If She's Legal, Go for It, Man....Right?

Even if she's your student. Because that's not ethically wrong at all. At all. It is, however, quite legal, according to today's ruling by a Washington Court Of Appeals panel holding that state law does not specifically prohibit a teacher from having sex with his or her eighteen-year-old student(s). The decision came after the trio of judges reviewed Matthew Hirschfelder's case; Hirschfelder was a choir teacher solidly into his thirties when he had sex with one of his students, a delicate flower aged eighteen years. Yes, he was committing adultery. Yes, the fling happened on school grounds. (Whoa.) And apparently, yes, the sex was not explicitly illegal.

Let us pause briefly to laugh at this snippet from a 2007 article over at King5 on the story: "The prosecutor says age doesn't matter. It's the teacher's position that counts under the law." Har har har, "position."

Moving on to what we see as a serious ethical issue: the power imbalance inherent in a teacher-student relationship. It might not be illegal as of this moment in time for Hirschfelder to have porked his student, but it should be. According to that King5 article, the girl was only a few weeks away from graduating. Pull your pants up and wait a few weeks if she's so damn irresistible, dude! Wait until you're not her teacher. You could have roleplayed that particular fantasy to your heart's desire with that very same girlchild without crossing such serious professional boundaries if you had just waited a few more weeks. Of course, you would still have to answer to your marriage vows. Good one, just all the way around the block. You are a winner in life.