levite

16 is realism. I teach high school, and I'd guess that easily two thirds of my 16-year old students are sexually active. Many have boyfriends or girlfriends a couple years older than they are. A number have boyfriends or girlfriends a couple years younger. Teenagers have sex, and to make it illegal just because some of us would feel more comfortable if they would wait is not, IMO, enough reason. I don't know if-- in the abstract-- I feel comfortable with the notion of middle-aged adults sleeping with 16-year-olds, but I question how pervasive that is, or is likely to be, and I question if my own discomfort is reason enough to let this be another instance of allowing the government to make rules about who gets to have sex with who.

Personally, I feel that there need to be immediate and strong arguments in order to justify that kind of government intrusion into privacy. You might have me at 12, but not 16.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)