My opinion on many American parents, though harsh, is pretty well-established at this point. This latest "controversy" over MySpace only serves to convince me even more that a great deal of American parents are completely useless as parents, and probably almost as useless as human beings:

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 "utterly ineffective."

Here's the quick summary. Teenage girl gets a MySpace account. Teenage girl posts the fact that she's 14. 19 year old guy contacts her. They decide to go out on a date. Teenage girl goes back to teenage guy's apartment. He expects to get laid. She claims she didn't see any of it coming "like a good girl." Then her mother gets pissed off because MySpace didn't send a chaperone to do her job as a mother and know the guys that her daughter is spending time with.

This has got to be the most ridiculous case of a parent not taking responsibility for their abject failure as a parent that I have ever seen. The mother is actually suing MySpace because she did not do her job, which includes knowing where her daughter is and laying down the rules with her when she sneaks out. From what's been released so far, no one even knows if the mother was caught unaware and punished her daughter or whether she's just "blaming society" for her daughter's bad behavior.

Maybe it does take a village to raise a kid these days because the combined intelligence and capacity for taking responsibility of the village would equal what parents had as individuals a hundred years ago. Back in the "dark ages," a parent would have been too mortified that his or her teenager was sneaking out to go out with members of the opposite sex without them knowing about it, to actually file such a lawsuit. The mother would have brow-beaten her daughter into submission for such a thing, but in this "enlightened age," it's easy to blame the computer network (MySpace) for the consequences of your teenager's bad behavior. Saying that the girl should have known better is a not so tacit admission that the mother not only didn't teach her daughter basic safety skills (men who try to get in your pants at 14 are typically not good men), but also basic self-respect and morals.

This trio deserves one another (cue a feminist to accuse me of saying that rape and sexual assault are ok). They are embarassments to their genders and social archetypes for the sort of people who are tearing this country down.

There is a little bit of silver-lining. One day, girls like her will have the protection of the intelligence community and military, thanks to the NSA taking the first steps to get sites like MySpace scanned by their datamining operations. And you thought that Big Brother wasn't actually there to help you!