Showing members how to gain children’s trust
This is from 23 years ago, but I don’t think I was aware of it until now.
Citing the First Amendment, the American Civil Liberties Union is defending a group that supports pedophilia against a civil suit filed by the family of a molested and slain Massachusetts boy.
The parents of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley filed a wrongful death lawsuit seeking damages from the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) for the 1997 rape and murder of their son…
The suit accuses NAMBLA of inciting Jeffrey’s murder and rape at the hands of Charles Jaynes and Salvatore Sicari through its literature and Web site — which is now offline. Both men were convicted of killing Jeffrey in separate trials and are serving life sentences.
According to the Curley’s suit, Jaynes was a member of NAMBLA under an alias at the time of the slaying. Jaynes, the plaintiffs say, had viewed the NAMBLA Web site shortly before the murder. NAMBLA literature showing members how to gain children’s trust, gain access to children nationwide, and avoid police investigating pedophilia cases were also found in Jaynes’ car and apartment, the lawsuit alleges.
Defendants have a right to legal representation, but they don’t have a right to political advocacy from respected civil liberties organizations. Adults fucking children is not a Civil Liberty.
According to the ACLU, the suit is designed to stifle the dissemination of the group’s unpopular beliefs: advocating consensual sexual relationships between adult men and boys and abolishing age-of-consent-laws that classify adult sex with children as rape.
There’s “unpopular” and then there’s “evil.” Adult men sexually exploiting boys is not a mere “unpopular belief.” There’s a massive power imbalance here, which makes nonsense of talk about popularity and belief.
“There was nothing in those publications or Web site which advocated or incited the commission of any illegal acts, including murder or rape,” said John Roberts, executive director of the ACLU’s Massachusetts chapter. “NAMBLA’s publications advocate for changes in society’s views about consensual sex between adults and minors. This advocacy is political speech protected by the First Amendment.”
But minors can’t consent to sex with adults, so there’s no such thing as “consensual sex between adults and minors.” It’s not just a matter of “society’s views,” it’s a matter of human brain development, which advocacy can’t change. Minors can’t consent because their brains haven’t developed enough to understand what they would be consenting to. Adults who exploit that lack of development are not heroes of civil liberties.
In short, it’s all quite horrifying.
This shows that they are evil, not just naïve or incompetent. Supporting that particular shower just demonstrates that they have always been on the side of abusers. It’s not as if the claims of NAMBLA stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Surely, if it were consensual it wouldn’t be necessary for the predators to go through all that trouble?
@1: “They” = the ACLU, or the NAMBLA?`
Clearly the ACLU, the subject of the piece. See also the specification of NAMBLA in the third sentence, which would make little sense if “they” were NAMBLA.
As repugnant as it is, I’m with the ACLU on this… If they can represent Nazis, NAMBLA isn’t a stretch. Now if they’d stop *engaging* in censorship…
From the 1970s through the mid-1990s there was this disgusting flirtation with normalizing pedophilia in certain quarters. It was framed as liberating children to make their own decisions about whether or not they wanted to have sex with creeps in their 40s. Hmm…I may have messed up the second half of how they framed it, but you get the vile point.
Unfortunately, some gay-rights groups, which had been operating on the fringes of society due to discrimination, got tangled up with groups that had been pushed to the edges for good reasons. In 1993, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), which was considered a mainstream organization, was given United Nations consultative status. A year later people noticed they had NAMBLA and a few other explicitly pro-pedophilia groups as affiliates. Just unbelievable.
Allen Ginsberg and Camille Paglia both supported NAMBLA.
Having said they, as much as it makes me feel ill to say it, I don’t think that the ACLU was wrong to take this case. They would often defend vile people like Klansmen and Nazis on the grounds that unpopular free speech needs to be defended for the law to mean anything. I put this in that category. NAMBLA was a disgusting group that taught its members to groom children and commit statutory rape, but they didn’t advocate for forcibly raping and murdering children, so defending them in this wrongful death suit was in keeping with the ACLU’s mission.
Now if NAMBLA were on trial for encouraging statutory rape, then defending them would make no sense, because they were 100% guilty of that. I certainly agree children cannot consent so I am not intending to downplay statutory rape. I also think the ACLU should have been more careful with their language when discussing that issue.
In some ways, this version of the ACLU was much better than the current one. They would have defended allowing gender-critical speech, and they wouldn’t have advocated for book banning as Chase Strangio does. Now they’re just another issue advocacy group willing to cast principles aside if they don’t help with those issues.
Thank you, Ophelia, you are right. I should have realised that my original response could be confusing. Of course I was referring to the subject of your post, the ACLU.
NAMBLA advocating for the grooming and rape of children below the legal age of consent is criminal (remember, the legal age of consent in some US states is much lower than in others) and should never have been defended by anyone. The very fact that they teach men how to groom the kids first shows the lack of true consent. There aren’t any packs of normal children roaming the streets hunting for middle-aged men to seduce; the men prey on vulnerable children, and bloody well ought to be locked up, along with their enablers.
To play devil’s advocate, our laws about consent are legal fictions, not brain development. Legally minors can consent to sex in most states in the US. Depending on the ages of the minor and the adult, in some states a 14 year old can consent to sex with an 18 year old. In some states a minor can consent to vaginal intercourse, but not oral or anal sex, or the penalties are different, creating a disparity between gay and straight minors. There was a big blow up over a State Senator in California who put forth a law to equalize the penalties so a 21 year old who gets a blow job from a 16 year old boy faces the same penalties as a 21 year old who had vaginal intercourse with a 16 year old girl.
In the majority of US states a 16 year old can consent to sex with anyone regardless of how much older they are. I’d like to see a uniform age of consent in the US. It is wrong to me that someone can have legal sex in one state, but cross the state line and they’re now a criminal and their partner is now a victim. I don’t think there is anything illegal with advocating to change or even abolish age of consent laws.
But the height of irony is the organization that once fought to protect the right to spread unpopular beliefs about sex with minors has become the leading censor of spreading the idea that biological sex is real and we shouldn’t encourage children to think they can change their sex.
I think the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was the breaking point for the ACLU. They had advocated for the organizers to get the permits for the rally and the backlash, internal and external, for their role in the rally pushed the organization to try and find some line where it would not find itself complicit in white supremacist intimidation, violence, and murder. They lost a lot of donors, employees were quitting, and I think the leadership was unable to accept that the ACLU was on the side of the people marching with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil”, marching with semiautomatic rifles and assaulting non-violent clergy, driving a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters.
They adopted a policy where they would not advocate for any organization holding an event where participants were allowed to carry weapons, which seems like a practical line to draw because it crosses from pure speech to intimidation and threats of, if not actual, violence, which aren’t protected. Unfortunately it became a slippery slope for the organization, which turned it from an organization dedicated to protecting freedom of speech to an organization dedicated to protecting “marginalized” groups from the harm of hearing ideas they do not like.
tigger @ 6 – but your comment wasn’t confusing! Of course it wasn’t.
[…] a comment by Eava on Showing members how to gain children’s […]
I’m not sure what the laws were like in 2000, but for many years very few states had any age of consent for boys. Whether this was because boys weren’t considered property to be controlled, or that males were presumed to be sexual machines without will of their own isn’t clear.
John the Drunkard, that isn’t correct. If it was numerous Catholic Church diocese wouldn’t be facing bankruptcy from all the decades old sexual abuse claims. There may be different ages for boys and girls in different cultures, but those usually apply to heterosexual intercourse. In most cultures homosexual sex was already criminal, but a boy who was raped by a man would not be prosecuted as two adult males would be. The idea that there was no concept that there is an age below which children of either sex should not be engaging in sexual activity is not supported historically.
JtD appears to be correct.
Children and Youth in History: Age of Consent Laws
Lots of interesting specifics in the article, including:
Also:
Sackbut, you’re ignoring that there is no point to have an age of consent for boys to have sex with men when homosexual sex was already criminal. I challenge you to find a western culture where an adult male sodomizing a 7 year old boy was acceptable. The idea of an adult woman having the agency to have sex with a male child was not something many cultures even entertained. Making uniform age of consent laws only became an issue when cultures started decriminalization same sex sexual activity. The SCOTUS case, which was from 1981, dealt with “sexual intercourse” which means PIV sex. The Court was not declaring open season for adult males to molest boys. If it was, NAMBLA, which was founded in 1978, wouldn’t have been created in the first place.
Eava, I think we’re talking at cross-purposes.
The sexual abuse claims against the Catholic Church, and the creation of NAMBLA, both occurred in the last part of the 20th century. By that time, it appears that age of consent laws were mostly gender-neutral and mostly referenced both heterosexual and homosexual acts.
Before that, though, for centuries, it seems age of consent laws, where they existed, often just mentioned girls. Which is what JtD said, and which I supported.
If JtD meant to imply that “for many years” means “all years before 2000”, I don’t think that’s supported by the evidence. But that’s not how I read it; the major changes to these laws began in the 1970s, after having been in place “for many years” prior to that, so what JtD said seems correct to me.
I did find that page from George Mason University nicely informative on the topic, and I hope others also find it of interest.
Age of consent laws existed for boys long before the 1970s.
https://rictornorton.co.uk/though16.htm
Some of the Catholic Church cases involve abuse that happened before 1970. The suggestion JtD made that boys were unprotected from sexual predation because they weren’t considered property to protect or because they were considered “sexual machines” isn’t historically accurate.