"I'm trying to construct the situation where you think girls would be worse off without an age of consent."

I got that backwards when I wrote it. I freely admit that does not fit with the rest of my thinking. :-)


You're back to a mess of false assertions interspersed with false logic. I tried looking through what you said about me for one thing that was true or supportable and had trouble finding one. Maybe there's one buried in there somewhere. If you want me to take you seriously, slow down and pick one point, say exactly which two things you think I am saying that are contradictory and why. From what you've scribbled so far my hunch is that it's a willful misreading of one or both out of context.

You seem to think that there are only two alternatives: a girl can choose to have sex with an adult, or else she is a defective blob of protoplasm who can't think.

I'll just pick a couple bits more or less at random:

The LEOs cannot be relevant when you bring them in, and an example of me wandering into non-sequitur when I respond to your claims about them.

The contexts are quite different. I was explaining why in my earlier post I emphasized the potential harm caused by pedophiles and omitted discussion of harm from other sources including LEOs. Here I am explaining why it will play out in life that an age of consent has positive effects. Reason for deciding what to include in a post -- quite different from effects in the world of a policy. No contradiction at all. (And the liberal anti-contact view would sharply reduce harm to children caused by LEOs).

The real world already has mechanisms to protect those who present a risk to themselves or others. To this you add "parental rights" and the superfluous need to recognize age alone as a risk factor and genetic relationship as the sole qualification to be awarded conservatorship.

I've never believed in parental rights as some end in and of itself, to be spoken of with a reverential tone. It's a practical matter, it's not absolute, it's part of a legal framework. But when someone asks why some kids are allowed to go swimming, that's the best answer. It's the grand sweeping theories that end up in trouble. I have no doubt that you'll gently keep your toddler grandkid from marching out into traffic as much as I will, but I still haven't heard any justification from you that fits within your grand theory of absolutes.

I couldn't see how the following fit with what came before, but I'll address it independently:
You can't claim that consent reflects choice in one direction and doesn't in the other.

Sure you can. Some things in life are asymmetric. There's a bias towards maintaining the status quo. For instance, if the police cut someone down who's trying to hang themselves, they will likely commit them involuntarily for a brief while, in the hopes that their suicidal impulse was a passing phase. Killing yourself disrupts the status quo, so we have asymmetric rules regarding it. They won't ultimately keep you from killing yourself, but they at least delay it a little. That seems quite sensible to me. You won't get much sympathy for the idea that the police egregiously violated your rights by interfering with your suicide attempt.