“Marcus Dixon had it all.” “Marcus Dixon is being punished because he is a black man who slept with a white girl.” “Georgia is a still a racist place for a black man.” But Marcus Dixon was also weak. Marcus Dixon recently fell from an honor roll student with a promising future to being convicted of aggravated child molestation - a charge carrying a mandatory 10-year sentence. Dixon was eighteen, she fifteen. He said it was consensual sex. She charged rape. The jury declared it consensual sex, but was forced to deliver the 10 year sentence because she was 3 months shy of being sixteen making it a aggravated child molestation. I had seen his story on Oprah and immediately grieved for the loss of his youth, life, and promising future. One loss I was not able to grieve for, however, was his innocence. Many are saying the real reason Dixon is serving ten years is because he had sex with a white woman in the South. Others claim misuse of the statute by the prosecution. I say this case is about the consequence of the character and actions of our young people.
While I do believe it’s a shame that this young man was robbed of his future for having sex, I think we are ignoring the more pertinent issue. Sex among teens has become way too casual. Sex is being mistaken by youth as a hobby, not a commitment or an act to be shared with a person they care about. No longer can parents expect to occur between boyfriend and girlfriend. These days teens see nothing wrong with having sex with someone simply because the other teen looks good. More than this, teens view oral sex as safer sex, emotionally and physically. I know many will say that teaching abstinence is an archaic principle that does not work. If not abstinence, can’t we at least teach our children that hit and runs are immoral and lacks the virtue that sex is meant to have?
I do believe Dixon’s situation may have played out differently if he’d had some type of relationship with her before and after the sex. It is hard to know whether or not she would have accused him, but it is that he would have slept with her after she turned 16 instead of after a conversation in a school parking lot. It is never okay for a man to sleep with a woman with no intention of future contact. For any man to believe that is all right to use a woman’s body so intimately for his pleasure and discard her like a candy wrapper is problematic in our society from high-school kids like Dixon to grown-married men like Kobe Bryant.
Of utmost concern is also the fact that our young people are not respecting themselves or each other. Without these qualities, Dixon’s troubles were lying in wait; simply happening in his life sooner rather than later. When we make choices toward a weaker path, it is not the people in our lives that cause terrible things to happen to us, rather our character catching up with us.
To ignore that Mr. Dixon had a hand in the cards being dealt to him is to refuse to look at the entire picture. For it is my thought that even if the statute that put him behind bars did not exist, Mr. Dixon still has a lesson