Lowering age of consent sends wrong message

IT SEEMS incomprehensible to have to explain to anyone beyond their teens what’s wrong with 14- and 15-year-olds having sex. The fact that teenagers don’t understand that sex can lead to pregnancy (which may be the surest ticket there is to a dead-end life), AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and emotional trauma is a big reason that we as a society have taken the extraordinary step of making it a criminal offense.

Yet apparently our state legislators are just as lacking in good judgment as the junior high school kids we used to try to protect from themselves. While everybody was fixating on their plan to execute repeat child molesters, the Legislature made it legal for 14- and 15-year-olds to have sex with anyone younger than 19. Lawmakers also decided to let at least some if not all adults argue in court that they didn’t realize the person they had sex with was too young to do so legally (a provision Attorney General Henry McMaster believes is unconstitutional). And Gov. Mark Sanford, busy trying to get pro-education Republicans kicked out of the House, signed the changes into law without a peep.

The lower age of consent probably won’t result in a big drop in criminal prosecutions, because sending teenagers to prison never was the point of the law. The point was for the state to back up parents by sending the most powerful message it can that it is not acceptable for kids to have sex. You’d think that at least a few of our lawmakers, who love to give speeches about protecting the family, would have objected to the decision to abandon parents in their struggle to combat a society that increasingly tells kids anything goes.

And you can be sure that while kids may be oblivious to most laws, many of them are completely aware of the age at which it is no longer a crime to have sex.

Supporters say the change was necessary to prevent teens from being consigned to the state’s sex offender registry for life just because they got carried away in the backseat. Frankly, that sounds like an argument you’d get from ... a 14-year-old.

Of course it’s ridiculous to brand a teenager permanently as a sex offender over consensual sex. But the solution to that problem isn’t to invite teens to have sex; it’s to change the law so that people convicted in such cases don’t have to register as sex offenders.

Some legislators say they didn’t realize the House had added the age-of-consent and mistake-of-age provisions to the death penalty bill in the final four days of the legislative session. But that doesn’t reduce the outrage: Legislators have as much responsibility to know what they’re voting on as grown men used to have to know how old the little girl they’re having sex with is.

It’s not like lawmakers don’t know better. Time after time they have passed outrageous laws — from legalizing video gambling and bestiality to removing all the restrictions from what was supposed to be a targeted state retirement incentive — without realizing it. And time after time they have vowed to pay at least a little bit of attention to what they’re doing in those hectic final days of the session, when entire bills are added as amendments to marginally related bills in an attempt to rush them into law before time runs out.

But apparently it’s too much to ask that they actually do this. So we must settle for asking that when they return to work in January they fix this mess they’ve made. The last thing we need to do is send out the message that the state of South Carolina thinks it’s just fine for 14- and 15-year-olds to have sex.