Score one more for the Utah porno police. Quick, kids, hide your National Geographics, or Davis County prosecutors could slap you with a third-degree felony charge.
A 15-year-old boy has been officially charged in the nude cell phone photo swap scandal that sent half the state and the entire Utah State Legislature into a tizzy several weeks back.
Sadly, regulating the legal age of puberty seems to be just out of the state’s reach for the moment-but I guess saddling a child with a life-altering, criminal sex offense is the next-best thing. Hormone-fueled teenage exhibitionism became the distribution of child pornography practically overnight.
In what appeared to be a shocking turn of events in the eyes of state and county officials, this whole “teenagers wanting sex” phenomenon was in fact not limited to one group of students, or even one school. It seems that junior high and high school-aged kids across the valley have engaged in what Ronald Dunn, a deputy attorney in Davis County, calls “mutual…flirtatious behavior.”
Well, I’m sold. Lock them up and throw away the key. Let the rest of us get back to the business of preaching abstinence as the only available form of birth control to these impressionable and obviously curious young minds. That sure did the trick during the syphilis outbreak of 2000.
God forbid anyone could sit down with these youthful offenders to explain that their totally sweet, new Nokia with the four times optical zoom is perhaps not the appropriate mechanism with which to express their fervent sexual desires.
This unfortunate boy will carry the shame, the stigma and the inevitable legal hassle of this sex crime charge for the rest of his life or until he jumps through more legal hoops to have the conviction expunged, if that becomes an option for him. This is all because parents choose to pass their obligations off to schools, which are patrolled by the state government, which has its collective head so far up its collective ass that it couldn’t tell up from down if its life depended on it.
Deeming this child’s offense felony-worthy is not only completely over-the-top and outlandishly inappropriate, but it is an astonishing waste of time, money and effort on the part of the juvenile court system. This debacle is just one more embarrassment for our state, effectively bringing us one step closer to convincing all of America that we are indeed proud residents of the biggest, little backwater in the west.
