OK, y’all…time for a pop quiz. If y’all are as smart as you seem to think you are, this should be a breeze.
Let’s see if any of you aspiring Ph.D. candidates can tell me what’s wrong with this picture:
Girl’s husband faces sex charges
LINCOLN - A 22-year-old man faces criminal charges in Nebraska for having sex with an underage girl, although he legally married the 13-year-old in Kansas after she became pregnant. Matthew Koso, 22, was charged Monday with first-degree sexual assault, punishable by up to 50 years in prison. He was released on $7,500 bond pending an Aug. 17 preliminary hearing. After the girl became pregnant, her mother gave permission in May for Koso to take the teen to Kansas, which allows minors to get married with parental consent. Nebraska requires people to be at least 17 before they can marry.
Yep, if you figured out that there is NO WAY IN HELL a 13-year-old girl should be able to marry ANYTHING for ANY REASON, be sure to leave your name at the ticket booth on your way out. Your prize will arrive in 4-6 weeks.
What I truly do not understand about this scenario is that the girl’s mother gave her consent for her 13-YEAR-OLD daughter to marry. WTF??? Have we completely lost our mind- not to mention our sense of parental responsibility. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but if I were that 13-year-old’s parent, her 22-year-old beau would be picking birdshot out of his @$$. This is some prime DUMB@$$ AWARD-quality stuff, except for the fact that the story doesn’t disclose the mother’s name. I’m sorry, but any mother stupid and irresponsible enough to allow her 13-year-old daughter to marry the man who impregnated her deserves to not only receive a DUMB@$$ AWARD, but to have the award named after her and retired.
Of course, the next question is what in the hell those knuckle-dragging troglodytes in Kansas were thinking when they legalized this sort of child sexual abuse? That is exactly what this behavior is. How long before some gap-toothed 45-year-old misanthrope from Deliverance, AR, shows up with his pregnant 11-year-old girlfriend and her mother, looking for a marriage license? Surely, a state as reflexively Conservative as Kansas cannot be accepting of this sort of child abuse? Or is “keeping them barefoot and pregnant” the new state motto?
Prior to the pregnancy, the mother's efforts to keep these too young lovers "separated" included obtaining a court order to keep the guy away from her home. It didn't work. Her daughter would sneak out at night to see the guy, hence the pregnancy.
There's certainly no brilliance involved in getting knocked up when your 13, or in knocking up a 13 year old, regardless of your age. But after the fact, the mom's options are really very limited. She could force the child to undergo an abortion, continue to try and keep the two apart, or accept the situation and act in the best interests of the baby.
While the odds are against the survival of this union, Nebraska's Attorney General isn't helping things a bit by jailing the father to be. In my mind, the State of Nebraska is the number one DUMBA$$ in this situation.
True: Nebraska's jailing the guy is stupid. But then we are talking about a red state, and a town named after America's first mass murderer.
Bob wrote,
[i]"She could force the child to undergo an abortion, continue to try and keep the two apart, or accept the situation and act in the best interests of the baby."[/i]
A 13 year old as a parent, and her 22 year old rapist as the other parent, and this is in the best interest of the baby????
What color is your sky?
Jailing the guy is a good first step. I lean more to Texas justice (think hatchets, nails, and gasoline-soaked burning stumps). Once the child is born it should be surrendered for adoption -- and then so should the 13-year-old.
Court orders and the kid 'sneaks out'??? Right. Where the HELL were the cops whose job it is to enforce those court orders? Oh, right ... mom didn't call, it would be too embarrassing.
I cannot believe you think this 'union' needs to be encouraged. There is NOTHING about this situation as it stands that is "in the best interests of the baby."
Either one of them -- what in the name of the seven bald steers makes you think a kid of 13 has any business being a mother? And as for relying on the grandparents, their track records suggest they'd raise another real winner, don't they?
The kid is 14 now. Not that it makes any difference.
I certainly did not mean to imply that teen sex or marriage should be encouraged. I did point out some relevant detail that the Chronicle did not print, and that the Mom seemed to have accepted the situation, and is at least attempting to act in the best interests of the child. This is her responsibility and that of her family, not the government's.
I maintain that the State of Nebraska is acting inappropriately in charging the father after the fact. The local district attorney opted not to do so, but Nebraska's DUMBA$$, Government in Everybody's Pants Attorney General decided otherwise.
BTW, For The_Other_Sarah, change the brackets [ ] to greater/less than symbols > and those italics will work...
OK, this is way off topic, but I just noticed that MT did not publish the underscores in Sarah's name as I had typed them... Instead, it italicized "Other".
Gee, I guess you can teach and old dog new tricks. That's easier than HTML!
After some experimenting, I found that wrapping text inside _two_ underscores will cause MT to __bold__ that text.
__What part of statutory rape did you not understand here?__
The child was 13. If she's 14 now at least that means she wasn't 12 when this pedophile got her pregnant.
__Don't__ come telling me __"she asked for it"__ again, either.
It's way more information about your tastes than I need.
Any way you look at it, when a 22 year old man has sex with a 12 or 13 year old girl, it is CRIMINAL. The guy is a pedophile. As soon as this little girl becomes a mature woman, he will lose interest in her and move on. Jail is the ideal place for him.
I'll leave it to the shrinks to decide if the guy is a pedophile. In my book he's at least a class-A jerk, and yes, he is guilty of statutory rape. With a baby as proof, it's an easy case to prosecute. (I wonder if the child chose to abort the baby if the state would charge her with destruction of evidence.)
My point was that the __nanny-state__ had their chance to stop this, and as usual, they blew it. Gee, what could have gone wrong? Did they run out of condoms at her school? Did our liberal public education system fail to properly instruct her on condom usage while they were encouraging teenage sex?
Details on this are sparse, but it just seems to me that since the state failed to protect this child, they should back off and let the two families involved handle the situation in the manner they see fit.
In my family, this would have included a series of persuasive "conversations" between the guy and 4 or 5 older, larger males -- BEFORE he knocked up the child.
The state performed their responsibility of protecting the child. The mother failed in hers. Why must you blame the state for the failings of the individual? Also, why is it the responsibility of the state to raise our children? This argument is really getting rather tiresome.
And, let me see; last I checked the Republican agenda is attempting to remove all sexual education from our public schools. This case should be a testiment to the success they are enjoying in this regard. I imagine this will be become more common in coming years as we continue to regress to pre-enlightened times.