‘Relationship’ as a Euphemism: What Does This Tell Us About the Culture?

Posted on Comments

Kaitlyn Hunt’s family says she’s a victim of homophobia.

A week ago, Canadian lesbian Kristin Ireland wrote:

The Kaitlyn Hunt case haunts me. Never more than a few moments out of my mind. I read every word I can find on the subject. And I search for similar cases. How many of our young people are caught up a legal web of irrationality? . . .
[Critics of Hunt] claim to be “telling the truth” and “stating the facts.” They focus on days and months and birth dates. A few pages on the calendar flip and suddenly we should all be sharpening our pitch forks and cheering to see a young life destroyed. We all know it’s not that simple don’t we?

This was brought to my attention by a commenter:

She deleted my comment to her May 30 Kate post. I just politely pointed out that age-of-consent laws are inherently based on “a few flips of the calendar.”
If no law should be contingent on calendar dates, then all age-of-consent laws should be repealed.
I didn’t even add that such would be the dawning of paradise on earth for all pedophiles. I just pointed that out and she deleted it . . .

The title of Kristin Ireland’s May 30 post? “Kate Hunt, The Internet, and Rationality,” as if she were capable of recognizing “rationality.” People have asked me why I dug in so hard on this story, and I explain it’s the same reason I drove to Kentucky in 2009 to prove Andrew Sullivan wrong: The media do this kind of stuff routinely — grab hold of some story that seems conveniently to “prove” liberal beliefs and then blow it up into a national drama. But the minute the ugly facts emerge to contradict the narrative, the media move on to the next story that, by similar distortions, can be used to validate their worldview.

They act as if we’re too stupid to see what they’re doing, and always seem shocked when we catch them doing it.

So, yeah, I dug in on this one and, once I did, people kept tipping me to new facts of the story and, if you’ll just check Google News, you’ll see that the bogus “Free Kate” meme has been so thoroughly discredited that the national media won’t dare try to revive it. And I’d be walking away with the victor’s laurels on my brow were it not for monomaniacal fanatics like Kristin Ireland who just can’t let it go.

What Happened to Paige Johnson?

Readers will recall that we last encountered Kristin Ireland tearfully proclaiming that the story of convicted Pennsylvania sex offender Paige Johnson was “like a Lifetime movie,” and now she’s turned her interview with Paige’s mother Jackie into a long blog post:

Paige was an 18 year old competitive cheerleader being home schooled in Warren County, PA. In January of 2010 a 14 year old joined the team and the two became friends. As the girls got to know each other better their friendship turned to flirting and eventually into a relationship. Paige’s mother Jackie was unaware of the relationship but said that she later learned that the younger girl’s mother (who did not have custody of her daughter) had known and apparently told Paige “I don’t care if you date my daughter. At least you won’t get her pregnant. But hurt my daughter and I’ll make your life a living Hell.” If this was fiction you could call this foreshadowing. Sadly, it’s not fiction.
Like many young relationships it wasn’t to last forever. Paige ended the relationship and the younger girl then also had sex with Paige’s friend (also 18 and also on the cheer team)*. In April of 2010 the girls travelled to Maryland for a National cheerleading competition. Over the weekend Jackie noticed tension between the two girls but didn’t know until later that it was because Paige had ended the relationship and the other girl was angry.

Isn’t there something . . . weird about that story?

We’ll get back to that in a minute, but notice how Kristin Ireland uses “relationship” as a euphemism for “having sex.” We saw something similar with the Kaitlyn Hunt saga, with her father describing Kaitlyn’s involvement with a 14-year-old as a “high school romance” when, as the affidavit made clear, it wasn’t remotely romantic, unless you count having sex in a school toilet stall as “romance.”

A strange lack of curiosity seems to have afflicted some people. Perhaps they thought Florida had criminalized moonlight and poetry.

This willingness to accept euphemism — the girls had a relationship, and the younger girl’s parents objected to the relationship, so the 18-year-old faces jail for her relationship — may reflect an instinctive aversion to the unpleasant realities of our sexualized society. Kids are engaged in shockingly deviant behaviors at shockingly early ages (e.g., three 19-year-olds taking turns with a 13-year-old) and it’s easier to hide this from ourselves behind the gauzy vagueness of soft-focus language than to confront the sordid facts of the matter.

How is it that on the one hand, America seems to be raising a generation of polymorphous perverts, while on the other hand this neo-Victorian reign of euphemism requires us to pretend that these sick little freaks are engaged in nothing more than “relationships”?

On that night, the freshman ran away from home to spend the night in Kaitlyn’s bedroom where, to quote the affidavit by Sheriff’s Office Detective Jeremy Shepherd, the two girls “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.”

This was “healthy and normal,” says Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother, and the ACLU blandly assures us that 18-year-old Kaitlyn and her 14-year-old girlfriend were just “engaging in behavior that is both fairly innocuous and extremely common.”

OK, just how “common” is this? Are 14-year-old freshmen girls nowadays routinely getting dildoed by their senior basketball teammates?

My guess is, probably not, but perhaps I’m being naïve, and this behavior — “fairly innocuous”! — has become so utterly commonplace that it is now more or less expected of ninth-graders.

Happy 14th Birthday! (Batteries not included.) But I digress . . .

A Strange and Unexplained Craving

Didn’t I say there was something weird about the Paige Johnson story? Description from the “Justice for Paige” Facebook group:

Paige had finished 12th grade, homeschooled with 4 college credits under her belt. She was going into her 5th year as an All-Star competition cheerleader. Though she had dated boys through her teen years, she was now currently in a relationship with a girl. She met another girl January 2010, when she was 18. The other girl was 2 months shy of her 15th birthday. They dated for two months and broke up, and Paige got back together with her ex-girlfriend. That was the catalyst for the girl’s mother to go to the police and file charges against Paige. She has been fighting for 4 long years now, and is currently incarcerated in the county jail for a purported probation violation. The civil rights violations and legal atrocities she has been subjected to would make anyone give up, but not her! She plans to attend college to become a vet tech and she wants to rejoin her competition cheer team in September after her release. We need to not only change the laws concerning peer-peer relationships, we need to take a good hard look at the injustices that are served to people like Paige on a daily basis in our court system.

Are we to assume that when Paige Johnson’s supporters say she “dated boys,” that the word “dated” signifies the same as “relationship”? Doesn’t this very much resemble what Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother said about her daughter’s sexual history?

At the beginning of this school year, she started dating a fellow student, who happened to be another female. . . .
This was unusual for Kate, she has always dated boys, but being the kind of mother I am, I didn’t want to make it a big deal.

Both Kate and Page had participated in competitive cheerleading. Both had previously dated only boys (at least so we are told by the mothers in both cases) and then — boom! — they turn 18 and suddenly they’re lesbians with an insatiable craving for 14-year-old girlflesh.

These very similar stories involve girls who lived thousands of miles from each other — one in Warren, Pennsylvania, the other in Sebastian, Florida — but the eerie parallels don’t end there. Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother says “being the kind of mother I am, I didn’t want to make it a big deal,” whereas “Paige’s mother Jackie was unaware of the relationship but said that she later learned that the younger girl’s mother (who did not have custody of her daughter) had known.” Whether clueless or indifferent, neither Jackie’s mother nor Kaitlyn’s mother seems to have shown any concern: “Hey, why is my 18-year-old daughter hanging around this 14-year-old? Why isn’t she socializing with people her own age?”

The Paige Johnson story doesn’t make sense in pretty much the same way the Kaitlyn Hunt story didn’t make sense. And I’m willing to  bet that S.J. Reidhead is getting the heeby-jeebies about Paige Johnson in much the same way she did with Kaitlyn Hunt.

Both of these stories involve 18-year-old girls acting out in ways that are certainly not “fairly innocuous,” nor “healthy and normal,” and any sane person can’t help but wonder why. Notice something else from Kristin Ireland’s telling of the Paige Johnson story:

Paige ended the relationship and the younger girl then also had sex with Paige’s friend (also 18 and also on the cheer team)*

We skip down to the footnote:

*Paige’s friend was also prosecuted and received 6-12 months in local jail.

Whoa! What’s going on here? This cheerleading team has not one, but two 18-year-old lesbians with a craving for 14-year-old girlflesh?

Certainly, by now, readers have got to be wondering exactly what the hell is going on here. Is it possible that some psychologist could interview these girls and try to find a common denominator? Is it a history of being molested? Exposure to pornography? Abusive boyfriends? Why or how has this phenomenon — Sudden Onset Lesbian Jailbait Syndrome — become seemingly pandemic?

‘Peer’ or Predator? Or Maybe Both?

Whereas we have an affidavit in the Hunt case, and a TV interview with the 14-year-old’s parents to balance that story, we have no such  detail or counter-narrative in the Paige Johnson story, and therefore must hear it as told by Paige’s mother Jackie to Kristin Ireland:

In court things went from bad to worse. Because Paige had accepted a plea she was not given the opportunity to tell her side of the story. The DA, on the other hand, painted Paige as a dangerous child molester in need of serious rehabilitation. . . .
The judge then asked Paige if she had read the victim impact statement written by the younger girl’s mother. When Paige said that she hadn’t, the judge passed her the letter to read aloud in the court (thereby entering it into the official record). In her statement the mother wrote that Paige had been a certified cheer coach who had viciously pursued her daughter. Paige’s anger built as she read this because it simply was not true. However, when she tried to refute the statement to the judge she was silenced. It now looked like Paige was an older predatory lesbian in a position of power who exploited a young girl in her care. A far different story from two peers, four years apart in age, on the same team who had feelings for one another.

OK, understand that to Kristin Ireland this is a story about an abusive criminal justice system, and she’s so sympathetic to the victim (i.e., the convicted sex offender) that she envisions this as a Lifetime movie scenario. Keep that understanding in mind. But now it’s time to ask ourselves a question: What don’t we know?

It’s obvious to me that something is missing from this story, but I don’t know what it is that is missing. If this was all a harmless situation about two teenagers “who had feelings for one another,” why would the district attorney portray Paige Johnson “as a dangerous child molester in need of serious rehabilitation”? Leaving aside the question of whether Paige was a “certified cheer coach,” what did the younger girl’s mother say in that victim impact statement, and why did the judge ask Paige’s mother to read it aloud? Why, if the girls were “two peers,” were these people — the district attorney, the judge, the younger girl’s mother — so determined to portray Paige as “an older predatory lesbian in a position of power who exploited a young girl in her care”?

Something is wrong with this story, I say — there are facts missing, facts which must explain what otherwise seems inexplicable.

Perhaps there are those who will insist (without proof) that this is explained by homophobia, plain and simple. OK, maybe so. On the other hand, when people were acting completely astonished by the Kaitlyn Hunt prosecution, I pointed out the aggravating circumstances, which seemed to demystify matters a good bit.

There is something going on here, however, that goes beyond the unexplained difference between how Kristin Ireland and Paige Johnson’s mom see this (“two peers . . . who had feelings for one another”) and the “predatory lesbian” view of the prosecution. What really must be explained are the apparent trends, the patterns, whereby girls who were allegedly hitherto heterosexual mysteriously develop lesbian desires at age 18, desires that for some reason are focused on girls so much younger than themselves. And why are the mothers of these girls so blithely approving (or blissfully ignorant) of the types of “relationships” their daughters are pursuing?

Is there some kind of cultural script involved here? Are these girls getting cues from movies or TV shows or the school curriculum? Is there some new rite of passage developing, some teen fad? Is lesbianism to this decade what disco was to the ’70s? Are today’s parents too busy to bother paying attention to what their kids are involved in?

Is this really the new “high school romance”? (Batteries not included.)

Hey, it’s just “relationships,” right?

 

 


59 comments

  1. You’re darn right the Paige Johnson case gives me the creeps! I would love to know just how much they ‘dated’. Do kids even date today, or do they go directly to the restroom stall, and then to bed at one of the parents’ homes? My problem with this scenario is that less than half the kids in school today are doing sexually active. Of those something like 1 in 5 will be sexually abused by the time they are 18. Those are included in that 49% or so statistic. Why do parents allow their kids to get away with this sort of thing?

    The past few days, I’ve been emailing back and forth with a friend who has finally become a first time parent. We’ve been discussing the Kate Hunt case, and parents’ rights. Looking at both Paige Johnson and Kate Hunt, one of the most alarming aspects of this is the fact that their parents have no respect and regard for the wishes and rules of the other parents. It’s like the parents have taken some sort of delight in seeing the other child destroyed. If this is the case, then something is seriously going on in that home life.

    I feel just as sorry for the older girls as I do the younger ones. In a way, I have nothing but pity for them. Their lives are basically ruined because their parents had no regard for the rights of others.

    This whole thing gives me the creeps in so many ways. I don’t know how we can even discount the notion that either girl is a pedophile. At the very least they are predators. I suspect they were also raised in a situation where their parents allowed it to happen.

    Is our society changing, or are the actions of predatory girls finally being exposed. Knowing some of the kids I’ve run across while working as a substitute teacher in high school, I’m almost inclined to think it is the latter.

    Great post, BTW.

    SJR
    The Pink Flamingo

  2. I think you’re onto something, Mr. McCain. The semantics of “love” and “relationships”, etc. is a problem in an amoral, relativistic society. I love ice cream..I love baseball..I love sodomy…I love the anonymous hookup with five guys in a club bathroom full of vomit.
    These clueless mothers are more of the same, The “kind of mother I am” says Hunt the dope is a philosophical empty valueless posture unable to impart anything to her wretched daughters but empty sex. Pity the fool.

  4. Everything you say resonates. What bugs me, as a journalist, is that people can encounter stories like this that just don’t make sense — something’s missing, something doesn’t add up — without experiencing a bullshit detector alert.

    I mean, c’mon: What was in that victim impact statement from the younger girl’s mother — or what are the details of this “relationship” — that turned the judge and the prosecutor so strongly against Paige Johnson? There’s something missing from this story, something Paige’s mother doesn’t want us to know, which must explain this.

    Yet Kristin Ireland isn’t even curious about this? How do people get through life with such defective bullshit detectors?

  5. The worst of it, (profanity deleted) is that I like the heeby-jeebie ‘think’ for part of a book title. Now I must give you, of all people, credit for that. Shut up and stop laughing. Let’s just declare ourselves frenemies and deal with it.

    This whole thing bugs the heck out of me, and not just the frenemy part. What is so profoundly wrong with people that they can’t see past what they want to see, and comprehend that there is a basic code of right and wrong. Am I missing something or is living at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level in New Mexico finally frying my brain?

    I’ve always been more or less a feminist. If women are to be equal in everything (with the exception of Major League Baseball) then women must be expected to play by the same rules, good or ill. If an 18 yr old male can’t get away with this with a 14 yr old girl, then why should women get a pass. I would hope the same would hold true with an 18 yr old male and a 14 yr old male. A child is a child.

    When adults don’t want to deal with this, in order to promote an agenda there’s something profoundly wrong. What concerns me is the fact that it appears many of the people supporting Kate Hunt were in the same situation when they were teens.

    SJR

  7. Hi all,

    Over at the Psychology Today site, there is a disguised “NAMBLA-like” article based on the Kaitlyn case trying to sabotage age-of-consent laws.

    (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dollars-and-sex/201305/is-kaitlyn-hunts-girlfriend-too-young-consent-sex/)

    In one of the comments, someone posted that there is an “actual case report that was attached to the plea offer” in the Kaitlyn case.

    I can’t find the link to this case report – does anyone know where it is?

    Thanks.

  8. “Is there some kind of cultural script involved here? Are these girls getting cues from movies or TV shows or the school curriculum? Is there some new rite of passage developing, some teen fad?”

    How about four decades of liberals shouting from the top of their lungs that homosexuality is normal, in-born (no choices involved), and just a simple variation of sexuality?

    This ties in to the LUG “phenomenon” – why does it only happen to girls that grow up being bombarded with messages that homosexuality is normal? In cultures where kids are correctly told that homosexuality is a problem, there is no LUG “epidemic.” How difficult is it to see that if you condition kids to accept something as normal, they quite immediately start adopting those behaviors for themselves and think it’s all “natural”?

    “study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 13,500 responses, almost 10 percent of women ages 22 to 44 with a bachelor’s degree said they had had a same-sex experience, compared with 15 percent of those with no high school diploma. Women
    with a high school diploma or some college, but no degree, fell in between.”

    Americans need to face that LGBTs are much more than 1% of the population, and this study is just one and doesn’t even cover all ages. In liberal environments, you can up the percentage to much higher levels, maybe 30% of women. And this doesn’t even include women who have same-sex attractions and feelings and don’t act on them in regard to the specific sex acts queried. But it wasn’t like this in the past.

    American society is being sexually deformed right before everyone’s eyes. The more it gets perverted, the more Americans will claim whatever sexual perversion is adopted by the majority, like bisexuality or homosexuality, promiscuity, degradation of sex through porn, targeting kids for sex, etc. is “normal” and “good” and “natural.”

  12. “If no law should be contingent on calendar dates, then all age-of-consent laws should be repealed.”

    —

    If there is no difference between children and adults, why shouldn’t violent juvenile offenders be tried as adults, and why shouldn’t their criminal record follow them for the rest of their life? As a show of good faith, Kaitlyn Hunt should demand that her own criminal records, accounting for every illegal act she ever committed as a juvenile, be unsealed.

    Or is she not the saint that she portrays herself as?

    It seems that she wants to enjoy the freedoms of an adult, but have the responsibilities of a child.

  13. Sexualization of children is part of the “queer” agenda, according to Kevin Dujan at hillbuzz.org. It is gay pride month and Kevin is answeing any question regarding LGBT. He distinguishes the queer agenda grom other LGBT groups; namely, their goal is to destroy all traditional lynchpins of American society.

    Kevin Jennings, Obama’s former safe schools czar was a guidance counselor at a school and failed to report sex between a minor boy and a 40 year old man. Someone in a previous post linked to materials that he uses in schools, which in my view encourage rebellion towards and distrust of parents in children. The materials use terms like “adultism” and “ageism” to brainwash kids into thinking that they are just as capable as adults to make ADULT decisions.

    Finally, what is evident in both of these and many other cases is the lack of adult supervision. What happened to parents vetting their childrens’ friends?

    On another note, when one reads the news reports of Paige and the other adult who were arrested, both of those women lived at the SAME address at the time they were having sex with a 14 year old.

  14. A national expert on the sexual abuse of children in schools is Carol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University.

  15. And as for cr*p detectors, phrases like this set mine off: “She [Paige] spent a lot of time with her best friend who was 16 and also on the
    cheer team…. Paige and the friend began flirting with each other over
    Skype but never engaged in any kind of physical relationship.”

    “Flirting.” What does that mean to these people? I mean, if statutory rape and school bathroom sex is “dating” and a “romance,” does flirting over the internet mean naked pictures of a minor?

  16. Another word that they deliberately and constantly misuse to justify sexual abuse is “peer.” This is what the dictionary says: 1. a person of the same legal status: a jury of one’s peers. 2. a person who is equal to another in abilities, qualifications, age, background, and social status. Clearly, Paige and Kaitlyn’s victims are NOT their “peers.”

  17. Indeed, there is something Orwellian about the way the meanings of words are being degraded here.

    “u r so hot lol!!”

    That’s flirting?

  18. Of course, the author is a Ph.D. from Vancouver — another Canadian!

    When are Americans finally going to wake up to the reality of the Canadian menace?

  19. You hit it on the head with two points: ‘see what they want to see’ and ‘promote an agenda’. People can rationalize anything to get what they want without feeling guilty about it.

  21. The similarities between the cases are striking. My first thought was was some sort of perverse hazing ritual.

  22. You’re spot on regarding disregard for the wishes of the vicitm’s parents. Aside from societies rush to sexualize children, there is also the rush to “liberate” them from parental control. This takes the form of “parenting by a committee of worthies,” i.e. anybody with an opinion other than the parents who brought the child into the world. After all, “it takes a village,” don’t you know.
    BTW, I told my son when he started dating, “her father is in charge, not you and certainly not his daughter. You do what he tells you, and if I find out you behaved otherwise, there will be hell to pay.” So far, it’s worked out nicely.

  23. It is sickening that people will just believe one side without looking for the other. When I heard Kate Hunt story my bullshit alarm went off and I knew I needed more. It’s irresponsible for people to assume that there is no victim without hearing from the victim. It only victimizes the victim again.

  24. Hi Mm,

    “What happened to parents vetting their childrens’ friends?

    I think that’s been gone for liberal parents for about two generations – at least one. Many liberal parents are “pushing” their kids to have sex, by promoting it directly or indirectly. Along with porn, or the idea that there is nothing wrong with porn, even if they may not push it on their teenagers. They push the idea, because they are consumers of porn.

    The question isn’t even about vetting their children’s friends, I think. The question is what happened to parents knowing who their kids are with and what they are doing.

    What I think is quite stunning though is the degree of normalization of homosexuality that we have today. These kids know nothing other than hearing that homosexuality is normal 24/7. They have no other experience. The only concept for homosexuality is the “gay is OK” one. They also do not know what it is to go through high school where kids are mostly dating in the old-fashioned sense. And that used to be the older teens only.

    And we all know what peer pressure does to kids and the desire to be like “everybody” else or like the pop stars or the “cool and older” kids.

  25. Things have gotten so deformed that at Boston College, a professor had the idea to offer:

    a ONE-CREDIT SEMINAR ON DATING, and that effort has now turned into a campaign to roll back some of the ill effects of hookup culture and reimagine the possibility of asking someone out for dinner and conversation.
    Cronin requires her students to ask someone out and then spend several hours talking, rather than going to a movie or scheduling the date so late that it turns into just another hookup.*

    …………………

    You see?! A COLLEGE COURSE ON HOW TO DATE (as opposed to having loveless sex all over the place)! Because these kids’ minds have been so corrupted and perverted by liberal culture they don’t know how to date. Their parents certainly didn’t instill in them the healthy values and attitudes they need to go through life and navigate relationships.

    So now they need to take a course- a remedial course!

    Now, I’m all in favor of the course given society’s current state – I mean, what are you going to do? But it goes to show how people who say “sexuality is nobody’s business” are the most stupid and irresponsible people on the planet. It’s the cornerstone of society, because it’s inseparable from relationships.

    *more on hookup culture here:

    http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/06/07/friendship-and-hooking-up-in-college/

  26. I am not surprised by comment deletion. Many gay activists do not want a debate, they are fighting a war with an end game. That is fine, to a point. But this is not an issue the rest of us are going to concede.

  27. “sort of perverse hazing ritual”

    Indeed, you have to wonder if there wasn’t some kind of initiation rite aspect to these incidents. Thinking back to my own youth, I remember hearing about frat guys competing for “points” in terms of sexual conquests, stories that at the time I discounted as probably mythical. But who knows? Perhaps this sexual-competition ethos — the macho notch-on-the-bedpost attitude — has replicated itself on the other side of the War of the Sexes.

    Equality! Progress!

    And anyone who criticizes this is a “hater”!

  28. I said if a few weeks ago but maybe not here. If “Li’l Miss Kate” had been taking the CHILD to the movies and buying her popcorn and even reading poetry to her, none of this would have happened. But that is NOT what “Li’l Miss Kate” was doing. Not by a long shot.

    If you commit a felony, you have no right to complain when you are charged with a felony. And raping a child is a felony in the civilized world.

    If “Li’l Miss Kate” wants to move to uncivilized parts of the world to avoid civilized laws, I’m okay with that. But she had better no complain what they do to her once she gets there…

  29. She simply is unwilling to face the wrath of the new morality police.

    Who, given their ability and willingness to ruin your life, are infinitely worse than the very people they perpetually rail against – aka the old morality police.

    Will to power being, at heart, all about power. And what is power if it is not expressed?

  31. Always remember, there’s a considerable advantage to being a member of an Official Government Victim Group…. especially one that can’t really be checked. Black is obvious; even “Native American” could have been resolved with a DNA check. Claiming you’re gay is damn near impossible to disprove precisely because it hasn’t been proven to have a consistent genetic marker; if you get asked about actual experience, you were just raised by homophobes and were / still are deep in the closet. Being lesbian is even easier because “proving it” doesn’t have to involve shoving things into orifices that weren’t designed for such activity.

    Now I’m sure there are people (like Bill Quick) who will jump in and claim there aren’t any advantages. Bull. You can get preferential treatment in college admissions, jobs (in certain fields / parts of the country such as Bill’s own San Fran); heck, there were proposals to extend CRA home loan preferences to gays. Now we’re looking at criminal code exemptions, de facto if not de jure (yet).

    And so it begins…

  32. Dr. Shakeshaft on female teacher predators: “What . . they say is that they didn’t really see this as a child. And they were attracted to the person and hey felt I should follow up on this attraction and that this was a romantic issue and that they didn’t really feel they were stepping over any lines because, after all, he was a man and he was an older youth.

    And what we see there is emotional immaturity, is the notion that they haven’t moved out of wherever they were stuck when they were 17. And we often find that women teachers are reliving and recreating their high school years. They’re becoming popular when they weren’t. They’re becoming assertive when they weren’t. They’re becoming powerful and in charge when they weren’t.” http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/teacherspet/shakeshaft.html

    Kate Hunt arrest affidavit: when asked if she knew it was wrong to have sex with the victim, Kate said she didn’t really think about it, that the victim “acted older.” http://www.scribd.com/doc/142642135/Kaitlyn-Hunt-Redacted-Affidavit-Redacted

  33. The piece you quoted about the reading of the victim impact statement gave me a different impression of what was going on. I took it that the judge had Paige read the letter aloud, and I suspect that was deliberate. The judge was watching to see Paige’s reaction to the description of how her behavior affected the victim. What I suspect is missing might be that Paige showed no remorse or understanding of what she was reading. Judges and prosecutors tend to take it personally when the accused insists they have the “right” to do something illegal because they see themselves as “special”, “important” or otherwise “elite”.

  35. About “defective bullshit detectors” – the first thing an abuser does is anything possible that confuses the victim and/or dismantles any “bullshit detector” they have. That’s part of how abuse happens. The victim is then vulnerable to further abuse because they don’t make “normal distinctions”.

    Regrettably, I think much of our current culture ends up in the same place. People don’t detect much because of the blinders being busily installed in public education and other public interactions. For all intents and purposes, our “politically correct” culture insists on treating everyone as victims who must be prevented from detecting anything “unapproved” or “wrong”. “Bullshit detectors” are not “politically correct”.

  36. This is another excellent point. With these examples, we see once again how much the concept that “sexual attraction is fixed before birth and unchangeable” is a fraud. The human mind in respect to sexuality and relationships is extremely
    complex and can never be reduced to “sexual attraction” only – especially not of the benign kind. There is no such thing as an independent, isolated part of the brain that will have any kind of sexual attraction that is unrelated to anything else
    that happens in the brain, or to that person’s entire psychology; or unrelated to their their entire personal history and their development
    history, their cultural and ideological conditioning, etc.
    Claiming that sexual attraction happens out of the blue in the brain and then determines every other aspect of the social and psychological
    functioning of a human being is simply absurd. It is exactly the opposite: a person’s entire
    psychological/emotional/cultural/ideological structure will determine specifically what kinds of sexual attractions are produced in their
    minds.
    If these women teachers had had a different personal trajectory regarding relationships, they would not have felt this particular sexual/emotional attraction to their young students. The same is true for “sexual orientation.”

  37. A trend not often discussed is the marginalization of parents’ roles in education. Public school districts do their darndest to keep parents uninformed about what’s going on the classrooms. When the bad things are discovered, the parents are painted as “Christianist” kooks.
    Homeschooling is of course an answer. The other is finding a decent parochial school which supports the parents’ values and not only allows, but encourages parental involvement in all aspects of the curriculum and extracurricular activities.
    The above is the reason the NEA is so strongly opposed to homeschooling and parochial education. It is a matter of time, if things continue down the path they’re on now, where such things will be forbidden.

  38. This is the first time I’ve seen the cultural left on the defensive. Kinda liking it.

  39. Once again we see that, to coin a phrase, “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you can’t be a pervert.”

  40. “In court things went from bad to worse. Because Paige had accepted a plea she was not given the opportunity to tell her side of the story.”

    Most probably a lie. Defendants are granted allocution, i.e. a statement before sentencing. It is, inter alia, a means by which the defendant can explain what happened and ask for leniency. Any defense attorney would know that.

  42. Yes, Annika is the girlfriend with whom Paige apparently shared her young conquest.

    Paige’s mother’s account (repeated without question by our Canadian airhead) contends her probation was violated simply because of a verbal argument in the street. Sorry, it doesn’t pass the smell test. Paige notified her PO of her violation only because someone else was going to notify them. If she wasn’t permitted to have even incidental contact with a person other than the victim, there was a good reason for it which hasn’t been disclosed.

  43. There is a difference, though. When it’s a unionized government employee molesting a child, you shouldn’t be at all concerned.

    The media only highlights the most unusual and outrageous cases, the rest are just background noise in “your public schools.”

  44. What she MEANT was that Paige was no longer able to claim innocence of the charges to which she pled guilty. If you refuse to allocute and admit the crime, most judges won’t accept a plea deal, it’s part and parcel of the reduced sentence to own up.

    There is the possibility of entering a guilty plea without an admission of guilt under Alford v North Carolina, but the prosecutor doesn’t have to offer leniency for that.

  45. That “someone” is I…

    I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about GLSEN and its insidious agenda for some years now. It’s significant because this organization has access to children in school “under the radar”, so to speak, of their parents, and they directly challenge the legal notion of age of consent in no uncertain terms – and it’s creepy and Orwellian!

    Being technologically enfeebled by the tablet computer I’m using now, which I can’t seem to make post the direct link to the document Mn mentions, I’ll give directions in text:

    glsen.org > TOOLS & TIPS > STUDENTS > THE GLSEN JUMP-START GUIDES FOR GAY-STRAIGHT ALLIANCES – then click the GLSEN Jump-Start Guide, Part 6 (a PDF file, available in Color or B&W!). This is what Mn is talking about…

    Thanks for spreading the word, Mn!

    FAN

  46. If you talk to prison inmates, you will find most of them have a story which explains or justifies their crimes – if they don’t just insist they are completely innocent. And yet, there they sit in prison. Listening to only their side, one would think the justice system is merely an instrument of oppression.

    But when a jury of their peers heard the whole story, they were each convicted. Through Kristin Ireland, we are not getting the prosecutor’s presentation or the impact on the victim. Paige Johnson made a plea deal for a lesser sentence because she KNEW she would be convicted of the some two dozen charges against her and face 20 years in prison.

    THEN she refused to abide by the conditions of her parole, and was sent back to jail.

    Those are the facts which are not in dispute, no matter how Ireland and Johnson’s mother choose to sugar coat them.

  49. In my state, allocution is allowed after a plea or finding of guilt following a jury trial. In the plea context, it would be an explanation of “teenaged love” or some silliness designed to get a more lenient sentence, probation or whatever. Also, a defendant is allowed to contest assertions or innacuracies in pre-sentence investigations.
    But you are correct. If a person maintains innocence during allocution the plea guilty won’t be accepted. My guess is that Paige minimized the victim impact statement, or failed to show remorse which pissed the judge off. Given Mom’s story, she probably tried to blame the victim or victim’s parents. Another similarity to the Kate case, it would appear.

  50. Evidently, the probation violation was having contact with a 16 year old on her cheerleading team. (Mom justifies this because the age of consent in PA is 16!?!) If she’s not a predator, then she’s damn stupid and should be in prison for that.

Comments are closed.