Fox News guest: Seducing 14-year-olds may not have been that unusual 40 years ago

it wasn't too unusual for a 30 year old man to court and marry a 15 year old.

1970? I don't think so. Maybe 1870.

The age of consent in the U.S. averaged from 10 to 12. My great grandmother was brought over from the old country at 14 to marry a man in his 30's. But after the 1920's it rose to around 16 and increased from there as time when by.

See my post 29 below

Your accusations will be justified.

19 years old. I went to an event (concert) at my university and ran into some friends... and they introduced me to some "women" that were attending as well... and after drinking a few shots (yeah, I was underage) I became friendly with one of the "women" and we snuggled under a blanket on the grass at the outdoor event. We started kissing and, well, fooling around... and I found out from talking to her that she and her friends were actually from a local high school and she was 16... and even though I was a "randy" young guy and little drunk I distinctly remember feeling "icky" and a bit worried that I was with an underage girl who also was drinking (I didn't give her the alcohol) and I got out the situation as quickly as possible (making sure she had a sober friend to drive her home).

So no... it was not acceptable for a 19-year-old to hit on or be with a 17-year-old or younger person. Not this year, not last year, not 5 years ago... and not 40 years ago.

Should I have known that she was 16... yeah, maybe... but everyone else there was from my university so I just assumed.

At least nothing serious happened... other than her drinking alcohol with me present (and drinking too).

Stupid... yup. At least I wasn't 34 years old trolling for high school girls at the mall.

Creepy then, creepy now...

https://nypost.com/2014/04/02/meet-the-older-men-looking-to-score-during-spring-break/

Drew Stevens and David Sheaf are standing in the sand, tossing a football back and forth as the hot Fort Lauderdale sun beams down on their naked torsos. All around, 19-year-old girls form gossipy groups, their burns nearly as neon as their DayGlo pink bikinis. Stevens and Sheaf admire the eye candy. It’s a bit of downtime for the pals who partied the night before with “some college girls from Ohio we met out here on the beach,” says Sheaf.

A pretty typical day in the life of a spring breaker — other than the fact that these two dudes have been too old for spring break for nearly a decade.

* * *
The Fort Lauderdale high school student says she and her college-age sister have been hit on mercilessly by spring vultures, including a 30-year-old prancing around in his outdated college paraphernalia.

“It’s perverted,” says Strum. “If you’re hitting on a junior in high school and you’re a 28-year-old, you need to re-evaluate something,” she says.”

This isn't a recent thing.

And the idea of going after a 16 or 18 year old girl wouldn't have occurred to me -- never mind 14 or younger.

And should be disqualifying, especially for an overtly sanctimonious candidate.

It might not have been unusual for pervy 30-year-old Repubicans to molest 14-year-old girls, but my father would have knocked him loopy if one had accosted me at the mall.

for a good long stretch, if he had. This wasn't some auto mechanic or electrical engineer or supermarket manager that was lurking around the mall. This was an attorney in the DA's office, with connections in all the right places. I think that is the major reason Moore never was knocked loopy by someone's father or uncle or brother or cousin.

He was that sort of guy.

I was a teenage girl in Alabama (not Gadsden) at the same time as this was going on. It's ridiculous to imply that a man that age hitting on high school girls was normal, it absolutely was not.

What was normal was that women and girls were routinely blamed for being sexually assaulted, and were shamed for it. If they reported it, it was in the papers and everyone talked about them, and what they were wearing, and they might have said and done, and what they should have done differently, and often about how they deserved it. This would all be much worse if the perpetrator was someone politically connected like Moore, if the report ever went anywhere - of course his friends in the police department and the DA's office would do everything they could to bury it. I understand perfectly why those women kept their mouths shut for so long.

And there still isn't due process for them. You can go to the police with a handwritten letter from your rapist where he talks about how you cried the last time you "had sex", and a poem he wrote about "Raping 'Your Name'" and still not get the police to take you seriously, according to Melissa McEwan.

to warn and protect each other.

Obviously, Moore knew how to find vulnerable girls who were needy and probably flattered by the attention at first. And he picked his targets carefully. I am certain as you say they had a difficult time coming forward after he molested them. I probably would not have told my dad because I would have been afraid that he would accuse me of encouraging him or as you say that he would cause a huge ruckus and get arrested as you suggest. So in that respect, Moore's behavior would go unreported to adults.

Clearly, the position of power Moore enjoyed did insulate him from his crimes. What I don't get is how the men in the community who pride themselves on defending Southern womanhood (at least I always thought this was the case) wouldn't have leaned on him privately. If cops were aware, one would think other upstanding citizens also knew.

In the middle school I attended, I recall boys mentioning a man in our community that they all avoided for similar reasons. The kids certainly know. To bad none felt they could trust adults to protect them.

Since you grew up there, did you ever hear warnings about Moore?

The thing is, most of the stuff we're heard that Moore is supposed to have done is really creepy, but not criminal. The age of consent was 16 for consensual sex with an adult of any age. Flirting with and "dating" teenage girls of any age wasn't and isn't illegal in and of itself. So, the girls would warn each other about him, and mall security would keep an eye on him, and some people might talk, but they really didn't have anything solid with which to confront him. A few of the women describe criminal sexual assault, but he denies that and his supporters believe him, and trash the women. They would have believed him then, too.

But he does seem to have stopped for the most part, at least locally. That's interesting, so what happened? Now, I'm speculating. Some of the men in the community may have finally had some seriously talks with him privately. He's not a fool. After he married, and the older he got, and the higher offices he aspired toward, the more damaging such behavior could potentially be, even that which wasn't criminal. Maybe his very young looking wife was enough to satisfy him for a long time, or maybe he went to Atlanta or Nashville or someplace else where he wasn't known to go with teenage or teenage-looking prostitutes, or maybe even he just learned to control himself better most of the time. Who knows?

That was 50 or more years ago.

It was 60 years ago, in 1957. As awful as it seems now, it wasn't all that unusual in small town Louisiana. The scandal was both because of her age and the fact that she was his first cousin, once removed (his first cousin's daughter). I had a friend who grew up there in the 60s and 70s and she said if you weren't married with a baby in your arms by the time you were 16, you were considered an old maid. I had another friend from Arkansas who married at 14.

Nevertheless, the youngest of Moore's victims was 14 in 1979. At that time the age of consent in Alabama was 16.

Republicans will not justify in one way or another...nothing if it means keeping the control they have in congress. There are no boundaries. Not long ago pedophiles who showed up at a house only to be greeted by Chris Hanson and a TV camera is now very close to becoming a senator in the Republican Party.

How come the Gadsden Mall wanted their security guards to keep an eye out for Creepy Moore?

it was already creepy, but if you go back much further, it was common for older men to marry younger women.

I do a lot of genealogy work, and it involves my French-Canadian ancestors. I routinely see situations where a man has lost his wife while she was giving birth, and then he marries the next widow in the village. He needs a caretaker for his children, she needs an income for hers.

I even came across a case where a 70 year old man married a 35 year old woman, and she had his child about a year later. He died at age 75, but still, it was not against the norms of the society at the time. I would imagine that it stayed that way in rural communities that were not sending their children for higher education (this could include high school) and watching those children get jobs in a city.

Remember, cousin marriage (both second cousin, and first cousin, in the one-half of the states that allow it!) is/was more popular in small rural communities, too. The automobile made it icky to marry someone with the same surname, it wasn't the Bible.

But she lied when they filed their intention and told the town clerk she was 18. Her husband wasn't in his 30's, either. No one else in my family tree married younger than 17, and most of the women were past 20. I understand it was more common for girls to marry very young in the South. All of my people were in New England and Canada.

In 1764 an ancestor of mine remarried at age 68 to a woman about 32ish and had two children with her before he died, when the younger of the two (also my ancestor) was six weeks old. She hand been widowed with three young daughters. His older children, that he had with his first wife, were in their 40s. Even so, she was a grown woman. This is very different than a 30 some year old man chasing 14 year old girls in 1978.

I saw on "This Week" excepts from a Frank Luntz focus group, where Luntz is actually challenging the group about Roy Moore's behavior, and while the comments chosen may not have reflected the sense of the group, one of them was, "Maybe he's been forgiven after all this time," or words to that effect, and the other was pretty creepy, along the lines of "Girls married early in those days, and the parents of a fourteen-year old would have been pretty happy to have an assistant D.A. hitting on their daughter."

That last comment was chosen to shock the audience into realizing the mentality of a Roy Moore voter, but I would have to say that the gist of it has some merit. If you've got a rural community where your teenage daughter is going to find a husband, would you rather have her marry another failing farmer's son, or Goober at the filling station, versus someone who has a good job in town, that would be able to support her and your grandchildren? That's the calculations people make in hardscrabble places.

I was a teenage girl in Alabama (not Gadsden) at the same time this was going on. Moore's behavior was not normal. There's a reason he didn't pick up girls at church and instead lurked around the mall to pick up girls who worked there. It is because the girls' parents weren't likely to be at the mall.

It simply has to apply to the minds of voters in rural areas who generalize their experience to other areas of the state. And yes, I find it creepy to the max, but I've spent most of my life living in suburban areas. I did spend nearly fifteen years in a rural area on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, even though I lived in the incorporated cities of that region, and I saw a lot of "us-vs-them" mentality when it came to country folks and city people. There were a lot of folks wary of me because I came from a suburb of Seattle before moving to a timber town with a plywood mill.

That goes against the idea that what he did would have been acceptable to them.

His behavior was undeniably creepy, but anyone who would vote for him on Tuesday has to do some mental gymnastics to allow themselves to do so. I was just trying to describe what passes for a thought process in the minds of such voters.

It wasn't.

It wasn’t done by creepy 30 year old men acting out their sick fetish. The Republicans keep saying “people got married young back then!” Well, yeah - usually to other young people.

Dating a 14 year old was wrong then unless you were under 18.

No, it was sick 40 years ago, it is sick now, and they know it. How these lying perverts sleep at night is beyond me. Dollar signs is all they see. They want PedoRoy in there to satisfy the christofascists and to have another vote for the deplorable fleecing of the middle and working classes.

Earlier this year I attended my wifes 40 year high school anniversary in rural arkansas. It was a boring evening until i started thinking about what I was hearing. Many couples were discussing great grandchildren. Do the math, that means these women were having kids in their early to mid teens in the 1970`s

Afterwards I asked the wife whats the deal. Much to my surprise she explained many of her friends were married at 15 and started having kids. This was not an anomaly and it appears almost all were still married. The spouses appeared to be a bit older which she confirmed to be 5 to 7 years.

So that was Arkansas in the 1970's I would expect this was not limited to that state.

A lot of girls I went to school with in Alabama got pregnant and got married, too, but their husbands weren't twice their age.

According to the wife, who graduated high school in 77, she recalls no girls who became pregnant before they got married. They became pregnant within a year after getting married.

Regarding ages, she recalls the husbands were 21 to 25 and the youngest girl she recalls was 13. From those I met at the reunion, they were still married.

Also just discovered my mother in law was married the day after her 16th birthday when my father-in-law was 25.

I never knew.

If we had known that a in his 30's was trying to hit on cheerleaders or girls on the volleyball team (like my girlfriend at the time) when they were freshman or sophomores in high school we would have thought it very strange.

Parents would have been outraged and the cops would have been looking to chase that guy away from the schools.

She's talking like it was the 1870's not the 1970's.

They can try to explain it away that it was along time ago, but it was wrong the the 70's. No man I knew thought it was OK to look at a 14 year old as a grown woman...and in 1979, I remember that my friends and myself all looked liked kids, even my friend who was way more developed than the rest of us, still looked like a girl, not an adult.

So again, NO!

...Living Confederate Widow Tells All. A huge and thoroughly boring book, IMO. When I was done with it, I threw it in the trash, even tho it was a hardback. Didn't want to subject anyone else to the agony of it by giving it away.

I seldom give up on a book. I should have on this one.

The main character was married a 15, to a retired confederate soldier who was 50.

...is not the same as vigorously defending Roy Moore for fucking children.

would have been a total creep. A college freshman dating a high school senior was the extent of what was acceptable. For college sophmores, high schoolers were off limits

And it's true. One year out of high school and dating a senior was right on the edge.

They're full of shit.

40 years ago was 1977, not 1677. Jerry Lee Lewis was ostracized for marrying his 13 year old cousin. (Maybe it was the cousin thing and not the age, I don't know) in the 1950's.

Each and every Roy Moore supporter if they would leave him alone with their own young teen daughter. I am so sick of our journalist letting people like Conway, Kaye ivy and these stupid women who support this man spew their shit without being asked this question. How low will these people drag our country down before one of these monsters say enough. People in prison have more morals than these people.

for what he was -- sick.

One of my teachers married a girl in my class --- but quite some time, years after she was in high school.

I was unaware of any girls my age dating men in their 30s. Maybe it happened in some circles, but not in mine.

As it is now? Why do we let them get away with saying this shit?

And yes, it meant the same back then as it does today.