Several weeks ago I happened upon a statement by Keith Burgess-Jackson (KBJ) about an blog post that he published in November 2017, which became a cause célèbre:

(That is the entire blog post, as reproduced in Alex Macon’s “UT-Arlington Professor: ‘What’s the Big Deal’ About Adult Men Dating Underage Girls?“, Dmagazine.com, November 30, 2017.)

There is presumably a connection between that post and the demise of Keith Burgess-Jackson (KBJ’s eponymous blog), where it was posted. But it is to KBJ’s credit that he quickly resumed blogging at Just Philosophy, and wasn’t cowed by the notoriety resulting from his post.

But I must say that my own reaction was similar to that of KBJ’s detractors:

I was trying to find a way into Keith Burgess-Jackson’s eponymous blog, which seems to have been closed to public view since he defended Roy Moore’s courtship of a 14-year-old person. (Perhaps Moore might have been cut some slack by a segment of the vast left-wing conspiracy had the person been a male.)

That is to say, I read KBJ’s post as a defense of Roy Moore’s “courtship” of a 14-year-old girl (or young woman). KBJ argues strenuously in his statement that he wasn’t defending Moore, who had been accused of more than “courting” the young woman. This account, from Wikipedia, refers to reportage that predates KBJ’s post:

On November 9, 2017, The Washington Post outlined an account of a woman, Leigh Corfman, who said that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32 years old.^[18] Corfman said that Moore met her and her mother in the hallway of the county courthouse, where Moore was working as an assistant district attorney, and offered to sit with Corfman while her mother went into a courtroom to testify.^[18] Corfman said that during that discussion he asked for her phone number, which she gave him, they later went on two dates, for each date he picked her up in his car around the corner from her house and drove her to his house, and on the first date he “told her how pretty she was and kissed her”. On a second date, Moore allegedly “took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes … touched her over her bra and underpants … and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear”.^[18]

The incident, as described by Ms. Corfman, doesn’t resemble courtship as I have understood it in my lifetime, and I am older than KBJ and Roy Moore. Christian minister Patricia Bootsma explains that

in contrast to the modern conception of dating, in “courtship, time together in groups with family or friends is encouraged, and there is oversight by and accountability to parents or mentors”.^[7] She further states that with courtship, “commitment happens before intimacy”.^[7]

That is courtship, and I’m surprised when an erudite man who uses language precisely (i.e., KBJ) doesn’t know the difference between it and “making out“, which is more or less what Moore was (allegedly) bent on doing. Perhaps KBJ picked up the term from another news story, or perhaps he chose to use it as a euphemism for the acts described in the Post‘s story (which were repeated throughout the news media).

But I can understand the objections to KBJ’s post because (a) the story wasn’t about “courtship”, it was about a 32-year-old man (allegedly) making sexual advances to a 14-year-old girl-woman. Moreover, the alleged behavior took place in 1979, not in 1922, when KBJ’s maternal grandparents were “courting” or courting, as the case may be.

In 1922, legislative battles about age-of-consent laws had only recently been settled (for the most part):

While the general age of consent is now set between 16 and 18 in all U.S. states, the age of consent has widely varied across the country in the past. In 1880, the age of consent was set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7.^[2] The ages of consent were raised across the U.S. during the late 19th century and the early 20th century.^[3][4] By 1920 ages of consent generally rose to 16-18 and small adjustments to these laws occurred after 1920. As of 2015 the final state to raise its age of general consent was Hawaii, which changed it from 14 to 16 in 2001.^[5]

By contrast, Alabama’s age of consent (which was 10 in 1880) had been 16 since 1920. Sexual behavior that might have been deemed acceptable in 1922, when old ways were a fresh memory, was surely beyond the pale in 1979 — 59 years after Alabama’s age of consent had been raised to 16.

So to answer KBJ’s question: It was a very big deal if Moore had in fact done the things that he is accused of having done with a 14-year-old girl-woman. Things were different in 1979 than in 1922. As someone who is older than KBJ, I will even say that things were nearly as different in 1979 as they were in 2017. The Mad Men days were by 1979 almost a faint memory. (Not in Hollywood, politics, or the upper echelons of the business world, but the Mad Men days never ended there — or not until recently, maybe. I’m talking about the workaday world of real people, when sexual harassment had by 1979 become widely frowned on, if not always suppressed.)

KBJ’s outrage about “people imposing their own moral standards on people of the past” is obviously misplaced. Because of that, any reasonable reader — even a leftist — could conclude that KBJ was attempting to excuse Moore’s alleged behavior.

I can’t quote portions of KBJ’s long, copyrighted statement because of the terms of the copyright (“Publishable in Its Entirety or Not at All”). I will just say that it struck me as an after-the-fact justification of a reflexive defense of Roy Moore (widely considered a conservative) by a conservative blogger who is (rightly) exasperated by the torrent of abuse that is heaped continuously on (actual and self-styled) conservatives.

Having said all of that, I should add that I am very much a fan of KBJ. I’m glad that he quickly resumed blogging, despite the barrage of criticism that was aimed at him — much of it, I’m sure, by leftists who attacked him reflexively because of his conservatism.