Religion & Law

Norm management and sex-ed licenses

By Rob Vischer

Dan Markel offers this response to my comment on his sex-ed license proposal:

Rob is right that there are definitely norm-management issues involved, but consider whether the same concerns exist regarding gambling, alcohol, and tobacco. Why do norms against abusing these exist even though their use is permitted by law? Maybe, one could respond that these three things are restricted to adults, so it's easier to manage the messages we send to minors about these things. But to my mind, that still begs the question regarding how we're able to create norms against abuse while still allowing the law to permit them for adults.

For what it's worth, I am much less troubled by the message that this license says: "go get some action," than the injustice and inefficiency of punishing purely consensual relations between mature and informed individuals.  But I should note that I'd be fine if the sex-ed license focused on the  consequences of sex so it served a bit like a "scared straight" movie.  Maybe a condition for the license would also require everyone to watch Knocked Up and Juno too...

A couple of quick follow-up comments: first, I'm not sure that norms against abusing alcohol exist among adolescents (at least among the adolescents I ran around with anyway), though I'm not sure whether the 21-as-rite-of-passage laws have anything to do with that.  Second, and this is probably a more fundamental disagreement, I'm not ready to put the same weight on the consensual nature of the 14 year-old's sexual relationship with the 34 year-old as Dan appears to be.  I believe that society has a legitimate interest in discouraging sexual activity among adolescents categorically, regardless of the answers any particular 14 year-old gives on whatever emotional maturity test the state comes up with.  I don't know how to articulate the needed standard of "maturity" when it comes to giving the state's seal of approval on the 14 year-old's readiness for sex, much less measure it.  If it amounts to "she knows the risks and willingly accepts those risks," that doesn't do much to persuade me to back away from my embrace of the more categorical approach. 

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).