A couple of things to say about this article.
First, about the closing paragraph:
[Twin Falls County Prosecuting Attorney Grant Loebs] says juries are supposed to decide if a law was broken, not whether it’s a wise or unwise law.
That is blatantly false. The jury judges not just the facts of the case but the law itself. If the jury says that the law is bogus, then can find someone not guilty. That’s what’s called “jury nullification”, and it has a long precedent in the American legal system.
A south-central Idaho teacher who told police he knowingly had sex with an underage girl has been found not guilty of rape.
Twin Falls County Prosecuting Attorney Grant Loebs tells the Times-News that the jury’s decision on Wednesday to find 40-year-old Jason Benjamin not guilty of raping the teenager “staggering.”
The jury foreman says the 12-member panel unanimously concluded the sex was consensual and did not meet their definition of rape because Benjamin did not physically force himself on the girl.
Benjamin was charged with rape under an Idaho law that applies when the victim is 16 or 17 years old, and the perpetrator is at least three years older.
Wilson addresses this best.
t. Right now, if a young high school sophomore wants to get it on with a boy in the school, the one with the acne problem, the school nurse has to give her a supply of pills, and may not inform her parents, but if she wants to do the same thing with the older man parked behind the stadium, the one with a steady job, the school nurse has to call the cops. This is because, we say, older men are capable of “grooming,” which is an insult to individuality and so on. This is not to say that grooming isn’t evil; it really is wicked. I am simply saying that our entire society is busily grooming all our teenagers, and we have not yet worked out the legal angularities. She can decide to have sex with her boyfriend, for she is her own person and quite mature. She can decide that she is actually a boy now, for she is her own person and quite mature. But if she exercises that maturity in the direction of an older man, then suddenly she is a widdle gwrl.
This is a lunatic inconsistency, and I have ten dollars here that says it will be resolved in favor of the imperialism of lust.