Actually it makes it worse. Your child is supposed to trust and love you, and you betrayed both.

With all due respect, if you ever see me walking towards you, I advice you to cross to the other side.

I was an incestuous father and my child was young when it started but I have been fully evaluated and am not a pedophile. Had I been declared one the state I was in would have been right to civilly commit me as a sexually violent predator and they never even considered that because they know incest is caused by a dysfunctional family dynamic.

You were speaking more of liberty than libertinism, as I see it anyway. Freedom versus a so-called abuse of freedom.

Pedophiles are a discrete orientation. My “the rest” refers to all thev other types and labels which tend to (erroneously) get lumped in with pedophilia, both in description and in chances for rehabilitation.

Yeah, you’ve dutifully spewed out your mainstream media-fed, “Priests = pedophiles!” time and time and time and time again (never noting the irony that you’re doing this at a website famed for debunking mainstream media presumptions of guilt).

We get it. Accusations = Guilt, mainstream media = honest, priests = molestors, etc., etc., etc.

I respectfully request that any future hate-filled posts about priests and Catholics from that user be ignored by all.

En Passant—

Freedom, period, versus freedom-ism? Regardless, true pedophiles are self-contained, unchanging, and sui generis; the rest, a morass of overlapping, evolving and devolving categories.

I have no idea what you are asking here. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe you didn’t understand what I wrote either.

Freedom, period, versus freedom-ism? Regardless, true pedophiles are self-contained, unchanging, and sui generis; the rest, a morass of overlapping, evolving and devolving categories.

JohnL—

Ironically enough, it’s the rejuvenated puritanical protection and idealizing of children from the progressive side of the aisle this time that’s responsible for the current safe haven for false-faced child sex crime accusers. This runs side by side with, and on occasion smack into, the prevailing “if it feels good, you get to do it” pop-culture libertinist’s ethic I alluded to above.

For child molestation cases in the bad old days, unless there was a confession or the perp caught in flagrante, cases were not pursued, either deemed “family” matters, or rationalized as unproveable without corroboration of the child. Today the pendulum’s swung too far in the other direction, partly with good intentions, whereby what the kid says is operative gold upon arrival unless and until there’s affirmative refutation.

#22 missjanenc

#14 Dave Krueger, please, please, PLEASE tell us you were being sarcastic.

Yes. :-)

Libertinism exists in most any social order, relatively independent of government’s invasive authority. But as government’s authoritarian reach increases, the libertinism tends to crop up among the least privileged socioeconomic populations because government’s resources to police larger populations are limited; and among the most privileged socioeconomic populations, because they are the government.

I’m not advocating for that position in any way, shape, or form. I’m suggesting that such a state of, er, affairs is the inevitable logical extension of liberal–and to a lesser extent–libertarian social philosophy.

maybe if he wrote it with motorcycles, glocks and monster trucks

I must disagree. A person who has baseless fears, who refuses to look at the facts that would prove those fears baseless, and who uses those baseless fears to justify wrongdoing, is evil.

Wake up. There are a lot of very evil people everywhere. Smite the evil.

#5, #9, Jesus Christ. Stop with this shit. You idiots are just validating the crap that Johnson was writing about. The people who push these idiotic panics are not evil man-hating supervillains, they are just stupid. They are honestly afraid. Note that I did not say legitimately afraid, because what they panic over is akin to someone refusing to leave his house for fear of a meteorite landing on him. But they are not evil.

I must respectfully disagree.

The mother who made the initial complaint in the McMartin case may have merely been “honestly afraid”. She was, after all, schizophrenic and sufficiently alcoholic to eventually die of complications.

But the officials, from prosecutors down to the investigators, were demonstrably evil. Their methods have been analyzed at great length and thoroughly exposed and debunked as not even remotely resembling honest and objective investigation. Their motives were various, but self-promotion and political and professional ambition were among them.

One of the original prosecutors, who left the case when he saw how it was being handled, exposed some of their unlawful conduct. Prosecutorial misconduct that eventually came to light included withholding exculpatory evidence and using perjured testimony at trial.

Even some in the press had less than honorable motives for sensationalist coverage promoting panic and endorsing the prosecution. The LA Times editor in charge of that paper’s dishonest coverage of the case became engaged to the prosecutor.

All that behavior, I submit, was evil. It was not the result of stupidity or “honest fear”.