Washington Post: “Sex Between Students And Teachers Should Not Be A Crime”

Bookworm

August 31, 2013

At least one person thinks there’s nothing wrong with a Montana judge’s bizarre decision to impose only a 30-day sentence 54-year-old Stacey Dean Rambold, a teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old girl, driving her to suicide. Betsy Karasik, a one-time lawyer, took her legal training to the Opinion page at the Washington Post to make a slick, dishonest argue that there’s nothing wrong teachers having sex with their young students.
Karasik opens her opinion piece by saying that she’s “ambivalent” about answering the argument. Read on, though, and you’ll discover that she’s not ambivalent at all. In her moral universe, adolescents think about sex, so why shouldn’t they have sex? And if they’re having sex, why shouldn’t they be able to have it with their teachers? After all, she adds, students have always had sex with teachers:

(Read More: School PTA President Films Porno In Elementary School, Featuring An 8-Year-Old.)

Cherice Morales: Victim of a teacher’s statutory rape at 14; committed suicide before turning 17 .

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

There are two things profoundly wrong with that paragraph. The one that probably struck you most obviously struck was Karasik’s cavalier statement that, in her forty to fifty year old memories, “no one died.” By saying that, she tries to distract you from the serious issue with the 30-day sentence the judge imposed against Rambold: In that case, someone did die. Cherice Morales, a definitely troubled girl who should have sent a normal, mature adult screaming in the other direction when he met her as a 14-year-old, proved irresistible to Rambold, a teacher/student relationship that drove her to suicide.

(Read More: Married School Cafeteria Worker Got Student Drunk Then Had Sex With Him.)

The other thing that’s very, very wrong with that paragraph is the way Karasik lumps together law students and college students (who, unless they are Doogie Howsers, are all over 17 or 18) with high school students. You might have some high school students in your family or neighborhood so you know that, when they start a four-year high school, they are still children. Some have matured physically a bit faster than others, but their brains are immature. This is why they don’t get to drive.

Stacey Rambold committed statutory rape, but only got a 30 day sentence (Credit: Paul Ruhter – Gazette Staff)

The whole point of statutory rape is to catch those adults who are so lacking in morality, decency, and common sense that they have no problem engaging in adult sexual relations with mere children. The law recognizes that, despite the fact that some of these children boast superficial sophistication or physical maturity, they are still vulnerable to predators who manipulate their developing minds in order to prey on their young bodies. A healthy adult would never prey on these vulnerable youngsters. A sick adult, one with no boundaries, would take advantage of them, and it’s entirely reasonable for someone with those immoral propensities to end up in jail.

(Read More: “You Will Be Graded On Your Performance”: Teacher Caught Asking Students For Sex On Facebook.)

Karasik also throws in an “everybody is doing” argument: “If religious leaders and heads of state can’t keep their pants on, with all they have to lose, why does society expect that members of other professions can be coerced into meeting this standard?” We hold no brief for hound dog politicians and pastors, but to trying to lump their adult affairs in with pedophilia is an argument that deserves to be smashed down . . . hard.

Judge G. Todd Baugh ignored the law and said a statutory rape victim’s conduct affected sentencing

What Karasik is proposing is sick. She tries to gloss over this fact by assuring readers that teachers who have sex with their students should have some sort of consequence. Her idea? They should enter rehabilitation before they can be allowed to teach again. That’s much more reasonable, she says, than “the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them.”

(Read More: Obama: Sex Education For KINDERGARTNERS “The Right Thing To Do”.)

The giveaway that Karasik is simply a sophisticated version of the NAMBLA crowd (NAMBLA is the official pedophile organization that works to do away with any laws blocking them from having sexual relations with children) is her statement that “there is a vast and extremely nuanced continuum of sexual interactions involving teachers and students, ranging from flirtation to mutual lust to harassment to predatory behavior.” That’s what every pederast argues – “Honest, judge, she was mature and, you know, she wanted me.”
It turns out that, in Montana, there’s at least one judge who’s buying that argument and, at the Washington Post, there’s at least one opinion page editor who thinks its an argument that d serves wider play in the media.