America: Are your daughters and granddaughters worth protecting, or not?
That is a decision that Americans need to make.
Now.
We live in a time when a major national discount store routinely stocks adult-style under garments for little girls. Really little girls.
A national cosmetics firm is at work, developing a full range of cosmetics that are intended for the skin of 5-year-olds.
And we are constantly seeing stories like the one the Associated Press ran this week from Salt Lake City, where a “woman has been charged with offering her 13-year-old daughter’s virginity to a man in exchange for $10,000.
“The woman was charged Monday in Utah’s 3rd District Court with two counts of aggravated sex abuse and two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor.”
According to court documents, the “mother” is reported to have “made the offer after the man asked about oral sex with the girl.
“Police say the woman and the daughter would model lingerie for the man. The offer was discovered by the woman’s boyfriend, who found multiple text messages discussing the proposal.”
The woman isn’t being named to protect the girl.
That’s good. At least someone is concerned about her protection, even if it is strangers.
But getting back to the original question, just how much does America want to protect the rest of our girls?
Why would we not believe that a 13-year-old is deserving of protection? Or a 14-year-old, 15-year-old, 16-year-old and so on? You get the picture.
In the classic film, “Operation Petticoat,” which came out in 1959, America was still so naive that the movie could include the quote: “When a girl is under 21, she’s protected by law. When she’s over 65, she’s protected by nature. Anywhere in between, she’s fair game.”
And that was talking about romance, not legalized rape.
Without doing a lot of digging into 1959, it’s tough to know whether it was really different or not, but most of us who were alive them would undoubtedly suggest that the culture was different, that childhood — that time from birth to age 21 — was much more protected than it is today.
We have a real problem in this culture.
We have so objectified our women — young and old, single and married, mothers, daughters, whatever — that it’s perceived by many to be degrading to suggest that they are in need of societal protection.
Well, they are.
It is the shame of America that we are not insisting that we, at the very least, provide protection for ALL of our girls — females under 18 at the very least.
It’s high time for America to grow up and show some self control.
— Chuck Smith