General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Kaitlyn Hunt's mother under attack by bloggers who say 'Free Kate' is all lies [View all]CincyDem
(6,357 posts)Having been through the teen dating dance with 5 kids, I think it's impossible to know when the "relationship" began. Was it a first date, a first kiss, a first "dear diary" entry, a first time someone saw them in public maybe holding hands, or a first intimate contact? Hard to say because "relationship" is such a vague word.
I knew one of my daughters was in a relationship months before she did. What did that look like ? Hmmm. Guess who's name kept coming up at the dinner table. Guess who has a sudden interest in basketball...but just a coincidence he's on the bball team. Guess who just happens to show up on a saturday afternoon to hang around in the back yard. But ask either of them and they'll tell you there weren't dating until the late spring of that year. And, in the only time of my life I've actually been more observant than my wife, I noticed it before her. Not by a lot but I mentioned it to her a couple times and she just blew me off. Eventually she saw it too.
I'm not saying this is exactly what happened here because we'll never know. I do, however, think there's lots of gray zone all over this one and I'm not even a trial will sort it out.
You got a couple young girls (yes - 14,15,17,or 18...they're all "young" and if any of you have lived in a household with more than one of that age at the same time, you know what I'm talking about. It can be amazingly wonderful to watch them grow and experience life and the next moment it can be every man's definition of hell on earth. It's not predictable and it's not logical, especially when it involves relationships. Compound that with it being a LGBT relationship and all the ancillary social questions...it had to be insane.
I've been, and will continue to be, supportive of Kate's side of the story in spite all of the hypothetical predator threads that support spawns. I understand it's a slippery slope and I know that some will think what about it being a guy...what about him being 20 instead of 18...what about her being 12 instead of 14. Yeah, I get it. BFD...in this case, it wasn't and we seem to have lost the ability to think in the gray zone.
I don't know Kate, I don't know her family and I don't know the other girl's family. And I don't know ALL the facts (a statement I would submit is true for most of us). But I know statistics.
Statistically, more parents are likely to have a unfavorable first impression of a child coming out (or even testing out). Doesn't make them bad people but if this younger girl is an only child, you can bet there was at least one conversation between mom and dad that included the phrase "how does that grandchildren thing work".
Statistically, more parents are willing to do anything to "save" their children. I think both these parents fall into that camp. On one side, you've got parents who will do anything to save their child from a potential LGBT lifestyle and eliminate the influence in her life toward that possibility. On the other hand, you've got parents who don't want their child tainted for life for being a teen-ager. Neither parents are bad but they have different fears and different agendas.
The unfortunate reality is that between them, they've lit a fuse that neither may be able to extinguish and no matter the outcome, these families will never be the same.