America’s Founding Fathers warned the American people about the dangers of the democratic mob when they created a republic (not a democracy), but we didn’t learn from them and allowed the United States to become a democracy early in the 20th century.
Now thanks to one furious mother that refuses to let her child have the freedom the law provides when a child becomes an adult at 18 years of age, California may join 23 other states where some may lose the freedom to fall in love with an older man or woman that is a former teacher.
Should falling in love with a consenting adult age 18 or older be a crime?
“Almost half of the world’s prisoners are in the United States (2.29 million), China (1.65 million sentenced prisoners), or Russia (0.81 million) – countries which account for just over a quarter of the world’s population…” Source: Prison Studies.org
The US is listed as # ONE with 743 prisoners per 100,000 people, the Russian Federation is # FIVE with 534 prisoners per 100,000 and China is # 117 with 122 prisoners per 100,000. Source: List of Countries by Incarceration Rate – Wiki
Since America is a country that often loudly announces it is the ‘land of the free’, being number one in this category should be an embarrassment casting a serious doubt on this claim.
It isn’t as if older men having relationships with a younger woman is anything new. These types of relationships may be rare compared to the average, but there are individuals that do find love with an older partner and it works.
How is this different from a relationship between two consenting adult gay men or women?
However, if Kristin Olsen’s Bill 1861 becomes law in California, 18-year-old high school girls or boys may still fall in love with any other older man or woman—no matter how old—as long as he or she isn’t a teacher.
If California joins the states that have removed this freedom of choice for legal consenting adults, 24 states may then send teachers to jail just because he or she had the audacity to fall in love (or lust) with a consenting 18 or older adult that was once a student.
I know of one teacher that worked at the same high school where I taught for almost twenty years. He married his wife soon after she graduated from that same high school. He was in his late twenties when she was his student and they started dating the following year, with the parents’ consent (the parents also acted as chaperones—the two never went on a date alone), when she was sixteen. That was in the 1980s, and that couple has had several children and are still happily married almost thirty years later. In fact, that older teacher wanted his younger wife to stay at home and raise the kids so he worked other job besides teaching to pay the bills. He sacrificed for the younger woman he loved.
In addition, I knew another teacher at the same high school that married a 19 year old former student that attended the same school, and when they married a year or more after the younger woman graduated, the teacher was in his 50s. A few years later, that marriage ended in an amicable divorce. The older man even voluntarily requested that the judge make the alimony higher.
Isn’t that what we have divorce for? If we make a mistake and/or fall out of love with someone we married (no matter what age they are), we have the option of divorce. Being age 18 or over means we have the right to make mistakes and learn from them without a parent interfering by pushing for punitive laws that will send more people to prison.
Continued on April 13, 2012 in Part 3 of the Mob’s War against Teachers or return to Part 1
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 
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April 12, 2012 at 22:55
Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, but I’ll continue with it for you. Reasons why there are less people in jail in China – they have the death penalty for many crimes – the highest number of people annually. So you aren’t in jail when you are dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
This country has a habit of enacting laws, but doesn’t enforce them. People are arrested time & time again, then sit on welfare, etc. That’s the problem. In other countries you don’t produce you die. You don’t get a nice cushy prison, tv, lawsuits, etc like in the jails in the US.
Lloyd Lofthouse
April 13, 2012 at 06:52
True, but from what I’ve read, China recently (in the last few years) reduced the number of crimes that warrant a death penalty and changed the laws so only China’s highest court could hand out these death sentences since the lower courts were being too liberal with executions. Since those changes in the laws, the death sentences in China were cut from about 10,000 a year (on average) to about 5,000 annually.
Executing a few thousand people a year is not going to reduce the number of people held in China’s prisons that much.
In addition, studies/history shows that countries that have tougher laws and enforce them have less crime, appear to be more stable and survive longer as a culture/nation.
When the US became a nation in 1776, the time it took from verdict to execution averaged about two weeks and there were no appeals. Today, a convicted criminal on death row may wait for more than a decade while one appeal after another works its way through the courts and the costs of these appeals to the tax payer is in the millions of dollars. In addition, it costs about $40,000 a year (on average) to house these criminals.
It’s true, China does not mess around when it comes to executing criminals and due to that, I feel safer walking the streets late at night in Beijing and Shanghai than I do in any city or town in the US.
Here’s a piece published by the Guardian in the UK on Death penalty statistics, country by country.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/death-penalty-countries-world
The fact that China executes more convicted criminals than any other country has nothing to do with the Chinese Communist Party. For thousands of years, the philosophy of legalism guided China’s methods of dealing with criminals and it is a harsh system. When Robert Hart (he wrote this in his journals) the main character of my historical fiction novel, Our Hart, was stationed in Canton during the Arrow War (mid 19th century), rebels broke into the city through one gate. After the combined Chinese Imperial, British and French forces drove the rebels out of the city (vicious fighting), the Imperial Chinese official in charge of Canton had fifty people rounded up at random from that same street and they were beheaded. Their heads were put in cages and hung over the gate that someone had opened in the night to let the rebels in. Beheading those people was a warning to the residents of that street to make sure it didn’t happen again and it didn’t.
It’s quite possible that the reason China has managed to hang together as one country for so long was because of legalism and the harsh sentences for some crimes.