Just hoping nobody in our community is going to earnestly take up the argument for why the age of consent should be reduced/eliminated.
I understand and hope the same but It is just . . i guess Epstien is putting a light on all that madness Rocket River
SHOULD We have a National Age of consent? Why or Why not? I think we should. I think it should be no less than 16 but I am of the mind that it should be 18 I think we can also go byt the HALF YOUR AGE PLUS 7 rule (18 yr - 9+7=16 . . .that should be the lowest they can do) 14 yr old can only go 14 and up. Shouldn't be doing anything under 18 but d*mn sure not below 14) Rocket River
https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2025/0...ct-on-senate-president-stuart-adams-relative/ An at times heated Utah Gov. Spencer Cox sparred with reporters Thursday over the fallout from reports that Utah Senate President Stuart Adams initiated passage of a law that later helped his 18-year-old granddaughter reach a plea deal in a criminal case involving sex with a 13-year-old. Cox said he didn’t think an ethics investigation or a third-party review is warranted, saying “there’s nothing to investigate.”
I support age of consent laws, but I don't think so. It is the sort of issue that states should police, not the federal government. And, there isn't really an issue where uniformity is important. The main reason to make it federal would be that some state other than your own is doing it in a way you don't like. Guess what-- you don't live there. Focus on the laws of your own state.
But people cross state lines all the time, and who is looking up state law before they have sex? Certainly not most people it would affect.
Exactly. Like pedophiles leaving the country to pursue their preference Someone can simply run to the next state over? Rocket River
It is just nice to have some level of consistency state to state. We used to have different ages for drinking, but that changed. We are uniform on Drinking, Smoking, & Voting. There are some variances state to state within those laws, but the age is consistent.
So, if a Texan pedophile moves to Utah to do some trawling there because of the weak legal framework over there -- well, he's not a resident of Texas anymore and he's not my problem. If he takes a Texas minor over state lines so he can have legal sex with her in Utah, well that does violate federal sex trafficking laws, So I think we're okay with the arrangement as it is. This difference in state laws touches a lot of areas. Some states have legal weed and residents of another state might travel there to toke up. Or to sample Nevada's legal prostitutes. Or the Indian reservation gambling casinos. To get abortion services. To dodge taxes on alcohol or cigarettes. Why do we have to insist that other states do it our way-- and if they don't, we'll just go over their heads and federalize it. Utahns love their children. If their new consent laws aren't serving them well, hopefully they have sense enough to fix it. But Utahns don't need the feds coming in and telling them how to do their consent laws any more than Houstonians need Trump telling us what color to paint our crosswalks. Btw, I'm not sure we have been explicit about what changed in Utah law on this. As I understand it, the age of consent in Utah is 18 years old, but they have a Romeo and Juliet law that allows a 16 year old to have sex with someone 10 years older. And a 14 year old can have sex with a 17 year old. They amended the law so that an 18 year old who is still in high school will be treated as a 17-year old in this case (I think this new rule is stupid btw). For both 17 and 18 year olds, sex with a 13 year old is still a felony. But, this high school rule also gives prosecutors some prosecutorial discretion to go easy on the perp -- and that's how Adams' family wriggled out of accountability. If the prosecutor had any integrity, they could have still charged felonies. The point of explaining all that is: this doesn't help the Texan pedophile moving to Utah to prey on young girls unless that pedophile is 18 and still in high school and is buddies with the AG.
That consistency in the drinking age is also the result of federal bullying. We passed a federal law in 1984 that said states would lose some of their highway funding if they did not set the drinking age to 21. That's an example of what I don't like-- Older Brother coming to tell you how you should run your own affairs. Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean you should bully people to go along. If you're worried when you are in another state that you might accidentally have sex with someone under age, I suggest you just mentally stick to 18. That's safe all over the country. And if that means you miss an opportunity to have sex with a 17 year old because you didn't know the state law-- that's okay.
Kids in High School are going to have sex. I assume that virtually no one in HS will be read up on the city, county, state or federal laws on the Age of Consent. Thus, they do not check the laws before getting carried away in the backseat. Should we throw teenagers in jail for having consensual sex? And what are parent to do when their daughters's BF knocks her up? and both are willing to get married? There are not questions with easy answers. As an aside, looking back on my misspent youth, there were girls in HS that had their **** together and could make a reasonable decision wrt sex and marriage. And there are girls/women I have met that will die of old age without that capacity.
And why not just make it over 18 across the country? Bullying over making the drinking age 21 is also about DWI as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is the group that pushed for the law. Not really losing sleep over making these sort of minimum laws at the federal law.
Also There should be somethings that are universal There should be somethings we all agreed on Law is basically the baselevel morality/ethics of a society Rocket River
I think I explained my position on this earlier. Making laws about how we remedy interpersonal transgressions like murder, robbery, rape, theft, etc are most appropriate to the state level. There should be some compelling reason if the federal government is going to tread on the sovereignty of the states. I don't think uniformity for its own sake is enough of a reason. Look at first degree murder: in Arkansas you must get a minimum of 10 years in prison, but in Louisiana you must get life without parole at least. Do we need to make it uniform so that murderers from Arkansas know they face stiffer penalties if they cross the border into Louisiana to do their business? Or to take the earlier example I alluded to, abortion. If we can blithely accept the argument that the federal government should sublimate the states' authority to make laws about these issues like the age of consent, the drinking age, etc, what argument would we have to resist a federal law to forbid abortion in any state? It's a constitutional question about the separation of powers that may seem relatively benign in some cases, but can have big impacts when it has implications in more controversial areas.
