Parents of Your 16-Year-Old Daughter's Boyfriend Tell You
"the dating relationship would be no contact -- no hand-holding or kissing" -- good (or that's what I'd think!).
She tells you she "[doesn't] belong in [your] home any longer because she ha[s] to fight demons every day and she belong[s] with her daddy, [the boyfriend's father]" -- not so good.
She comes to "believe[] certain objects including her teddy bears [are] possessed by demons" -- not so good, either.
The parents encourage her to leave your allegedly demon-ridden home and move in with them -- a class B misdemeanor.
Or at least it did when I was a teenager, I'm glad to report! Fond memories of youth do not correspond neatly to fond hopes for one's 16-year-old daughter.
And that could lead to dancing.
I had a somewhat blunt father. If someone had said that their sons dating of my sister would be "no hand-holding or kissing" he would have thrown them out for lying or being clueless about foreplay.
Sex standing up, and then MIXED DANCING!
I'm a Christian, and these sorts of things are so humiliating. One more reason to think that religion turns people into nutcases.
Every group attracts its whackjobs. Politics... hello, nutroots, and if my candidate fails we are all doomed. Within any reasonably large group of mankind, there will be many who are a few cards shy of a full deck, and they will go for whatever extreme and wierd perversion of the group principles can attract their attention. And if there isn't one, invent it. I suspect many a Hindu has considered mass homicide when bumping into Hare Krishnas.
The only way to avoid them is to form a movement of no practical significance whatsoever, then they stay away. So perhaps their annoyance is proof that you are doing something of significance.
What's the matter with kids today?
! ! ! ! !
She hopefully jokingly replied, "But what if I already have?"
There were no such witty retorts when I warned her to run from strangers who asked for help to find lost puppies, and hopefully by inference, pervs like Walter.
"[I]n the closet]" indeed.
I mean given that the girl decided she wasn't into the whole running away thing after less than a day it seems likely to me that this was as much about defiance of her mother as it was real belief in the crazy religious junk that the other family told her.
It's unfortunate that a court was so careless as to put the details of this girl's "dating" life on the Internet for all to see, available on Google forever. The court could easily have redacted the opinion to take out the identifying information.
Courts need to think more carefully before vomiting their opinions onto the Internet.
Seems to me this should be a lesson to always stick something in your brief that wins the case if the other guy doesn't bother to respond to it. Or is that not always possible?
Trials have always been difficult to victims, but at least the transcripts weren't published on the Internet. When most current judges started practicing law, court of appeals opinions went straight into books read only by lawyers or into electronic databases so expensive that few other than lawyers used them.
I have even seen the names of alleged child rape victims in opinions. Some courts have declined to redact the names even when it's brought to their attention.
North Carolina, which has an active alienation of affections tort for alienation of marital affections (as well as a loss of consortium tort for loss of services etc.), turned down a case involving alienation of parent-child affections on grounds that marriage is a kind of contract where the parties agree to exclusive affections which the state can enforce, and while parents can be required to give their children support and children to give their parents obediance, services, and such, the law does not require thme to love each other.
But this was simply a public policy choice. There would be nothing unconsitutional about a parent-child alienation of affections or loss of consortium tort.
And what can be prohibited by civil tort can be made a crime.
Yes, it was wrong for the family to encourage the girl to defy her mother. Christian teaching is that children are to honor and obey their parents. It was also wrong for the father to be alone with the girl after her mother had expressed her concerns about it, not because the man was a danger to the girl but because the girl's mother was concerned. Christian teaching is not to give people reason for offense.
Other than that, this is a pretty typical clash of cultures. The family didn't do anything wrong in teaching the girl what they believe, the mother didn't do anything wrong in trying to raise the girl in her own values. The decision of the court seems reasonable and the case should end there.
It is unfortunate that this is used as an excused for more negative stereotyping of Christians, though.
I have to admit that, as a Texas prosecutor, I took the most interest in the paragraph about the State failing to file a brief. I admit there have been plenty of cases where I think writing a brief is a waste of time and we'd win without one, but I still always write one! I hope there was just some sort of mix-up at the DA's office where they didn't realize this was pending -- we've had cases where the appellant served a neighboring county instead of us and the court sent notices to that county, so we didn't find out about the appeal until rather late. Still, a lot of prosecutor offices don't have an appellate section, and things will fall through the cracks.