The lunatic fringe pestering Abbie over the Woolwich murder

Nobody is at home. The first weekend of study leave for my school means that people have gone elsewhere for the weekend, to have the first taste of freedom. Mark’s school has had study leave for longer, and Stephen for instance is in Italy with his parents for their annual trek to Rome. Only Abbie is at home, and he’s facing demands to condemn the Woolwich murder, which is crazy.

Abbie has been quite dejected for a bit about that. He is raging about racism and injustice in the particularly eager way that he has, and I think he has a point. As a third generation British Citizen whose parents are about as religious as the average bloke on the street, Abbie and his kin are apparently being asked to protest and condemn atrocities committed by the lunatic fringe of his religion.

And of course you have organisations like the EDL and BNP and UKIP that even question his right to be in Britain, even though his parents and grandparents have paid taxes all their lives. When people look at me or Abbie, they see me as the Englishman – despite the fact that I’m a half-immigrant. When they see Abbie, they see someone non-British, simply because of his skin.

Abbie’s family is here mainly, as I understand it, because of the sins of the British Empire, and the ability of the citizens of its former colonies being able to come here and work. Even decades after Pakistan was born, and decades after the middle East was carved up by the Empire, his grandparents or great-grandparents abandoned their lives there and came to England for whatever reason. I’m not sure why. And now, in 2013 his place here is being questioned, while I am being accepted as a proper Englishman, by all. This simply because I look like everyone else.

The other day when he was out with his parents to do the shopping, some more dim members of the white public called names after them, and told them to go home to wherever they came from. And where is that? Croydon? Ealing? I’ve never been confronted thus, not like that. Yet they’d have more cause to challenge me than him.

I’m the half-bloody-foreigner in their midst, and I observe them, and I judge them. Particularly since nobody asks Christians to condemn things like the recently revealed regiment of torture and sexual assault at the Catholic boarding school Fort Augustus Abbey in Scotland. When it comes to atrocities like that, it’s about rogue elements doing bad deeds. When it comes to Muslims, it’s the lot of them doing it, and the whole group is pestered for condemnation. That is racist, and that is crazy.

The heinous crime of love

The age of consent laws in the UK are 16. In Sweden it is 15. That means that by the time I arrived in England, I was ready and legal, and could promptly get it on with Mark when he plopped into my life. For a mere chance of being roughly equal in age, with just two months difference and being on the right side of an arbitary age limit, we avoided becoming child rapist and child rape victim.

This is not the case in the United States, it seems. A seventeen year old girl dated a fifteen year old class mate, and as soon as the older girl turned eighteen, the parents of the younger girl reported her for sex crimes against the younger girl. The older girl was expelled from her school before graduation, and won’t receive a high school diploma it would seem, and has to go to court to defend herself against charges that will land her on the sex offender registries for life.

From the article at the Advocate:

Kaitlyn Hunt was a popular student at Sebastian River High School, participating in everything from cheerleading to basketball. Hunt began dating another female student and the latter girl’s parents became enraged, according to Hunt’s parents. Kaitlyn was 17 at the time the relationship began, while her girlfriend was 15. Upon Kaitlyn’s 18th birthday, her girlfriend’s parents sent the police to the Hunt home and the teenager was arrested.

Hunt was charged with two felony counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child. Then, weeks before her graduation, Hunt was expelled from school.

I read that article, and I look at Mark and my relationship, and wonder what arbitrary difference there is between me and him, and this girl couple, except for the law. In their case, the older girl will end up on the sex crime registries. In my case, people go on about how cute me and Mark are together, before they ooh and aah about young love.

I’m not trying to make a moral superiority case here because if I had been younger than 16, or if Mark had been, then in the eyes of the UK law we could have been in the same position as that couple. What if either of us had been 15 and a half when we met two years ago? Would either of us have deserved to have our future destroyed by being expelled from school, and would either of us have deserved to end up on sex crime registers as child rapists?

That is the fate the older girl in the article apparently face, and I can’t help think that it’s a case of deep, bottomless and boundless injustice.