File talk:Ages of Consent - United States.svg

Latest comment: 6 years ago by WhisperToMe

Shouldn't Texas be yellow? 216.26.106.182 (talk) 23:24, 8 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Fabrickator: @Mx. Granger: A user changed the color of Texas to green from gray.

In fact the legal situation is more complicated than that. The whole reason why Texas was colored gray, not green, is because there are two legal codes with two differing interpretations. en:Talk:Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States#Texas age of consent: discussion from WP:OR noticeboard

   I'm the editor just quoted. I didn't realize that this was about an OR issue.
   The OR issues here are a bit tricky. None of the secondary sources cited above are reliable sources: lay newspapers are not RS for legal conclusions, and neither are unedited blog posts. So can we simply say that the Texas age of consent is 18, or is that WP:SYN? I think this is a fairly close issue on the WP:SYN issue, but what carries the day for me is that a Texas court, in the course of discussing these two statutes, actually said that the Texas age of consent is 17. Ex parte Fujisaka, 472 S.W.3d 792, 800, 801 (Tex. Ct. App. 2015).
   On the other hand, we can't just say that the age of consent is 17, either. The Texas Department of Public Safety has taken the position that the Texas age of consent is 18. Appellant's Brief, Texas Department of Public Safety v. Garcia, 2010 WL 1366961, at 8 (Tex. Ct. App. filed Feb. 1, 2010). And this is clearly a reasonable position for the department to take. So for us to choose one age over the other would be WP:SYN. We need to say that there are two different statutes that have been characterized as age of consent statutes in Texas, with two different ages (17 and 18), with perhaps a brief discussion of each.
   If anyone wants a copy of any of the documents I've cited, email me and I can reply with a PDF. The Fujisaka case may be available on the web, I haven't checked."

Even though I would personally treat Texas as an age of 18 state, to say so on this map definitively is en:Wikipedia:Original research as per en:Talk:Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States#Texas age of consent: discussion from WP:OR noticeboard WhisperToMe (talk) 12:40, 4 February 2018 (UTC)Reply