Having been lit off by a posting over on Say Anything (and the news article that started the whole thing), I decided to carry forward the rant that I began over there and really get into the nitty gritty on the subject...

With that said, I am not too proud to admit that I was a typical teenage guy when I was younger. I groped, slapped, pestered, poked at, pulled the hair of, tickled and whatever else may have been required of me to get the attention of the fairer sex. I fancied myself to be in the top 1% of the flirting population. I also paid the consequences of those actions on more than one occasion including being dumped out of my desk in the middle of class and more slaps than I could ever hope to remember. Of course, those counter flirtation techniques were always done with a little smile, a lot of blushing and giggling and usually resulted in some sort of teenage fling.

What's more is that this sort of behavior did not result in me growing up and becoming a sex offender, rapist, sexual predator or anything else of the sort, nor did it result in creating hordes of female victims that needed therapy for years after the incidents. You know why? Because it was all in the name of fun. It was all part of performing that delicate dance between teenage boys and teenage girls as they struggle past that awkward phase of relationship building. It's all normal behavior. More importantly, they are all very important building blocks in developing teens.

This sort of behavior taught us things like tolerance and respect. It also teaches teens that there is right behavior and wrong behavior, and teaches them to understand that a little bit of flirting and "naughty" interaction is perfectly acceptable in life, and actually makes life much more enjoyable.

However, things have changed, and people like me are apparently a dying breed. If I were of high school age now, and I acted as I did 10 years ago, I would probably find myself labeled as a sex offender and be sitting in jail. Don't believe me? It's happening right now. From the article....

"The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran -- what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher's aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.

After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?"

What the hell? Has political correctness really gone this far? It has in Oregon apparently, and my guess is that it's lurking in the shadows in every corner of this country right now. All it takes is for one oversensitive person - in this case a teacher's aide who saw this activity - to bring down what would ordinarily be a normal way of life for teenagers.

I can't even begin to explain how furious this makes me. I mean, where does it end? Is the male/female relationship dying at the hands of the politically correct crowd? It certainly seems that way. This is on the heels of one of my prior articles about a school that has banned all physical contact between students - with no exception. So now the "big brother" politically correct crowd is working feverishly to completely remove something that most of us would consider an essential aspect of growing up. That relationship dance just got a whole lot more difficult.

So where does it end? If a 13-year old boy slapping another 13-year old girl's butt results in jail time and registration as a sex offender, then where does that leave us? I think back to the classic movie "Demolition Man" and the scene where Stallone is supposed to have "Sex" with Sandra Bullock and finds that there is no physical contact in this version of the future. Sex is all in the mind and contact/transfer of bodily fluids is considered abhorrent by the population. Of course, reproduction is regulated and done in a lab. Whereas the scene in the movie is entertaining, the prospect of something like that becoming reality is pretty damned scary!

I don't think that the movie hit a nerve in 1993 when it came out, and I doubt that the writers meant for that future to be anything more than an entertaining bit of absurd science fiction... After all, who would ever think that physical contact between two people would be disgusting? But now fast forward 14 years later, and in 2007 it seems that perhaps that future wasn't so much science fiction as it was prophetic. Is this where we're headed?

As much as my rhetoric sounds absurd, even to me, I can't shake the feeling that this science fiction view of today's social climate is headed in a very bad direction. Physical contact between teens is a sex offense, boys on a team giving each other high-fives is banned, even looking or talking to somebody in an "inappropriate manner" can result in job loss or massive lawsuits against you. Is the goal of the politically correct crowd really to create a "gloriously" sterile world? I shudder to think. I mean, I guess it's only a matter of time before the thought police come into play and we run the risk of being punished if it's suspected we have had an impure thought about another person. Are we looking at a future where people like me end up with "PERVERT" tattooed across their forehead in red block letters because we still have naughty thoughts and like to be a little frisky once in a while?

Well, probably not... I wish I could say of course not, but I'm just not that confident in the state of things right now. So for now it's just going to be probably.