So, you can talk of a "child" of 17 years of age? Or 17 years, 11 months, and 29 days? Don't be ridiculous.r
Age of consent refers to the age which a person can legally consent to sexual activity. If that age is 15, are we talking about "child" abuse? What about 14?
Nowhere in these United States is the age of consent for sexual activity 15 or 14. The youngest age in any state is 16.
Age of consent in 18 is my state.
Where do you live? Saudi Arabia?
Catholic apologetics, 21st century style: bugger a 14 yr old boy, and the priest can say he never violated his chastity vows. Everything's okay (and no one was hurt), because the Catholics now tell us that it wasn't rape-rape.
From Dominic Lawson's blog at The Independent:
The world of film – indeed, of art in general – regards this (Polanski's arrest, that is, not his abuse of a 13-year-old girl) as a scandal. This attitude was most clearly evident in the remark of the Hollywood actress Whoopi Goldberg, who last year defended him with the observation, "I know it wasn't rape-rape". With this remarkable neologism, Goldberg gave a new gloss to the old line (usually uttered by men) of "she said no, but she meant yes".It is not sexual misconduct, rather it is sexual assault, that Catholic priests were accused of in the John Jay Study. The topic isn’t “who’s accused of sexual misconduct”, it’s “who’s accused of committing a felony against a minor”...The John Jay study speaks of 4% of Catholic clergy (mostly priests ordained between 1950 and 1979) who were accused of raping underage male parishioners...Of the 38% of all Protestant clergy being accused of some level of inappropriate sexual contact, only 4.6% have engaged in actual sexual intercourse outside of marriage. And none of them of rape...If the Catholic apologist were really comparing apples to apples, the real statistics would speak of Protestant clergy accused of criminal sexual contact with minors, or would adjust the John Jay study’s four percent upwards to include inappropriate but otherwise legal sexual relations. But the Catholic apologist does no such thing. They start with John Jay’s 4%, move on to Protestantism’s 38%, and leave the reader thinking that 4% “statutory rape” is comparable to 38% “inappropriate relations”. Sometimes you have to keep score, to tell when the other side is moving the goalposts on you.
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- excerpted from the "Inside Catholic" blog article and 'Catholic Caucus' thread Kneeling Before the World
....“The thesis of this book,” writes Lawler, “is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate.” Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility. Lawler several times invokes the terse observation of St. Augustine, “God does not need my lie.” The bishops lied, says Lawler, and many of them are still lying. This is offered not as an accusation but as a conclusion that he believes is compelled by the evidence.
“The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed,” Lawler writes. “The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied....The third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders.” The third aspect, the malfeasance of bishops, “is today the most serious of all.”
-- excerpted from "Paved with the Skulls of Bishops" by Richard John Neuhaus