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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (9884)	4/16/1998 4:21:00 PM
From: Thomas C. White	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

I don't completely go along with that. There are certainly various degrees of "nonviolent" crime, ranging all the way from littering to embezzling the life savings of an old lady so that she starves. In the latter case, the embezzler is not excused by the fact that he was mentally ill because he had a fixation with money and thought that he was entitled to any money he could get his hands on regardless of the means he had to use to get it. He was aware that what he was doing was criminal. A more difficult case would be presented by a man who perpetrated the same embezzlement in order to have money to get his wife an operation to save her life, but even so, the knowledge of the crime is the basic issue. In this case, we can understand better, and there may be some mitigating circumstances, but he still warrants punishment. What Mary Le Tourneau did is way over on that scale of "nonviolent" crime. Her delusion is not what is punishable. That's a lot of why she was granted probation the first time. What was punishable by prison was her calculated circumvention of the deal she made in order to continue the criminal act afterwards. "What I meant specifically, though, in regard to your first sentence, is that women all over the world abort their babies, go off and have affairs and neglect their families, or prioritize their children so low on their list of important things in their lives that the children are undeniably very damaged." Well, these are issues which face society in terms of defining what constitutes criminal behavior. Our society has favored limiting what constitutes a criminal act, and increasingly limiting this as time goes on. Not spending any time with one's children is not criminal, because no one can easily mandate where to put the dividing line. Only forms of neglect that are physically harmful (such as not feeding one's children) are considered to be neglect. Abortion is not criminal, because the Supreme Court has determined that to get an abortion is within a woman's constitutional rights. But our society has long accepted that sexual activity with someone who has not reached the age of majority is a very serious crime. The age of consent has increased over time, but this has been a basic tenet of society for several centuries. I also think you will find that much of Europe's view regarding the proper severity of penalties for pedophilia (and this is what Mary Le Tourneau engaged in, regardless of her reasons) have changed markedly after the horrific pedophile ring that killed several girls was discovered in Belgium.