Because Dread said this: "When I think about this, I don't have a super-duper problem with allowing underage kids to marry each other if both are under 18. I'm all for letting people make stupid choices." And when it comes to children, I think its unconscionable to take that attitude.
Somewhere up there I advocated mandatory birth control implants for girls under 21, but of course that's abusrd.
First, you can't ban sex, obviously. Second, you can ban two dopey kids from getting married at 16 or dropping out of school at 13 or whatever other dumb life-altering things they might decide to do. Now, just because you can't by force of law keep teens from having sex, doesn't mean you should give them the opportunity to make terrible errors in other parts of their lives too.
EDIT: Just to soothe away any more anti-absolutist arguments, I've already conceded the absolute terms used so far were unwarranted. It should be "Most 16 year olds have no business making life decisions without counsel from their parents or some other responsible adult."
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
To clarify, Minx got this right. I was specifically talking about the basic principle of people marrying when they are 16 or so, as that was a number mentioned in the article. I wasn't looking at this as ten year old kids getting married, which I think is clearly wrong.
That said, Nessus I don't see how/why you would assume I support ten year olds getting married. This is why I specifically said, "I have nothing in common with those who do voluntarily want to get married at the age of 16, but that's on them to make the choice and live with it (and probably get divorced)."
Emphasis on "AT the age of 16". Not "UNDER the age of 16". Your response to this very specific statement was to go sorta nuts and accuse me of being an American Taliban. But the reason I brought it up was in response to Chaloobi's comments, which as we all see were clearly leaning towards making it illegal for 16 year olds to marry.
Last edited by Dreadnaught; 08-09-2010 at 03:15 AM. Reason: Grammar
It was really stupid of me not to realize you wanted to have a casual chat about dim-dums, and it is really unfortunate that due to my inability to grasp these things you think I'm a "minefield " It really is sorta nuts to expect that anything should have any relevance to anything else, I mean come on, right? Well, except the posts Chaloobi will make in the future, but we're all savvy to those. You got some numbers right, you were having a good time, and I went and ruined everything. I hope we can move past this as a community, and maybe have a laugh at stupid people's expense together!
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Well come on if at some point you come to the conclusion that someone here endorses pedophilia then it makes sense to take a closer look at matters or at the very least to be cautious... it'd be like someone reading a study that shows poop to be tastier than chocolate and then going around calling everyone assholes.
Or, to take a more pertinent example, when Loki implied that I support the right of adults to drug and rape underaged girls... was he being sensible? Of course not. He certainly wasn't being particularly charitable!
Of course I may be missing the point entirely, in this case.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I made an unfair personal comment too. It's a work in progress!
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I love it when we love on another
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Lolli I call BS, 16 year olds in general do not decide to have a child. They may frequently engage in everything that is needed to produce a child, but that doesn't mean they are consiously striving for the result of having a baby like you are claiming.
The idea that they should burden the exploration of sexuality above all other complications with a legalized relationship also doesn't sound like a very sane approach to raising one's children.
Congratulations America
There are girls who deliberately try to get pregnant, Hazir. They probably have no clue what they are getting themselves into, but they think it is exactly what they want. Sometimes they do it in bunches
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news...ectid=10391528
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,369103,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4187548.ece
http://www.ahealthyme.com/topic/teenpregnancy
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases...nancy.ssl.html
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
I know there are teenage girls who choose to get knocked up. And I do even know that they sometimes follow the silly example of their peers. That doesn't mean though that in the vast majority of the cases the fucking took place in order to make a baby. For the average teenage girl a baby is an unfortunate side-effect of fucking in a situation where precautions (if any put in place at all) failed.
I think you don't help anybody by enhancing the negative sides of teenage sex. It's much more likely you get positive results by encouraging responsable behaviour than by pushing young adolescents into some pidgeonhole just because that suits your religious ideas of morality. Any parent who'd rather see a child go through the trauma of a marriage and a divorce before 20 and being part of a broken family than see that child grow up before life altering choices are made, in my eyes doesn't understand what it means to be a good parent.
Congratulations America
They do still choose to actually have the baby rather than abort, even if the pregnancy was an accident, so they are choosing to be teenage mothers. I'm terribly sorry, but I don't think any woman, even a silly teen, should be forced into aborting (or not aborting) against her will.
And it happens deliberately entirely too frequently, still. I wouldn't be so quick to assume the vast majority are accidental, anyway.
How does Chacha feel about schools handing out free condoms, or girls being able to get other birth control without parental permission?
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
I don't think that at any point I said anything as brash as that women of any age should be forced into aborting a pregnancy. What I do think is that it is actually not that hard to inform young people about sensible attitudes towards sexuality. Of course it would mean that you have to shove aside religious considerations in order to deal with reality rather than with the sexual doctrine of this church or the other.
I still don't think that the majority of these teenage girls choose to have children for the sake of having children.
In my own family in most cases children came relatively early by the way. The only case where children came very late was in the case of one of my sisters-in-law who simply had extreme problems carrying out pregnancies. I think she had 3 miscarriages before she had her first child when she was 37.
Congratulations America
It's a great idea. Hell, I already said birth control should be mandatory for underage Persons and that wasn't a joke. Double hell, ideally nobody should parent children before the age of 30, but whatever. The world's full of fucked up people and I'm no exception.
I have distant inlaws that are working on the 3rd generation of girls getting knocked up in high-school and none of them were accidents. Stupid, poverty stricken, addiction, self-destructive, generation on generation of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, you bet. But no accidents. Mind-boggling family culture....
Last edited by EyeKhan; 08-16-2010 at 12:57 PM.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)