Somewhere, Mary Kay Letourneau is shouting, "You GO, girlfriend!"

The first sentence of the Reuters story tells all:

A pregnant 37-year-old Georgia woman who eloped with a 15-year-old boy was in jail on charges of child molestation, authorities in the southern state said on Tuesday.

And people from the Deep South wonder why we ridicule them. Lovingly, of course. But nonetheless, we ridicule.

Apparently, Lisa Lynnette Clark (and didn't you just know her middle name would end in "-ette"?) has been schooling her teenaged beau in the ways of carnal congress for the past two years. In case you just wandered in from the Appalachians yourself, I'll help you with the math: The kid was 13 when Miz Lisa Lynnette, then age 35, enticed him into becoming her pederastic stud puppet.

At least, so far as one can discern from the news report, she wasn't a blood relative.

But here's the thing that strikes me most about this story. The fact that we can speak about this incident in anything approaching a mocking tone rests entirely on the respective genders of the participants. Were this sordid tale about a 37-year-old man and his pregnant 15-year-old child bride, we'd all be staring aghast at our monitors and calling for his statutory castration, instead of chuckling to ourselves.

That says something creepy about our society. Regardless of the part of the country we call home.