Dear Editor,

I believe that GLT’s Dec 11 editorial is the paper’s most ill advised treatment of tricky subject matter over the past decade. The heavy hand of a new female editor’s style has already brought outspoken charges of the publisher accepting Lesbian Separatist sexism on his editorial page. True or not, editorials like this can come back to haunt the community adversely in a variety of ways.

At a time when many GLBT youth would like to see California’s 18 legal Age of Consent lowered to Canada’s normal 16, this article feeds the very bigots whose desperate response to the recent Supreme Court ruling against discriminatory sodomy laws will be to outlaw as many homosexual acts as they can. They will likely resort to attacking some of the “sinful conduct” by raising the Age of Consent among pairs not planning to get legally married (i.e. Heterosexuals) as high as they dare. They will quote such ill-advised editorials as this one out of context (due only to space limitations, of course) to protect “teenagers and those in their early 20s” from “dirty old men” over the age of thirty or whatever. Not just all teenagers 17 and under as dictated by current obsolete law, but 18 and 19 year olds as well.

Which children and young adults in their early 20s should be reduced to juvenile status? Should those 24 or under, say anyone capable of admission to the Hillcrest Youth Center, be confined to the revised Age of Consent? How about those questionable 25 and 26 year olds: why should they be permitted to have such awful sex if they do not have legal (heterosexual) marriage in mind?

Some Lesbians claim this is all a male thing, so they don’t have to worry about such expansion of pedophilia to include any intergenerational Gay sex they don’t happen to like. Some do hate men: why not destroy unity among Gay Males under any convenient excuse? Then watch some radical Lesbians condemn any Gay relationship with over a three or four year age difference as effectively as any bigoted minister.

Apparently males, including the publisher, read this sexist editorial before it went to print. We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps publisher approval was the cost of keeping Lesbian feminazis in our midst from insisting that GLT follow the Center and Pride into inappropriately renaming itself the LGB Times. Under such circumstances, why should men take pro-choice political stances, just because overwhelmingly male legislatures prefer to decide what females do with their bodies?

Suppose you were a minister who or priest who raises $ by playing that profitable Homophobia card!

Whether you are in Anaheim, Colorado Springs, Lynchburg or Topeka, you need fresh angles to improve your income. You are willing to change “Protect Our Children” to “Protect Our Children and Young Adults” if it pays off in dollars, column inches and radio talk show interviews. In states with laws in place against recognizing future Gay marriages, you can urge that the Age of Consent on sinful sex be raised to at least the legal drinking age. In the old Confederacy and Mormon states, strive for at least 25. In states without laws in place against recognizing future Gay marriages, get that law enacted while you hike the age of sinful consent to 21. Quote extensively from San Diego’s Gay & Lesbian (at the moment) Times, but only out of context, due only to space limitations (of course), to prove that even Gays and Lesbians admit that you are right.

I hope that the California Republican Assembly reads neither this or your original editorial.

Now lets see if GLT has to edit this letter down due its space limitations?

Jay Murley

San Diego