While I am generally annoyed by the culture wars, I do find the meta-culture wars interesting. ie I don’t care about melodramatic screeching about groomers, but I am interested in potential hypocrisy from the melodramatic screechers. That brings me to late 2022 and early 2023 when I started trying out a new take. My argument was that if you looked at the age of consent across the country, right-wing states (ie states where melodramatic screeching is more common) seems to have lower ages of consent (AOC) laws than left-wing states.
For example, most of the deep south has their AOC set at 16 years. Meanwhile supposedly pro-groomer states like California and Oregon have their AOC at 18 years. But a closer look at the map also shows multiple counterexamples. Like the deep south, states in the northeast have their AOC set almost exclusively at 16 years. And the states where the AOC is 18 seem to be evenly split between blue states (California, Oregon, and Virginia), red states, (Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Utah, Idaho, and North Dakota), and two purple states (Arizona and Wisconsin).
So I decided to test my take. To do so, I wanted to look at how the average AOC differed between red states and blue states. I measured the affiliation of each state with:
2020 Presidential results
2016 Presidential results
Governor mansion occupation
Senator breakdown, with all independent Senators considered Democrats
Same-sex marriage before Obergafell, broken down by if same-sex marriage was legalized through the Supreme Court, a lower court, or by non-judicial means
No matter how I broke it down, the AOC gap between more right-wing states and more-left wing states was roughly zero.
Limitations
There are two limitations worth nothing here. First, population differences. Califonia has its AOC set at 18 years and is considered left-wing in all five breakdowns. Meanwhile, Alabama has its AOC at 16 years and is considered right-wing in all five breakdowns. These two states are weighted equally even though California has ~8x the population of Alabama.
The second potential limitation is gradation. While right-wing states might have roughly similar AOC laws to left-wing states, very right-wing states could have higher or lower AOC laws than very left-wing states.
A note on history
Another meta-culture war issue I find interesting is the conflation of “traditionalism” with protecting children. It is extremely weird that the “traditionalists” have been able to claim the banner of protecting the innocence of children considering that children’s innocence hasn’t traditionally been protected. For example, AOC laws have risen over time. And not by a small amount. The AOC used to be in the 10 to 12 years range. It was even as low as seven in the US. Georgia and Hawaii had their AOCs at 14 as recently as 1995 and 2001! Similarly, we all know that the age of marriage for women and first childbirth has gone up over time. It was far more common for a teenage girl to be married and pregnant in 1823 than it is in 2023. Protecting the innocence of children is a convenience of modernity!
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