
An 18-year-old girl was arrested for statutory rape over a same-sex relationship in Florida because of bigoted parents, according to the mother of the arrested teen.
Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt was arrested February 16 by the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office on two counts of lewd or lascivious battery on child.
Her mother, Kelley Hunt Smith, explained on Facebook that Kaitlyn began a “mutual consenting” relationship with a girl at Sebastian River High School who was about three years younger. The parents of the younger girl were upset by the situation and contacted police, she wrote.
“They were out to destroy my daughter, they feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay,” Kaitlyn mother’s said. “They are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter.”
The parents of the younger girl also pressured the Indian River County School Board into expelling Kaitlyn, she added. The teen is now attending an alternative school.
“Those parents have forced the State Attorneys office to go thru [sic] with felony charges and are trying to ruin my daughters life,” Kaitlyn mother’s continued. “This is insane. This should have never been a legal matter, it is a family matter. They are trying to send an innocent young girl to prison because they are full of hate and bigotry. These girls are teenagers in high school, who had ONE mutual consenting sexual experience. My daughter isn’t a criminal, she isn’t a predator.”
Kaitlyn has until Friday to accept or reject a plea deal of two years house arrest and one year probation, according to her mother.
In response to the incident, friends and family setup a “Free Kate” Facebook page and online petition in hopes of having the case dropped. Support for the young girl appeared to be strong. The petition had more than 27,000 supporters on Sunday morning. …
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/19/florida-parent-says-religious-zealots-got-teen-daughter-arrested-for-lesbian-relationship/
Free Kate…and her girlfriend.
Odds are the parents of Kate’s girlfriend have unresolved homosexual feelings causing them to be this hateful. That would make sense genetically if they had a gay daughter. Their hate could be self-loathing.
Attackers of gays turn out to be repressed homosexuals who hate themselves because their own closet gay patents spent so much time expressing hate toward gays.
Both gay people and confidently non-gay people (that’s most of us) don’t care if some people are gay.
Kate being terrorized with jail time by these people pisses me off. No one can make a daughter gay except the parents. It’s genetic. Well epigenetic, actually. Kate’s girlfriend’s dad didn’t have enough testosterone at a key time and that can’t be changed now.
The hereditary link of homosexuality has long been established, but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are many pairs of identical twins who have differing sexualities. Scientists from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis say homosexuality seems to have an epigenetic, not a genetic link.
Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks — extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, “erased” between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren’t erased — they’re passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. …
“There is compelling evidence that epi-marks contribute to both the similarity and dissimilarity of family members, and can therefore feasibly contribute to the observed familial inheritance of homosexuality and its low concordance between [identical] twins,” Rice notes.
Rice and his team created a mathematical model that explains why homosexuality is passed through epi-marks, not genetics. Evolutionarily speaking, if homosexuality was solely a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to eventually disappear because homosexuals wouldn’t be expected to reproduce. But because these epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.
http://mobile.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/12/11/scientists-may-have-finally-unlocked-puzzle-of-why-people-are-gay
More detail:
… First, evidence shows that homosexuality can run in families. Still, only 20 percent of identical twins are both gay, said Rice. Furthermore, linkage studies looking for a genetic underpinning to sexual orientation have not turned up any “major” homosexual genes, Rice noted. “This made us suspicious that something besides genes produces heritability that isn’t genetic.” Epigenetics fits the bill.
The model focuses on the role of epigenetics in shaping how cells respond to androgen signaling, an important determinant of gonad development. The researchers suggest that androgens are also important factors in molding sexual orientation, and that various genes involved in mediating androgen signaling are regulated by epigenetic modifications. These epigenetic marks, they argue, can be passed on between generations.
As an example of how androgens shape sexuality, the researchers point to girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who produce very high levels of testosterone and often display masculinized genitalia and higher rates of same-sex attraction. But testosterone levels are sometimes the same in normally developing male and female fetuses—without masculinizing the females—suggesting that something else must be playing a role.
The answer, they hypothesized, has to do with sensitivity to androgens. There are a variety of proteins that can modify androgen signaling, and the researchers hypothesize that differences in sensitivity to these signals between male and female fetuses help mediate their sexual differentiation. Rice and his colleagues suggest that such sensitivity may be regulated by the acquisition of epigenetic marks that make girls less sensitive to masculinizing androgens, or make boys more sensitive.
Such epi-marks are typically accrued early in development, as cells are programmed to become specific adult cell types. … they could be inherited from a parent. Most epigenetic modifications are erased during development of germ cells and soon after fertilization so that cell lineages can be programmed with new epigenetic modifications. But if epi-marks that direct sexual development are not erased correctly, a mother could pass down epi-marks that direct female development to her son, resulting in an attraction to men, and vice versa for a father and his daughters …
They also expect that specific epi-marks will regulate sensitivity differently in the brain versus gonads, resulting in same-sex attraction even when normal genital development occurs, said Gavrilets….
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33773/title/Can-Epigenetics-Explain-Homosexuality-/
Further research will tell, but this is the current most plausible biological basis.