Sleep Is Amazing

I feel so much better today.

I went to bed not long after last night's post. When I woke up this morning it was nearly 11:00; it makes me believe that my body really needed the regeneration time. No temperature, and the only thing that hurt was my left hip. So I took some Aleve and did some stretching. It made a world of difference.

I haven't seen the episode on 20/20 about the age of consent yet. But I have an opinion about consent, and it is that most of the time it should be followed. Sometimes there are circumstances that need to be considered, though, and this tends to make things complicated. With that said, Gilberto Soto, the man interviewed in this Union Leader article, needs to have his head examined. For him to say that he would "do things differently" to the boy he beat up is, to say the least, disturbing. This is from the article:

"So I hit him," said Gilberto Soto, the girl's father. "Do I regret
what I did? No. Would I do it differently? Yes, I would, I would.

"Now?
Take that kid, stick him in the car, tie a rope around his neck and go
as fast as I could up and down the highways, every single highway there
is," Soto said, then clarified that he meant drag the boy at the end of
a rope behind his car.

Now, I understand that there is the whole concept of parental protection; after all, I have a pair of young ladies, 16 and 15, that I worry about daily. And I also understand that there are other things going on here - the young lady in question had originally said the boy had raped her and then admitted that she lied about that later on. But that does not give him license to beat on someone else, regardless what happened. He made statements, both in the UL article and on 20/20, that from what I can see, amount to criminal threatening towards the boy. Not intelligent on his part; if someone really wanted to pick them apart, he could find himself in a world of trouble. And where are the Weare Police Department in all of this? Couldn't they examine what he said and use it as evidence towards charges? Probably not - after all, he didn't really do what he said he would do, and free speech is still our right under the U.S. Constitution.

I will say this, though: if the boy in question were my son and this Soto character went after him, I would go after Soto, and I would make it hurt. And I'm sure I would also be charged with assault, but keep in mind that parental protection swings in that direction as well.