Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Chaerophon]

What nice imaginary straw men you have talking.

Sorry, what straw men? The post that you quoted was not directed towards you, it was directed towards Griffonspade, in light of his use of anecdotes to draw a conclusion that was unclear at best.

As for the post that I DID point in your direction: you seem to have missed my central point. This whole conversation started when Roland asked whether it was the government's place to put such a limit in force.

I simply said yes, it is. Everything that I have said since was in defence of that particular point. I'm not arguing that implementation is not often flawed, I'm not even arguing for a particular form of implementation. All that I'm saying is that, in principle, the government must be able, in certain situations, to legally enforce the rights of children.

You're points re: implementation are not incorrect - the devil may very well be in the details. However, that is simply not an argument against my point. My point is removed from practical concerns. Any argument against my point would have to be saying that there ought not to be such limits placed on age of consent, and that it should be left up to the parents to enforce. When the radical fundamentalist Mormons start marrying off 12 year olds, I think that they have moved beyond a reasonable limit around which their is a wide social consensus - that is simply not appropriate, and amounts to child abuse, end of story. There is undoubtedly a lot of grey area here - do the parents know? Do they approve? Do they encourage? Do they force? Doesn't change the fact that there IS a line, there HAS TO BE a line, and even if that line needs to be better defined, that is not much of an argument against having a line at all. Why? Because NOT having a limit is completely unacceptable.

There are no straw men here, just one fairly straightforward and coherent line of argument, with which you have mixed issues that have no bearing on my point.