This keeps popping up so I address the issue. What in heck is a teen-ager? A young adult who can get an abortion without parental consent? Birth control pills or appliances without parental consent? Or is a teen-ager a child? Sex with a child, even a consenting 17 year old, is child abuse. This petard our socieity has hoisted itself on is being played out now in Portland, Oregon, where the mayor, openly gay, lied about a relationship he began with a young man of seventeen. It turned sexual, he says, when the boy turned into a man on his 18th birthday. One measure of genius is its ability to be contradictory. What geniuses we are.

Tags: Add new tag, responsibility, sex, teenagers