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The War on "Sex Offenders"

Readers are familiar with the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, and how the state uses military metaphors to justify spending billions of dollars on failed policies that destroy human liberty. For the past twenty-five years, since before the now discredited satanic cult child sex panic that made headline news in the 1980s, we've witnessed federal and state authorities in the United States waging war on those whom they identify as "sex offenders" and "pedophiles." Truth be told, there's been precious little opposition raised by either self-identified libertarians or civil libertarians. First Amendment stalwarts steer clear of the question of child pornography. And libertarians, who are happy to defend the right to ingest the recreational drug of one's choice, studiously avoid any discussion of the age of consent that has now been effectively federalized at eighteen.

I was therefore delighted finally to read a thoughtful and well-researched essay that addresses these issues in an unapologetic fashion from a civil libertarian perspective. I strongly encourage all who claim to take personal freedoms seriously to read this article and think about the issues raised. Pariah's Scapegoats and Shunning is a telling account of what the author calls "sexual fascism in progressive America" and explains how the Feds and state authorities are waging war on the civil liberties of millions of Americans under the guise of protecting children.

The author concludes as follows:

"One day--perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now--it will appear ludicrous that our society was so consumed with anger at this class of scapegoats that it obliterated its fine traditions of liberty and justice in favor of retribution and vengeance. It will seem odd, that American society was obsessed with concern about sexual acts with teenagers even as it pursued a pointless war that killed thousands of teenagers and others on both sides of that war. People will hopefully someday recoil when told that a person convicted in Federal court of making a photograph of a 17 year old masturbating would receive a mandatory sentence of life in prison, yet a person convicted of the (non sexual) murder of that teen would face far less. It will seem incredible that the focus was on sexual deviance rather than on the astronomical rate of murder and other real violence, or the growing gap between rich and poor, and the indelible mark of real poverty on so many children. Until such a day of greater sanity, this scapegoating and shunning of all sex offenders and "pedophiles" will inevitably lead to less freedom and more insecurity for all who might engender the wrath of puritan preachers or stoke the greed of media outlets and pandering politicians. For now, it seems unlikely that even those who traditionally guard our civil liberties or those who traditionally challenge state repression from the left, will dare speak out, lest they, too, be marginalized and shunned."

Posted on Saturday, March 4, 2006 at 10:09 PM | Comments (11) | Return

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