Funny how the definition becomes fluid depending on politics.
AP reports on a 16 year old boy who is the subject of a [now removed from Youtube] video where he is shown in a church where members are shouting and praying over him to “cast out the demon of homosexuality.” As strange or creepy as one may view this*, no one is alleging that he was dragged into the church and kept there against his will or was physically hurt or restrained in any way.
However, once the video caught the attention of “gay youth advocates”, they have decided it is “abuse” and report it to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families
“I think it’s horrifying,” [Robin McHaelin, executive director of True Colors, an advocacy group for gay youths] said of the video by Manifested Glory. “What saddens me is the people that are doing this think they are doing something in the kid’s best interests, when in fact they’re murdering his spirit.”
McHaelin even believes that the sprinkling of holy water in a gay “child’s” room is beyond the pale.
However, when is a 16 year old “child” not a child but an adult, fully capable of making one’s own decisions without the consent or even knowledge of the parent(s)?
Abortion.
Hmmmm….voluntarily attending church: under 18 is “child”
Voluntarily undergoing a surgical procedure killing nascent human life: under 18 is “adult”
Yeah, that makes sense.
*Just a further reminder, I am not making a comment on whether prayer can “change” a gay person into a straight person … personally I think sexual orientation is much more complicated and fluid then either politicized side wants to admit … my focus is on the way contemporary society looks at “children” and that what we consider allowing them to do as “adults” has become much more ruled by politics than any other consideration.
Comment by B Moe on 6/25 @ 7:55 am #
Another example: a 16 year old girl taking a picture of herself on her phone and sending it to friends. The girl taking the picture is an adult sex offender, the same girl being photographed is a child being exploited.
Comment by Bob Reed on 6/25 @ 8:00 am #
Yeah, well as usual, the meaning is fungible to suit the desired purpose at hand…
But the double standard is mind boggling; 16 years old is adult enough to get abortion on demand without the consent of legal guardians, but is young enough to call child services, and use the force of law against the parents, if in any way it threatens the validity, and legitimacy, of homosexuality…
Probably just a bunch of NAMBLA members worried about losing their shot at some fresh meat…
Comment by Bob Reed on 6/25 @ 8:01 am #
Good example BMoe…
Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 8:13 am #
Good point Darleen. B Moe is also correct. It is the double standard that is the problem.
But what is the harm of a kid voluntarily getting a exercism to make him straight…it won’t work? Or it may work in the short term and eventually this kid will be prowling mens restrooms like Larry Craig or wait George Michael (what was his excuse anyway, he is out)? As for the psychic harm of feeling bad about being gay, well I am not sure CPS is up to the task of eliminating that.
Sexual orientation is complex. I am not a proponent of this sort of thing, but it is certainly a stretch to call it child abuse.
Comment by Pablo on 6/25 @ 8:16 am #
High schoolers are children when there’s recruiters around. But they’re certainly adult enough to talk about the nuances of fisting.
Comment by Bob Reed on 6/25 @ 8:19 am #
Another good point Pablo…
Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 8:27 am #
Thanks pablo, but please, please, please do not let this tread degrade into someone confiding all the lurid details of what happened at “band camp.”
Comment by Carin on 6/25 @ 8:41 am #
It’s funny (well no) but my kids know they aren’t even allowed to DATE until they are 16. My son is going to high school in the fall (he asked and we thought about it for a while) and he’s happy that he’s now going to be allowed to talk to chicks.
This hypersexualizing of our kids is NOT ending well.
It IS ok to put the brakes on ‘em. They don’t wilt. So to speak.
That was wrong.
Comment by sdferr on 6/25 @ 8:57 am #
Why does this captivate us? It’s something to do with the lack of a non-arbitrary bright line, date certain, consistent in application over every individual and summing the individuals together, over the nominal group, to perfectly distinguish a youth from an adult? Or is it merely the apparent lack of uniformity stirring a fuzzy “hey, what’s going on here?” Or is it an exultation in the muddiness and variety of life and living and the evident inability of speech to keep pace with the bewildering multiplicity of it all? Is the nub of our presumed interest, the impossibility — in principle — of finding one definition which will fit all possible cases? Or is it the mere fact that having a vagary about thing named, that is to say the changing growing human being variously tagged as teen, child, adult, dork, naive twit, clumsy oaf, viperous vixen, vacuum cleaner of cupboards and destroyer of victuals, etc., the labeling gets used politically now this way and now that, which surely, is no surprise to any of us since we’ve seen it done forever, no less than having lived and grown through the state of confusion ourselves? So “funny how the definition becomes fluid”, it seems to me, isn’t. Funny that is. It was fluid from the get-go and politics just happens to live in the same world.
Comment by SmokeVanThorn on 6/25 @ 9:24 am #
Can a 16 year old buy a cigarette to calm her nerves on her way home after a procedure at the abortion clinic?
Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 9:32 am #
Talking about repressed sexual orientation, Ahmadinejad has his own
SanfordMcGreevey moment.Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 9:37 am #
And Carin, in the old days (like the 1700s and early 1800s) records show lots of 15 and 16 year olds got pregnant and then got married. There was some fooling around on the frontier, but then they did the right thing and took responsibility for their actions.
We then tranformed to a more rigid Victorianism where pre martial sexual urges were repressed, and that continued right up through the early 1960s.
Then everything started to go downhill.
Comment by geoffb on 6/25 @ 10:14 am #
Child, adult, they are just words, labels. Ones which evoke emotional responses. Their use and meaning depends on the exact political effect desired. What emotional response will gain power for the left? That determines the use and meaning.
Will to power has no use for actual children or adults except as abstractions to be used for emotional effect. The whole of reality is viewed and used likewise.
People and things, all of them, have no intrinsic worth or existence. They are only means, to be used as needed, discarded when not, and destroyed if they get in the way.
Comment by Carin on 6/25 @ 11:11 am #
Joe, back in the day when 15 and 16 y/o got preggo , then married, they were just a year or so away from being considered “adult.” Now-a-days, it’s not uncommon to find 30 y/o “kids” still living with their parents.
Imagine, back in the days … 13 y/o weren’t allowed to “date.” My neighbor’s kids are …11 and they date. @@. How many years can kids date before sex seems like the next logical step?
By not allowing my kids to even consider dating until they are 16 … well, I’m just putting time on my side.
Comment by geoffb on 6/25 @ 11:31 am #
Unsure how you “date” at 11. My thought was the age that you could drive a vehicle, alone, away from home determined the age of dating.
Back in the horse and buggy day that would be more a function of when parents thought you of physical and mental age to do so. With the State licensing use of motor vehicles they took control of the age by when a license was granted, and so when you could get out on your own.
Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 11:36 am #
You are a good mom Carin.
And the more I think about it, I am not letting my daughters date till they graduates from college. With honors.
Comment by Joe on 6/25 @ 11:37 am #
My bad. graduate.
Comment by Carin on 6/25 @ 11:37 am #
Well, date they do. They are “special” friends, and the parents take them to … movies (alone) and last week the one boy spent the day shopping. I guess the mom dropped them at a mall.
Certainly they are dependent upon the parents, and thus that gives a bit of oversight. BUT … it does also suggest that 11 is an appropriate age to start pairing off.
Comment by Carin on 6/25 @ 11:39 am #
Well, as my daughter’s have gotten older, I’ve started to reconsider that 16 y/o age thing. It seems early to me.
Comment by JD on 6/25 @ 11:46 am #
I am not going to let either one of my little angels out of my basement until they are thirty.
Comment by pdbuttons on 6/25 @ 12:38 pm #
throw some holy water on the boy who went shopping
Comment by Danger on 6/25 @ 12:41 pm #
“throw some holy water on the boy who went shopping”
heh,
Comment by Letitbeme on 6/25 @ 1:23 pm #
“Dating” is a combustible-engine-era phenomenon that replaced “courting” — with two transitory interludes of “taking it out to the corn shed the night before you go off in a ship to die for France.” Lost in the transition was an understanding that your lifetime guarantees amounted to exactly fuck-all, and thus adulthood was something fondly to be hoped for, not avoided. This is a fundamental shift in the way practically every person in the developed world thinks.
Such blather as “This sort of thing has been going on for time immemorial” simply means “preceding my memory.”
You can read that as an endorsement for holding off on the “dating,” but it won’t change anything. This petri dish is not that petri dish.
Comment by Letitbeme on 6/25 @ 1:24 pm #
Damn, I AM grizzled.
Comment by pdbuttons on 6/25 @ 1:33 pm #
i used to do pee
to mark my territory..
now..i wear depends..
ha!
Comment by Makewi on 6/25 @ 1:41 pm #
At least those German penguins are still gay. Haters.
Comment by Mars vs Hollywood on 6/25 @ 1:54 pm #
Also, an 18-year-old gangbanger shot in a driveby is a “child killed by guns”.
Comment by kasper on 6/25 @ 2:11 pm #
In New Hampshire your 13-year-old daughter can get an abortion without parental consent.
NH used to be a pretty smart state, but the surrounding moonbats who have made a filthy mess of their states decided to infiltrate ours now to make the same mess. Rats.
Comment by pdbuttons on 6/25 @ 2:20 pm #
live free mark steyn man
[ geez – i hope he has a plan)
tomorrow..also..
Comment by hf on 6/25 @ 2:27 pm #
The kid might could be an adult. My feeling is he should bring an assault rifle to church next Sunday and find out. Just cause of how ick.
Comment by Letitbeme on 6/25 @ 2:40 pm #
Correct me if I’m wrong, Mars, but isn’t an 18-year-old mowed down after shooting a cop, also?
Comment by Ira on 6/25 @ 3:01 pm #
This is what Tom Goode (on the old British Sitcom “Good Neighbors”) described as “the principle of shifting principles.” I doubt he (or the writers) knew how well they were describing the typical leftist.
Comment by Velociman on 6/25 @ 3:43 pm #
I find the difference pretty simple: if a 16 year old wants to engage in homosexual behavior he’s an adult; if he wants to be exorcized of his perversion by friends he is a child.
Comment by Neo on 6/25 @ 9:26 pm #
Doesn’t this mean that the key to killing the “public option” is to make it so “feature poor” that employers will have to go elsewhere.
Comment by The Monster on 6/25 @ 10:22 pm #
For millenia, boys at age 13 stood before the congregation and declared “Today, I am a man!” And the next day, they were behind a plow, or in a shop learning a trade, etc. (Girls were considered women at age 12.) The smartest would be able to apprentice under lawyers, doctors, or other scientists, which eventually evolved into academia.
So nearly all teenagers were in an environment where everyone else was an adult too, and most of them many years older. Even in the academy, the others in his age cohort were also the cream of the crop intellectually and in their manners, as they knew their actions would reflect upon the family honor.
He was considered responsible for his actions, and had the freedom to act that comes with that responsibility. If he committed a crime, he was punished exactly like any other adult. He wasn’t old enough to be a leader in the community, but he was old enough to marry, and be the leader of his family, which served as training for greater responsibility should he show he handled well his leadership role.
Now we put teenagers in schools where 90%+ of the people with whom they interact are within a few years of the same age. We bombard them with movies and TV sitcoms featuring smart-mouthed young punks putting the verbal smackdown on the old squares, including teachers. We tell them they can’t engage in productive work, and pull their own weight in the society. Instead, we say they are sovereign consumers, whose every whim must be satiated as a matter of right, and advertisers bombard them with incessant messages about the latest bling that they must have to feel fulfilled, lest they fall too far down the social pyramid. When they act irresponsibly, we send them to a “juvenile justice” system that permits them to violate most laws with impunity. If they get a girl knocked up, she and the child will be taken care of by the government, if she doesn’t just abort the inconvenience away.
And we wonder why, when those kids finally do reach “adulthood” (whether that be defined as 18, 21, 25, or whatever) so many still behave irresponsibly.
Comment by B Moe on 6/25 @ 10:30 pm #
I think the Monster just hit one out of the park.
Comment by pdbuttons on 6/25 @ 10:32 pm #
nice post monster fuddy duddy
how do you feel about the twitter
[and beyond)
she-it?
and stop staring at my star face tatoos
Comment by The Monster on 6/25 @ 10:41 pm #
pd, I set up a Twitter account, and have tweeted so few times, a hillbilly could count them without taking off his shoes.
Comment by pdbuttons on 6/26 @ 12:20 am #
looking for big race
waffle house girl had cute face…
i would like a hike!
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