option #5. “fucking yikes”
I know that cute old grandmas use social media to keep in touch with their family (dangerous as that can be). But, I have seen enough to rationally conclude that SOCIAL MEDIA IS A DEADLY DISEASE THAT HAS INFECTED MOST OF SOCIETY.
I say (with grim sarcasm), hey StevoR, don’t mask your true feelings about this so much.
But, Seriously, I agree whole-heartedly with your expressions.
What most of these guys do is child sex tourism.
They go to third world countries with poverty and lax law enforcement.
Don’t forget that once Rush Limbaugh was caught coming back from a known child sex tourism destination, the Dominican Republic, with a bottle of Viagra, not prescribed under his own name. The fundie xians didn’t have a problem with that.
Andrew Vachss wrote several novels about a vigilant who had grown up in the dysfunctional foster care system, getting abused and -after becoming a gangster- eventually creating a legal facade while doing a Dexter Morgan.
His target was child molesters that by bribes, connections or indifference had been getting away.
At the time it seemed unlikely so many could have been falling between the cracks. I did not then know about Epstein.
Wachss also anticipated the ‘school scooter’ phenomenon as something that could happen if people with guns got desperate enough.
Going off on a tangent here, but the Christian film “Bells of Innocence” had some creepy parts where the protagonist interacted with a small girl.
I don’t get that the ultra-religious can be so tone deaf, even if they aren’t pervos themselves.
If a “liberal” character in a Christian film had acted like that, it would have been a signal he was a pervo.
I see something like that and wonder if he’s trying to lay the groundwork for how the Christian god isn’t really a pedo even though Mary was younger than 14 when she got knocked up.
@Alverant #35:
How is that parallel supposed to work? “Let my incorporeal form penetrate you before your old man finally manages to get it up and I’ll give you a free ticket to Heaven after you’ve watched your son die horribly.”
birgerjohansson @34, indeed.
I read that series (Burke) in the 90s and was quite impressed.
Notably, it also had a very sympathetic attitude towards transexual (idiom of the times) people. The protagonist was very cool.
(Had a cool pooch, too)
This is so revealing about his views on who is and isn’t human and deserving of agency and protection. Twisty of IBTP made the point years ago that patriarchy is a hierarchical system which prioritises people on a spectrum from rich white Western higher-class men to poor brown female children in the global south. A 14-year-old girl, white and Western though she may be, is nothing and no-one to this sociopath.
Also, someone on Twitter amusingly noted the additional weirdness of thinking she she’s old enough to make decisions about sex at 14, but not about money, for a full seven years more. The right-wing view of the world is truly strange.
@mooskaya
Well, of course. After all, money is important.
Yeah, but guys, like, wait! This is a big intellectual Thinky Thought(TM) Ethical Conundrum(TM)! Why are you so against any ethical consideration of middle-aged billionaires having sex with young teen girls, under the age of consent in many of the jurisdictions in question, using intellect, reason, and the challenge of received wisdom and cultural restrictions? For shame! We’re atheists! Freethinkers! Rationalists! Nothing is beyond question!
You’re all rushing to take the perspective of and protect this teenage girl. How naive! How conventional! How prosaic! Have you not considered the perspective of the most important person in this equation?
That’s right. You know who it is:
Jesus.
Capitalism is the economic system of Jesus. Why? Many reasons, one of which is obvious; Jesus threw over the money lenders’ tables in the temple because they were simply not charging enough interest. Because God created an entirely fair world, and his will is not to be questioned as everything is part of his plan; billionaires are billionaires because they are the best people. God thinks so, capitalism thinks so, therefore you should think so too. After all, who are YOU, an atheist, to question the will of God? Jesus is frowning at you, but he loves you. And will damn you to eternal Hell because of that love. Billionaires won’t get damned, obviously, because they are better. Or if they do, they will have Platinum membership to Hell, where they get to make other people suffer in their place.
So now we know the most important person in this equation is Jesus, your actual Jesus, and we know that capitalism is Jesus’ favourite economic system, and billionaires are the best people. What should the 14-year-old girl do? Obviously, she should “honour her mother and her father”. D’uh! It’s WRITTEN in the bible. WRITTEN. In a book. What could be more rational and reason-based for us atheists? We love books. Her parents want the billionaire to pay her for sex, billionaires are better than everyone, so who is she to disagree? Jesus would, in fact, encourage her agreement.
There is another important person in this vital Ethical Conundrum(TM): The middle-aged billionaire. Won’t anyone think of the middle-aged billionaires?
When you are one of Jesus’ and capitalism’s Approved Best People(TM) you have desires, just like everyone else. But you are bored. You have everything you wanted before: untold riches, a private island, hot and cold running lackeys. So now your desire have to grow with your stock portfolio. Not for you the regular sexuality of lesser mortals. You must have Jesus Approved Additional Desires(TM). A foot fetish? Trivial! Whips, chips, chains, dips? What are you? A pleb? None of these workaday desires will please Jesus and capitalism enough. You must want to rape children.
Now before you get all excited, raping children is the natural next step. For reasons too obvious to state. After all, if every whim and desire is catered for, why not take the merest whisper of a thought that could cross your mind to the most extreme degree of its expression? Now, what do you have that the lesser people whom Jesus loves less don’t have? Well, apart from superior everything, it’s money. Everyone wants money, so why not give it to them? In exchange for sex.
Frankly, even though we are all atheists, rationalists, and advocates of freethinking, freethought, and reason, I am surprised all these obvious ethical facts didn’t occur to us all.
Louis
Yeah, but guys, like, wait! This is a big intellectual Thinky Thought(TM) Ethical Conundrum(TM)! Why are you so against any ethical consideration of middle-aged billionaires having sex with young teen girls, under the age of consent in many of the jurisdictions in question, using intellect, reason, and the challenge of received wisdom and cultural restrictions? For shame! We’re atheists! Freethinkers! Rationalists! Nothing is beyond question!
You’re all rushing to take the perspective of and protect this teenage girl. How naive! How conventional! How prosaic! Have you not considered the perspective of the most important person in this equation?
That’s right. You know who it is:
Jesus.
Capitalism is the economic system of Jesus. Why? Many reasons, one of which is obvious; Jesus threw over the money lenders’ tables in the temple because they were simply not charging enough interest. Because God created an entirely fair world, and his will is not to be questioned as everything is part of his plan; billionaires are billionaires because they are the best people. God thinks so, capitalism thinks so, therefore you should think so too. After all, who are YOU, an atheist, to question the will of God? Jesus is frowning at you, but he loves you. And will damn you to eternal Hell because of that love. Billionaires won’t get damned, obviously, because they are better. Or if they do, they will have Platinum membership to Hell, where they get to make other people suffer in their place.
So now we know the most important person in this equation is Jesus, your actual Jesus, and we know that capitalism is Jesus’ favourite economic system, and billionaires are the best people. What should the 14-year-old girl do? Obviously, she should “honour her mother and her father”. D’uh! It’s WRITTEN in the bible. WRITTEN. In a book. What could be more rational and reason-based for us atheists? We love books. Her parents want the billionaire to pay her for sex, billionaires are better than everyone, so who is she to disagree? Jesus would, in fact, encourage her agreement.
There is another important person in this vital Ethical Conundrum(TM): The middle-aged billionaire. Won’t anyone think of the middle-aged billionaires?
When you are one of Jesus’ and capitalism’s Approved Best People(TM) you have desires, just like everyone else. But you are bored. You have everything you wanted before: untold riches, a private island, hot and cold running lackeys. So now your desire have to grow with your stock portfolio. Not for you the regular sexuality of lesser mortals. You must have Jesus Approved Additional Desires(TM). A foot fetish? Trivial! Whips, chips, chains, dips? What are you? A pleb? None of these workaday desires will please Jesus and capitalism enough. You must want to rape children.
Now before you get all excited, raping children is the natural next step. For reasons too obvious to state. After all, if every whim and desire is catered for, why not take the merest whisper of a thought that could cross your mind to the most extreme degree of its expression? Now, what do you have that the lesser people whom Jesus loves less don’t have? Well, apart from superior everything, it’s money. Everyone wants money, so why not give it to them? In exchange for sex.
Frankly, even though we are all atheists, rationalists, and advocates of freethinking, freethought, and reason, I am surprised all these obvious ethical facts didn’t occur to us all.
Louis
Smoggy? Is that you?
@Chigau, #42
Jacob Rees-Mogg or some vaguely rememberable troll?
Louis
Louis #42
Smoggy Batzrubble was a … remarkable… commenter here in the olden days
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/09/18/jesus-h-christ/
for example
Louis #43 that is
@Chigau,
Ah yes! I remember them…very very poorly, but better now!
Louis
What? No. Ew. Who even thinks of that kind of thiing?
What if she’s 19 years old? That’s legal in many municipalities. 18? 17?
Aisha was 14 when she married Muhammed, and she was his favorite.
My take is that the line must be drawn somewhere, but where exactly, and how sharp a line, is in part arbitrary; and for that reason, enforcement is more emotional than rational.
@Nathaniel Hellerstein, #48,
I am curious about the implications of your comment. Not least because I think it is quite misguided concerning the reality and logic of sexual consent. Maybe I’ve misunderstood you.
Being deemed able to consent to sex is, as you say, a legal line in the sand. It’s informed by many things: history, philosophy/religion, an understanding of mental development/legal precedent etc. Of course some component is arbitrary! It has to be. If there are a million people in a country, the stark, bright line of a specific age of consent will not apply equally well to every individual in that million people. This is not revelatory.
Legal systems have to draw a line as a matter of simplicity (as much as anything else). Otherwise, how would the ability to consent to sex be assessed (if at all) in the absence of a simple “line”/standard? The arbitrary nature of an “ability to consent” line misrepresents and poorly maps onto reality, perhaps (although it can be informed by nothing but a rational assessment of reality). However, that’s true of any simple rule that deals with a vastly more complex set of phenomena.
The fact that something is in part arbitrary doesn’t render any aspect of enforcement “emotional” (c.f. rational). This does not logically follow. In the case of sex, an emotive topic, some element of some enforcement is emotional, but it ain’t necessarily so in practice or principle. “Emotional” doesn’t follow from “arbitrary”. “Non-rational” does not follow from “arbitrary”. Equally, “emotional” is not the opposite of, or even antithetical to, reason and rational thought. As you say, a line has to be drawn somewhere, but why does that line have to be drawn using any “emotional” (as contrasted with “rational”) calculus? The arbitrary nature of any law can be a simple, perfectly rational reflection of the complexities and nuances of applying a legal standard to a messy reality. It’s possible to argue that these “lines in the sand” have arisen from some historical, emotional context, but if one looks at how ages of consent have changed, and a good example is in regards to homosexuality, it’s easy to see how evidence and rationality have impacted legal ages of consent.
In countries where the age of consent is, say, 18, the idea that a 14-year-old could consent to sex is likely to contain that emotional “ick” factor for some people. Other places have set the age of consent at 14 (e.g. Italy, Portugal, and Germany, to pick examples from the high-income/developed world). In these social circumstances, the concept of 14-year-olds having sex is much less likely to attract the same “ick”/emotion around age. However, if you look at the Wiki articles on those laws, the laws are heavily caveated regarding exploitation. So even in those developed jurisdictions where the age of consent is 14, a recognition exists regarding 14-year-olds being prone to exploitation by older or more (socially) powerful, people. It’s the exploitation implicit in the original question that attracts the most (entirely justified) concern, and less so where and how the line for age of consent is drawn. That’s not emotion as contrasted with rational thought. That’s an evidence-based recognition of how power and influence can compromise consent.
Then there’s the “sex work” element, as in “the exchange of sex for money”. At some point, laws around sex work permitting, the ability to accept payment in exchange for sex becomes relevant. Whatever one thinks of sex work, there is a different type and degree of understanding required regarding the personal and social ramifications of undertaking sex work than there is regarding engaging in sex alone. This is trivially true. The act of “sex” alone contains fewer entities than does “sex work” and all the implications thereof. This, too, is a well-observed phenomenon, not derived from emotion as contrasted with rational thought, and is the reason that in examples I can think of, the age of sexual consent is lower than the age at which sex work can be legally (if at all) undertaken.
If you change the age of the theoretical person in the original poll to 19, and 19 is (over) the age of majority (which it is in many jurisdictions), and that person is fit, able, and legally permitted to give informed consent to engage in sex work, then you’ve changed the question to an unrecognisable degree. You’re not asking the same question at all. The number is only one factor. For completeness: It’s also possible that said 19-year-old is being exploited, coerced, and placed in a position where their consent is compromised. In fact, this is a frequent criticism of sex work (whether it’s a good criticism is a different discussion), i.e. that people are coerced into sex work for financial reasons, thus removing their “free” consent to engage in sexual activity.
It’s not “emotional” (again, as you have contrasted to “rational”) to inform laws regarding consent to sex by using demonstrable, observable reality to set or enforce a standard that, by the very nature of the complexity of the issue, has an arbitrary component. It’s demonstrably the case that, for example, if you look at the neurological development of 14-year-olds versus that of people a decade older, there are physical changes in the brain that are relevant to the ability to understand the longer-term consequences of actions. There are changes to impulsivity, the ability to process emotion and control emotional reactions, etc. All of these are derived from changes in the underlying neurology. They’re also informed by social factors like education, experience, etc. The average 14-year-old demonstrates a different set of abilities and understanding regarding consent, the ramifications of engaging in sex work, and, most importantly for the original question, appreciating and resisting coercion/exploitation.
None of this even touches the issue of whether or not the parents’ consent is relevant or whether it is in itself compromising of consent or exploitative.
So, all of this makes me wonder about your comment. Your contrasting of “emotion” and “rationality” derived from the fact that a law has an arbitrary component is simply misguided. One does not logically flow from the other. A quick Google can reveal the difference between a 14-year-old and a 19-year-old in terms of the abilities mentioned above, socially and neurologically. Equally, the difference in law between someone on one side of a legal line and someone on the other will obviously change the legal ramifications of a question. I think the original question is set within the context of US law/society (not that those are one, simple thing); hence, a reasonable assumption is that the age of majority implied is 18. So if, as you have done, one modifies the question to ask whether or not an adult can consent to sell sex for money versus whether a child can consent to do so, you’re not operating in the same space, legally or factually. You’ve just ignored the differences between the average child of 14 and the average adult of 19, handwaving them away as being under the heading of “arbitrary”, and their enforcement is therefore “…more emotional than rational” when it’s quite the reverse. Quite what Mohammed and Aisha have to do with anything is completely beyond me.
So why is your “what if she is 19?” question relevant to the original question PZ quotes?
Louis