Here is the story:
Turkey protests to Austria, Sweden over 'child sex' claims
on mail dot com August 15, 2016
https://www.mail.com/int/news/europe/4544788-turkey-protests-to-austria-sweden-child-sex-claims.html
Cavusoglu said the reports that appeared in Austria and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom's* tweet were a reflection of the "racism, anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish (trend) in Europe." Turkey's Constitutional Court last month scrapped an article in the penal code that defined all sexual acts against children as abuse, triggering concern among children's rights advocates that the move will lead to an increase in child sexual abuse cases.
The court justices voted 7-6 to uphold a local court which argued that all cases should be reviewed individually and that someone who abuses a 4-year-old should not receive the same punishment as someone who has consensual sex with a 15-year-old. The previous law remains in force for six months, giving Parliament time to enact a new law, while children's rights advocates will seek to have the judgment reversed at the European Court of Human Rights.
Wallstrom tweeted on Sunday: "Turkish decision to allow sex with children under 15 must be reversed. Children need more protection, not less, against violence, sex abuse."
In the Catholic Church we agree about the principle - but not about 15 as the age limit. In fact, St Thomas Aquinas defended the age limit which is the traditional one, namely 14/12 - two years later for the bridegroom than for the bride, since boys are two years after girls in puberty - and argued like this:
I answer that, Since marriage is effected by way of a contract, it comes under the ordinance of positive law like other contracts. Consequently according to law (cap. Tua, De sponsal. impub.) it is determined that marriage may not be contracted before the age of discretion when each party is capable of sufficient deliberation about marriage, and of mutual fulfilment of the marriage debt, and that marriages otherwise contracted are void. Now for the most part this age is the fourteenth year in males and the twelfth year in women: but since the ordinances of positive law are consequent upon what happens in the majority of cases, if anyone reach the required perfection before the aforesaid age, so that nature and reason are sufficiently developed to supply the lack of age, the marriage is not annulled. Wherefore if the parties who marry before the age of puberty have marital intercourse before the aforesaid age, their marriage is none the less perpetually indissoluble.
Here is the source:
Summa Theologiae > Supplement > Question 58
Question 58. The impediments of impotence, spell, frenzy or madness, incest and defective age
Article 5. Whether defective age is an impediment to marriage?
http://newadvent.com/summa/5058.htm#article5
Note the underlined specification as to what age we talk about. My emphasis.**
I came to a longdrawn and mostly low intensity conflict with neighbours in one village after falling in love with a girl of 14 (minus some weeks) and declaring my feelings.
They tried - some of them - to solve the conflict by shutting me up in a madhouse, that is by treating this as a kind of symptom of insanity.
I was hospitalised once, and I turned the other cheek.
I was never more hospitalised over that story as such, though I was in police interrogations about it. Nor was I sent to prison for that story.
However, next time there was another conflict, I tried to defend my mother against such an indignity, I was hospitalised, not totally turning the other cheek.
A third time I had done nothing - my passivity was deemed self destructive by people prying into my life, although in reality I had a plan for what I was going to do, if evicted from the apartment.
That time I did not turn the other cheek. I opposed a policeman serving my mental health care harassers, taking his own pistol and shooting one shot in his hip in an attempt to take him hostage so as to oppose hospitalisation.
Two courts refused to even hear my plea of actual and justified self defense, first acquitting me due to "putative self defense", and second scrapping that acquittal. I tried to appeal to Supreme Court, but was by my guards stopped from posting the appeal text in time and after that stopped again over not having posted it in time.
But, even so, my so called punishment - my sentence, that would even be correct, even if it was an unjust sentence - only specified 3 years and 6 months, of which I served two thirds.
THEN there was a society which was NOT ready to accept in any way shape or form either my opposition to psychiatry or my denial of Swedish law being THE one and obliging moral compass over when someone is a child and when someone is not.
Margot Wallström embodies the ideology which made the free years in sweden between 2000 when I came out last of June and 2004 when I left Sweden as a homeless man in March a social nightmare for me.
In the article it appears that Austria had also been mentioned. Fortunately for my dear country of provenance, not a minister, but just a news ticker.
Turkey protested to Austria over a news ticker at Vienna's airport that claimed Turkey allows sex with children under age 15.
Under the Habsburgs, when Dummrath wrote his book, he noted that in Austria a girl of 14 could marry with parental consent, but could do without the consent at 21. So, Austrians are not really advised to hang on to this ideology of 15, since it is a slur against a well respected Austrian past.
That said, Turkey should have asked the news program for air time, not the government to smack down on free speech, even if here the news ticker was wrong.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Ember Saturday after Epiphany
14.I.2017
* It is really Margot Wallström with ö (o + ¨ = ö) in last syllable. ** When I was received in the Catholic Church, I did some reading of canon law and during this story, before debating the principle on forums, I actually believed the limit was 16/14, as the "law had been changed", not sure when and not sure if validly.
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