Sex Is For Adults

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there as well as here:

Peter Tatchell has popped up in the Guardian calling to lower the age of consent to 14. As much as anything else, that would have legalised almost all the acts that brought scandal on the Catholic Church. Has that occurred to him?

Of course, founded as it was out of centres of pederasty such as the Stonewall Inn, the politically homosexualist movement has always, by definition, had these agenda. How many teenage boys did you ever see on those marches to lower the age of consent? But how many middle-aged men?

Yet what of Stuart Reid, columnist for The Catholic Herald and The American Conservative, and lately deputy editor of The Spectator? In this week’s Catholic Herald column, even he seems to be feeling quite indulgent towards, at least, sex between women and teenage boys. As an Old Labour High Tory, I normally only disagree with Stuart about the EU, and even then only because he sees it as potentially a reborn Christendom, whereas I see it as anything but. However, I really do have to disagree with him about this, too.

To my mind, it should be made a criminal offence for any person to commit any sexual act with or upon on any other person under 18 who is more than three years younger than himself (or, of course, herself), or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon him or any third party anywhere in the world. The maximum sentence should be imprisonment for twice the number of years difference in age, or for life where that difference is more than five years or where the younger party is aged under 13.

That way, adolescent experimentation would not be dealt with by means of the criminal law. But the message would be clear: that at 32 I would have no business carrying on with a 17-year-old; and that sex is for people who can cope with the consequences, physical and otherwise. In a word, adults.