A 21 year old Georgia woman married a 14 year old boy five weeks after giving birth to the boy's child. According to Georgia law, it's perfectly legal for them to get married, despite the boy's age, because they're parents. However, also according to Georgia law, it was illegal for them to have sex prior to wedlock, so now the woman is in jail.

Yeah it's a paradox. It's legal for you to get married because you've made a baby together, but it was illegal for you to make that baby in the first place.

Lots of people think that the law is some sort of cut and dried equation. If you have a set of facts, a crime, and a set of laws, you should always end up with the same verdict and the same punishment. (Unless you hire a really expensive lawyer, in which case you'll escape punishment no matter how heinous the crime.)

It doesn't work that way people. There are so many laws on the books that every one of us is a criminal. The government figures if we're all criminals, we're easier to control, because they can always get you for some reason. There are so many contradictory laws on the books that it doesn't matter which way you jump, you're still guilty.

It's all about power and control.

This is just such a case. The law forbidding sexual intercourse is there to control young people's sexual behavior. Young people have been having sex for thousands and thousands of years, and there's no reason to believe that they're going to stop now. The law is there to control people's behavior, to mold them into the cogs of society. To make them uniform. To get them used to being obedient so that they don't question the social order as they mature.

The law allowing marriage is there so that if young people break the first law, the male half of the equation will have a chance to "do the right thing." To marry the girl so they can both become acceptable cogs of society. To be uniform. To help create a stable social order. It provides an "out", a way to escape the punishment of the first law in a socially acceptable manner.

Someone forgot to explain this to District Attorney Richard Read, who said that their marriage doesn't make any previous sexual encounters legal. No Dick, it doesn't, that's not the point. The point is control. To force them into marriage so that the Beast that is Society is appeased. They've done what they needed to do to make ammends, they've performed their act of penance for society, and you BLEW IT by punishing them anyhow. You've forced people to examine the law, to question it, to wonder why these laws exist.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," said the Wizard of Oz.

Dick, listen to the Wizard. Learn from him. If you keep pulling stunts like this, you'll muck up the works. You can only wield that kind of power and control as long as people aren't paying attention.

Check it out yourself

oarsman@pigdog.org