It's weird but a state issue. Remember when they still had all the sodomy laws and Idaho had more than any other state? Man, it seemed like the only sex you could have in Idaho was missionary style in a four poster bed if you were both white, married, and over the age of 12. Then there were the bathroom stings.
But I digest...

What I meant is weird is that pedophilia/age of consent seems to be coming up in so many threads lately.
I mean, not commenting on whether it's topical or anything. Just happening a lot is all.

It's a fairly frequent tactic by those opposed to gay rights to analogize homosexuality to things markedly less acceptable to most people.

But I find age-of-consent stuff an interesting topic in its own right, so I don't necessarily refrain from engaging the topic when it goes that way.

That's fine with me. Was just thinking aloud.

One of the many beauties of the American constitutional system is that the States retain the common law functions of governments, and each can decide to go its own way in many respects. Thus we have 50 laboratories in which to try various solutions.

The States also have very different cultural and social histories. May I highly recommend David Hackett Fisher's Albion's Seed, which explains a lot about the cultural divides we still notice today? Briefly, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was settled in the 1630s by people from East Anglia, most of who were nonconforming Puritans; the Tidewater was settled in the 1650s by C of E folk from Wessex & Sussex; the mid-Atlantic was settled at the end of the XVIIth century by Quakers from the North Midlands; and the mountains were settled in the mid-XVIIIth century by what we'd call Evangelicals from the areas of northern England, southern Scotland, and northern Ireland that are around the Irish Sea. These very different groups brought very different cultures with them -- and in many respects, their social customs, dialects, and attitudes have been preserved - and extended to those other parts of America that they settled. (For example, in Massachusetts, a marriage was a strictly secular arrangement, which although Banns were read in Church, was solemnized only in the home with a civil ceremony; in Virginia, marriage was a sacrament of the Church of England, and the mountain folk celebrated a marraige with a charivari and a mock raid and abduction. Is it any wonder that folks in these regions have different ideas about marriage today? For another example, certain aspects of Black dialect today, e.g. the pronunciation or terminology of "axeing a question" and the conjugation of the verb "to be" without changing its form were both standard features of the standard English spoken by all classes of people in Wessex and Sussex in the XVIIth century.)