A 14-year-old girl who authorities say secretly gave birth to a son and then strangled him, will be prosecuted as an adult. Cassidy Goodson is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. She was arrested Sept. 28 after deputies say she gave birth to a 9.5-pound boy in the bathroom of her house. Detectives say she used a pair of scissors to “pry the baby out,” and delivered the child alive and into the toilet. She then strangled him with the umbilical cord still attached and put him in a shoebox, according to detectives. The girl’s mother found the baby in the box, hidden in some laundry.

Detectives say the girl hid her pregnancy from her family. According to officials with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, the high school freshman killed her baby because she “didn’t know what to do with it” and “didn’t want the relationship with her parents to change.”

I have got to wonder, are the parents of this sad child getting a pass on what happened? Are they being charged with aggravated child abuse of which they are obviously guilty? Imagine the horror this girl had to be subjected to by her heartless, disgusting and abusive parents that she chose to hide in the toilet with a pair of scissors instead of telling her parents of her pregnancy.

Now the girl will be “prosecuted as an adult.” In the meanwhile, the actual adults who terrorized her to this unimaginable degree will play the victims and receive huge amounts of support and compassion. And if you are tempted to bellyache that the girl should take responsibility for her actions, ask yourself why you are not equally tempted to suggest that these horrible parents take responsibility for the results of their parenting.

A post with mostly not horrible and not even completely useless sex advice ends with a surprisingly childish outburst:

And never, ever say “I love you” if you don’t mean it. Or if you’re not 100% certain you’ll be saying it again.

Huh? Does anybody know what this is about? Is this some sort of a carry-over from the olden times when people though that a sex act constituted a promise of marriage or something?

What is the deal on voter suppression? I read an en entire issue of The Nation on the subject and I still have no idea. Is there something wrong with the requirement that people provide photo IDs in order to vote? I don’t see anything hugely unreasonable about that.

Now, registering to vote is, of course, a very bizarre practice. Why can’t everybody just get a citizenship card automatically, like they do in Canada, and use it to vote? I don’t think I heard of any other country where voting rights aren’t automatically granted to all citizens.

So why is there so much drama over an issue that could be solved easily, once and for all?

A fellow scholar (!!) and a native speaker of English writes me the following email:

Dear Clarissa, the reason why you received this paperwork is due to the fact that. . .

Is there a reason why she couldn’t have simply said, “You received the paperwork because. . .”? Or is that reason also due to some fact?

As you can understand, I’m grading essays right now and this makes me ultra-sensitive to crappy, clunky, miserable prose.