This article was written weeks ago, before a gasket blew and the Epstein controversy introduced a whole new news item. Once the post was finished, with one blog banned (Google — It Is Time to Restore a Blog — and its 14,000 Posts — That You Have Harbored Without Problems for Over Two Decades), I figured I didn't want to risk another blog getting the same treatment and left it in draft status. But then Sarah Hoyt shamed me — not on purpose (I don't think) — when she published her take on the latest Epstein developments.
I’M GOING TO GET IN SERIOUS TROUBLE FOR THIS, BUT: Okay, I have to say this.
… out of nowhere, not only is Epstein trending, but every single blog I frequent is full of people screaming that if Trump doesn’t fire Pam Bondi NOOOOOW (and possibly Patel and Bongino too) he’s a pedophile, and supporting pedophiles.
And twitter accounts are screaming that the administration is just all corrupted and co-opted by the deep state and if you tell these accounts they’re insane, they call you a pedophile-lover. Or scream about their feels that Trump promised he’d take down pedophiles and this is the most important thing right now.
… Trump such as he is is obviously the best we can get right now and get elected, and like he says we should concentrate on cleaning the elections first before we go saying we’ll punish him or what not.
… If you throw away this miraculous chance we got to search for some mythical perfect, you are in fact an idiot. They had their claws at our neck. We managed to sweep them aside using Trump. But now you want to throw it all away because Trump is not a perfect person or a perfect president.
And here we return to how the present post was originally slated to start:
In one of his reports a decade or two ago, on the subject of sexual relations, John Stossel pointed out that being on a sex-offender registry had gotten one man banned from a park where he wanted to play with small children. How was that fellow a pedophile? Stossel asked none other than the "sex offender" in question and… his wife by his side. He had bedded a girl of… (wait for it) 17! When he himself was virtually the same age — albeit an adult — 18 or 19! It wasn't some random hook-up either, one in perhaps a long list of icky Casanova-type seductions.
She was his girlfriend, his fiancée whom he loved — and whom he was faithful to — and indeed they would later go on to get married, and have kids. And during the Stossel interview, she was now standing, as mentioned, by his side. And the children that the "sex offender" wanted to play with at the park? They were his very own (as well as those of the above-mentioned girl's/wife's)! This man did not have the right to be alone with his own kids, fathered with the woman/girl/wife that he had (monogamous) sex with for the sole reason that he was in love with her!
And the authorities? The lawmakers and the law enforcers? When asked by Stossel about the case, a policeman refused to condemn the man's dire fate or even acknowledge, let alone simply see, the absurdity of the case, simply repeating over and over, unable to wipe the smirk off his face, that "that's the law!"
Conservatives have embraced the terms "pedophile" and "sex offender" — as well as the fight against same — but perhaps it's time to wonder whether those aren't to be linked to the Left's hysterical attempts (and hysterical terms) to shame and demonize anybody and everybody who is in the mainstream (racist! sexist! transphobe! colonialist! imperialist! traitor! convicted felon! misogynist! pedophile!) — with words invented out of whole cloth for that very goal — and not a member of some kind of minority (where such accusations are routinely excused and/or ignored).
That may be the most unvarnished truth about pedophiles: isn't the main reason the term exists (and was invented) so that leftists have yet another weapon to shame and demonize the average citizen of the United States, as well as of other Western countries, for what is often pretty run-of-the-mill (mis?)behavior?
Indeed, when you think about it, hasn't the sexual revolution been not about freedom but about the very opposite? Hasn't the sexual revolution been not about freedom but about government and the authorities moving more and more into the sphere of what was once considered private life? Hasn't the sexual revolution been about "freeing" the people who enjoy being dependent on the government (females, who can do no wrong—we must not judge) while putting more and more chains on the people who enjoy being free and independent (males, whose motives and personalities are regularly described as icky—judgment not only necessary but highly desired)?
Try googling the first crop of names of famous (infamous?) "survivors" over the past generation or two that come to mind: Tawana Brawley (Al Sharpton case), Crystal Mangum (Duke lacrosse team), Jackie Coakley (Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax), Emma Sulkowicz (Mattress Girl), Mary Zolkowski (Michigan's Delta College), Nikki Yovino (Sacred Heart University), Sherita Dixon-Cole (DUI arrest), Morgan Wright (law professor Francesco Parisi), Amber Heard (Johnny Depp), Halina Kuta (casino mogul Steve Wynn), Cathy Abreu (Tucker Carlson), Eleanor Williams, and, last but not least, Jessica Gallagher (an upstate New York woman claiming she was raped was in reality angry at a man she met on a dating app because he wouldn’t give her a ride home).
The men involved in those cases invariably met with (unbelievably high levels of) opprobrium and punishment but, as Ann Coulter puts it, "From the Duke Lacrosse team, the Columbia mattress girl and the University of Virginia, the left has not been able to produce one actual rape on a college campus."
An article in Reason by — probably predicting the popularity of one Donald Trump — posits that
"If there is political consensus on anything in the United States today, it is the consensus that our government has overcriminalized and overincarcerated the American public," [write law professors and lecturers from the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Rutgers, Harvard, and Georgetown University]. Yet "against this political consensus and judicial backdrop, the current ALI [American Law Institute] draft is an extreme deviation, focused on expanding criminal sanctions for sexual behavior." … "None of this is inadvertent or the result of loose drafting," the lawyers and professors suggest.
One of the most egregious cases was the instance of the police captain proudly announcing the arrest of a "child pornographer" sending nude photos of a teen girl from their phone (i.e., sexting) and threatening to put that villainous pervert engaged in"pornography" if not in jail, at least on the sex-offender registry. The "child pornographer" sending the nude photos of an underage girl — one single naked girl, not myriads — and threatened with jail and/or having the rest of their life ruined by "a system of prolonged public punishment" was none other than… the underage teen girl herself! And the (lone) guy she was sexting was (as in the case mentioned in the introductory paragraph) her boyfriend.
Think of the innumerable videos of police arresting American parents for letting their kids walk to school. Think of the videos of police arresting right-wing protestors, both in America and abroad, while letting members of leftist mobs go free. Think of the FBI under Obama and Biden (not to mention under Trump's first term). Think of British police (weren't London bobbies once the height of respect?) and German policemen.
I'm all for "supporting our law enforcement" and the boys in blue, but I hate to say it, it turns out that too often these people, after joining the force, fail to use their brains and their common sense.
Red State's Andrea Ruth points out that her "grandmother was 15 when she married", — adding that "Roughly 13% of marriages in 1950 took place between brides and grooms who were 15-19 year-olds" — and leading Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds to add that
Teen-agers have been having sex forever. Their bodies are maturing, their hormones are raging and doing what comes naturally is, well, natural. Indeed, for most of human history, teen sex was an entirely normal part of life, since people tended to marry and be treated as adults at what were, by modern standards, very early ages.
Not that some stories sound, and are, horrific — particularly those linked to Jeffrey Epstein and his island. But regularly reading scandal stories about teens being bedded by some teacher, I have to say that I am sorry, but that I sometimes wonder what the fuss was/is about. In my early teens (possibly as early as 11 or 12), I was already harboring fantasies about models in ads, actresses in movies, the girls in my classroom, and the female teachers in my school. Would it have been a bad thing for me had, say, the French teacher (ohlala!) tried to fulfill said fantasy? Possibly, but I certainly wouldn't have demanded that the police get involved and have the teacher put behind bars.
I remember reading the story of a single mother in Italy who derived her income from renting out apartments in the building she owned. At one point she learned that her teen son had lost his virginity. Whom by? He had been "deflowered" by a widow in one of the apartments. The mother's reaction? She didn't say a word, but the next time the widow got her monthly bill, she noticed that her rent had been lowered.
To their credit, even some on the Left seem to accept that the "Busybodies" and the "nanny-state advocates who want to infantilize everyone" (Glenn Reynolds) have gone too far. In his advice column as the New York Times "Ethicist" — and this article was the starting point which led me to pen the present post — Kwame Anthony Appiah makes several pointed remarks as he answers a reader's question, "I Saw a Neighbor on the Sex-Offender Registry. Should I Tell Others?"
Sex-offender registries in the United States were created for the reason you’d expect: to protect the vulnerable by informing the public. … But what began as a law-enforcement tool has, over time, evolved into a system of prolonged public punishment, treating vastly different cases as if they were the same.
Some people are on the registry for horrifying, predatory acts. Others wind up on a registry for nonviolent conduct committed when they were children or teenagers, including a 10-year-old girl who “pantsed” a classmate. But that’s what the system has allowed. Teenagers in a relationship who consensually swapped nude pics, adults who got busy in a car parked in a municipal lot, a drunken undergraduate who went streaking across the quad — all may be subject to lengthy registration mandates. Even those no longer on the official registries may find that for-profit data-collection websites still display their names and photos, demanding payment for delisting.
In theory, registries can distinguish among offenses by labeling them according to tier and type. In practice, a person on the list becomes a sex offender — full stop — regardless of the details. Elizabeth J. Letourneau, who directs a center at Johns Hopkins University dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse, has observed that a vast majority of sexual offenses are committed by individuals who aren’t on any registry. A concern for evidence-based policy has led the American Law Institute to recommend eliminating public notification and limiting registry access to law enforcement. Public registries don’t reduce recidivism or protect people, researchers have concluded. The old “once a sex offender, always a sex offender” wisdom is a discredited generalization. Yet policies built on that assumption remain, despite a growing belief among experts that the registries do more harm than good.
You recently decided not to purchase a house after discovering that a neighbor was on the registry. You didn’t mention what the offense was or how long ago it occurred; presumably the person’s mere presence on the registry was enough for you. That’s your prerogative, of course. But it’s worth pausing to think about what your decision was based on.
How dangerous is this neighbor, really? That depends on details the registries rarely convey: what happened, how long ago it happened, how old the person was at the time and what the person has done since. A quarter of people currently on the registries, it has been estimated, were minors at the time of their offense. The presence of a name on a list tells you very little about your actual risk.
