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Texan_Pride ago

Over my dead body. This all sounds possible on the internet but good luck letting the public see pedophiles starting to get confident. That will end this debacle quickly.

huhWHAThuh ago

So will everybody here be a "pedophobe" and "bigot" for not allowing their children's "right to choose" and make them into "second class citizens?" Well so far the public is 100% at falling for childish word games. Does anybody expect the future to be any different?

greycloud ago

good luck finding ANYONE on voat who pushes for age of consent reform more than i do. but even i don't advocate for children being allowed to have sexual relationships that their own parents do not approve of. you have a vested interest in the welfare of your own children, and i have always respected that. but what you don't have, is the right to stop some muslim or jewish or other family who is quite accepting of THEIR children doing that stuff from being able to give the child the liberty to choose to do so.

now i accept that there needs to be some level of competence required for informed consent. but informed decision making is reached at different ages by different people. some people are much smarter than their peers, and we live in the age of information. others are functionally retarded and will never gain the capacity to make informed decisions. age is less important than ability. but at the same time intelligence is mostly genetic. you have never seen a genius banana, they simply don't have the genes for it. parents and children have closely related genes. a precociously smart child is very likely to have smart parents who are looking out for that child. if the parents and child agree that the child should be able to choose to have sex, than you as a not member of that family should have no say in that decision. now if you are the smart parent, than yes, you should have a whole lot of say in that decision. after all you have a vested interest in the welfare of your own children.

huhWHAThuh ago

Society most certainly DOES have the right and responsibility to protect children from abuse of any sort. The whole point is that children - all children - are not physically, mentally, or emotionally capable of making an informed consent decision to have sex. Stores are prohibited from selling alcohol to children for the very same reason. They are not capable of making a mature decision about that, and must be protected in areas where they are incapable of protecting themselves. The same is true about access to illegal substances, or driving cars, or a myriad of other circumstances. Infants and children do not have that capability. If the discussion is about 17 or 18 or 16 as the proper age, some area of ambiguity may exist. But any discussion of children or even infants (yes some pedo groups make that argument) having the capacity for informed consent moves beyond the area of silly, into the region of sick and perverted.

greycloud ago

piaget stages: at the formal operational stage people can meaningfully consent to that type of activity. some rare people develop this ability at 11 or 12 years old, others don't develop it until 20 years old, still others (considered developmentally disabled) never reach this stage of cognition. trying to slap a specific age on it is a fallacy that fails to take into account that some people develop faster than others.

as for society having the right and responsibility to protect children from abuse of any sort. some consider teaching religion before the same stage of cognition to be abuse. that is to say that sex and religion should be exposed at the same age. to teach one before the other is abuse, and as you said, society has a right and responsibility to take children away from such abusers.

huhWHAThuh ago

You conflate teaching religion (or anything else for that matter) with having sex with a child? You have gotten silly. Done with this conversation.

greycloud ago

there is no outcome you can measure where having sex as a child has an impact on it, that having strong religious beliefs doesn't have a larger impact on it. if sex is a crime, religion is a greater crime.

greycloud ago

it is conditioning them to believe something before they are rational enough to understand it. it is the exact same thing as child grooming.