"Europe has moved on to the next tragic stage of its civilizational suicide: rationalizing its surrender."

It seems to Mark Steyn that

...the most powerful European institutions (courts, media, police, bureaucracy) are increasingly eager to shovel core western liberties into the landfill. ...Following The Mark Steyn Show's Free Speech Forum, many readers have asked me to comment on the recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights, summarized in this headline:

Calling Prophet Muhammad a Pedophile Does Not Fall Within Freedom of Speech: European Court

There was "no violation" of freedom of expression because the courts "carefully balanced" freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected - and came down on the side of protecting feelings rather than freedom of expression.

...If your right to free speech has to be balanced with people's "feelings", then as a practical matter there is no free speech.

There is also no truth: It is not the defendant who "had made statements suggesting that Muhammad had had paedophilic tendencies" but the Hadith, which after the Koran are the most sacred foundational texts of Islam and in whose literal truth Muslims are enjoined to believe:

[60] What about he, who consummated a marriage with a girl of nine

5158- Urwa narrated: The Messenger of Allah 'Allah's blessing and peace be upon him' married A'isha when she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her when she was nine. She remained with him nine years (till he died).

So it's not that it's illegal to "suggest" that the Big Mo "had paedophilic tendencies", it's just illegal to suggest there's anything wrong with that.

...There will be much more of this: In the interests of "religious peace", the prohibitions of Islam are being extended to infidels, and the linguistic contortions of courts and media and police and bureaucrats confirm that Europe has moved on to the next tragic stage of its civilizational suicide: rationalizing its surrender.

Read more here.

Precious Memories

Guest post
by Suzann Darnall

My husband and I have been blessed this past week to have two of our granddaughters spend the week with us. Their parents were volunteers at a church girls camp, where their older sisters were campers. So, as in past years when the littles have stayed home and the bigs have camped, MawMaw (AKA: me) has held a mini girls camp or mini camp (when my grandson has been with us).

While we seldom do anything huge, we do seem to have fun and make memories that the kids treasure. I try to make sure they go home with a few little mementos and that we do a variety of simple activities. They also get well fed and indulge in an abundance of treats. In addition, they get some down time to watch TV or movies, play on electronics, or just chill.

This week we have baked bread, received t-shirts saying “Girls First”, gone for manicures and pedicures, had lunch out with a friend, gotten friendship bracelets, had a family pool party with their aunt and her family, had a sleepover with their cousin, had a picnic at the drive-in movie while watching “Christopher Robin”, and done lots of other things. Today is a quiet day as we await the return of their family and they head for home. It has been good stuff and I will treasure the memories for a long time.

But, mingled amidst the wealth of these precious memories with my grandchildren, from this year and past events, has been the intrusion of a black cloud brought to my mind by social media and new sources. A very dark subject that I am loathe to mention, but feel must be addressed. In part I am writing about it ‘cause I was asked to address it by others. I also hold this to be an important fight for our society to hold the line against an evil attack against the family through the destruction of happy, healthy childhood for some of our littlest citizens. It is the apparent drive to “normalize” pedophilia.

There is nothing normal about pedophilia. It might be more common than we realize, but that does not in any way make it normal. Cancer is common, but is certainly not normal! And, to my mind, pedophilia is a societal cancer that will only spread more rapidly if we in any way accept it as the norm.

To equate pedophilia to being gay is a huge disservice to the LGBT community. The gay people I know do not approve of children being hunted by evil-minded predators. In fact, many gay people I know were once preyed upon by pedophiles and actively fight against it happening to others. Of course, I also know straight people who were victims of pedophiles, as well, and they, too, are abhorred by what is happening in our society at this time.

Our children are our most precious commodity. They are our future. They should be our prized treasures and protected at all costs. Perhaps many in our communities should be less concerned about guns, which are actually a relatively small threat, and more concerned about the slime of humanity which is oozing from the darkness into the light under a false mantle of tolerance for all lifestyle choices.

Sorry, the sexual abuse of infants, toddlers, children, and young teens by adults is not a lifestyle choice. It is a horrendous criminal act and should be punished as such. Covering it up with a diagnosis of mental illness does not help the victims in any way, and probably only puts more children at risk. And, when I say “victim”, I mean the child and ONLY the child. I do not now and never will consider the predator/pedophile to be a victim.

So, while I have rejoiced this week in the presence of my grandchildren, I have been reminded of past horrors which still haunt family and friends who were victims of pedophiles. And, I pray my grandchildren will be spared ever becoming victims of such predators. We should all pray for our children. And, we should all vote for those who will protect them at all costs!!! Elections matter and issues like these matter most of all.
Suzann blogs at Wooly Mammoth.org

Maher defends pedophilia

Here is a jackass defending pedophilia. He's the same jackass who proudly claims credit for the downfall of Milo Yiannopoulos.

The pediophilia panic

I just got an extremely loud series of beeps on my cell phone. It was an Amber Alert, asking me (and every other owner of a cell phone in Colorado) to look out for a red Kia Sorrento. Ironic, because I was just reading a piece by Julia Yost at First Things, who writes that in the 1980s

Our mother was reacting to news reports that America was creeping and crawling with child predators. These were people undetectable by the casual observer but secretly organized in rings or cults dedicated to the violation of children, whether recreationally or as stipulated by satanic rites. Often they operated preschools or daycare centers as fronts for culling.

A new book by n+1 editor ­Richard Beck recalls this extraordinary popular delusion and the secondary delusions entailed by it: the fantastical orgies; the intricate high-reaching conspiracies; the magical ability of children to sustain gross physical injury without scarring; the pseudo-psychiatric theories of traumatic repression and recovered memory.

It was a strange time. Beck is solid on the history, chronicling several high-profile criminal cases with an emphasis on the nonsense. And he belabors an irony that cannot be belabored enough. His sarcastic title is We Believe the Children. During the daycare and preschool abuse panic, grownups were required to “believe the children,” or else be denounced for collaborating with evil. “Children never lie” about sex abuse, we were told. On the contrary, as Beck details, children could often be induced to tell untruths about sex abuse. Prolonged and harassing interrogation would do the trick; evocative psychotherapy, aided by hypnosis or psychopharmaceuticals, was a subtler method. Whatever it took to get the children to say what the grownups wanted to hear.

Beck gives much of his attention to the paradigm case, that of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Chapters on McMartin alternate with chapters on the various copycat cases that arose in small towns and great cities across the country. ­McMartin spanned the heyday of the daycare panic, beginning in 1983 and ­continuing for seven years—the longest criminal proceeding in the history of the United States.

The McMartin Preschool was well regarded by the affluent families of Manhattan Beach, until its seven teachers were accused of full-­spectrum child abuse. Prosecutors said the McMartin teachers had hosted orgies, on school grounds and off—sodomizing the children, demanding oral sex, lacerating them with bullwhips. They had cast the children in pornographic film and photo shoots. They had kidnapped the children to a California ranch, there to witness the slaughter of horses, and to a national park in Montana, and up in a hot-air balloon, and to a local car wash. They had committed acts of bestiality and levitation. They had flushed the children through sewer pipes. In catacombs beneath the school, they had donned robes and capes and celebrated satanic liturgies at which cats were boiled alive.

Law enforcement recovered no physical or documentary evidence: no pornographic films or photos, no satanic vestments, no bullwhips, no horse carcasses, no hot-air balloon, no catacombs. The children’s bodies bore no traces of physical trauma, except for minute anatomical variations (alleged “microtrauma”), later demonstrated to be utterly normal.

How had these bogus ­charges arisen? A schizophrenic woman, speaking for her toddler son, had placed a series of lurid phone calls to the police. (Her mental capacity would not become public knowledge until well into the trial.) Investigators fanned out. Then began the Chinese whispers in the supermarket aisle. McMartin parents began to quiz their kids: Did the bad man touch you? No? Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure?

The civil authorities enlisted a therapist, inexperienced but zealous in matters of forensic psychology, to extract allegations from reticent children. Using hand puppets and bully tactics, the therapist wrested from forty-one children the 321 florid counts of the indictment. ­Preliminary hearings ensued, and dismissals of charges, and trials and mistrials and retrials, and an acquittal, and two hung juries, and defections and elections of district attorneys, and the McMartin defense team carried on, until the list of defendants had dwindled to one, young Raymond Buckey, a surfer dude who had not seen the sun in years, whose charges were finally dismissed in 1990.

...Beck’s theory fails to account for the majority of false abuse allegations. Neither so lurid nor so stupid as the daycare nightmares, but vastly more numerous, were allegations of incestuous child abuse, which were all the rage in the 1980s and remained so well into the 1990s.

These cases relied on a therapeutic technique that had figured in a number of the daycare cases, namely recovered-memory therapy. This therapy was based on a dubious account of the operations of memory, whereby traumatic events cause instant amnesia (“repression,” in a misuse of that Freudian term). Memories of trauma exist in the unconscious, unreachable by the ordinary processes of recollection, but recoverable by an analyst. The theory and practice of recovered memory were discredited in the late 1990s—not before thousands of fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, and teachers had been jailed, sued, or just estranged over recovered memories of ­pedophilic abuse.

This phase of the pedophilia panic, which wrought far more destruction by the numbers than had the daycare and preschool cases, hardly seems an initiative of the Reagan administration for the restoration of patriarchy. Indeed, it proved extremely useful to feminists and theorists on the left. A feminist critique of domestic relations held that the nuclear family was a power structure set up to enable and conceal the abusive predations of men. For academic trauma studies, which draws on feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and other -isms, ­recovered-memory therapy recuperates the silences of alterity, over against the patriarchal signifying order. In academic theory or in clinical practice, down with patriarchy!

...Contraception has made children—once blessings and burdens—into optional luxuries. We still must sacrifice for our children if we have them, but when and whether we have them is for us to decide. Even a child that has been conceived may be disposed of if it is not desired. To an unprecedented degree, children today exist at—and for—our pleasure.

We are haunted by the knowledge that we have placed our desires before our duties to children. We know that children make transcendent claims on us. We know that we ought to be at their disposal, not the other way around. We repress the knowledge of our failings and compensate by insisting, rather too forcefully, that we do honor children and their transcendent claims. Seeking an occasion for this performance, we fantasize Someone Out There. This imagined monster subordinates children to his desire in ways we know we never would. His depravity incenses us, obscuring our more subtle sins.

...Pedophilia is popularly imagined to be an incurable mental disorder entailing uncontrollable criminal desires. (This belief lies behind our draconian sex offender registries.) Studies consistently show, however, that pedophilic offenders have a low recidivism rate compared with that of other criminals. Try applying this fact to any public controversy, and see where it gets you.

...We should rejoice that many children who are molested are not broken, and that many offenders will never offend again. Instead, we fantasize villainy and eternal wreckage. Indulging in hysterics over their safety and purity, we assure ourselves that though we have commodified our children, we will honor them if the stakes are high enough.

...We’re all repressing our contraceptive mentality. As Congress knew, there is no ­constituency for being halfway reasonable about child sex abuse. Until we place our duty to children above our own desires, we will have special reason to go on “believing” them. The pedophile will reign as our most feared and loathed criminal figure for some time yet.

Read more here.

Instapundit asks, "Obama's House Pedophile?"

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links to a report by Nigel Naquiss in Willamette Week about Obama's biggest fundraiser in Oregon, Terry Bean.

Terry Bean

In the past, Bean, a gay-rights pioneer and co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign, has been a strong Democratic booster and raised more money for Obama's presidential campaigns than any other Oregonian.
That fundraising prowess earned Bean visits to the White House, a trip on Air Force One and a prominent place at the president's side when Obama visits the Pacific Northwest.

But any participation by Bean in a presidential visit now could be embarrassing for Obama. Bean is currently under indictment, facing felony sex abuse charges in Lane County.

Last June, WW reported on Bean's tempestuous relationship with a former lover named Kiah Lawson. A lengthy criminal investigation followed the story, and in September Bean was arrested in Multnomah County and charged with two counts of third-degree sodomy, a felony, and sexual abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor. He faces an August trial date on those charges in Lane County, where his alleged abuse of a 15-year-old boy took place in September 2013. Lawson was also charged for his role in the alleged incident.

Terry Bean and Kiah Lawson - Photo courtesy Kiah Lawson

Bean’s attorney has told the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office that Bean is the victim of an extortion plot carried out against him by a former boyfriend, 24-year-old Kiah Lawson, a onetime cellphone salesman with a drug problem and a criminal record.

Bean says that last year he fell in love with Lawson. Bean paid him a $400-a-week allowance, put Lawson up in one of his homes and took him on international trips. Last fall, Bean brought Lawson to the White House and also introduced him to Obama.

In January, Lawson says, he discovered that Bean had a hidden camera in the smoke detector above Bean’s bed in his West Hills home. Lawson used this information to seek money from Bean, alleging that the camera captured videos “of at least a half dozen individuals in a state of nudity engaged in intimate acts with you.” Lawson claims he is in more than one video.

Records reviewed by WW show Bean recently attempted to settle the matter for $40,000 in exchange for Lawson turning over the images and refraining from disclosing Bean’s “alleged illicit sexual activities.”

That deal appears to be off, and last week Bean’s attorney went to the DA, alleging Lawson was guilty of theft and extortion, in addition to being involved in a wider range of criminal activities. The case is under investigation by Portland police.

Bean’s fundraising prowess reached its peak in 2012, when he helped Obama win a second term. According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, Bean raised $500,000 for Obama’s re-election. Obama thanked him publicly at an event in Portland that year. When Obama left Portland after a fundraiser, Bean flew to Seattle with him on Air Force One.


FLYING HIGH: Terry Bean and President Barack Obama on Air Force One in 2012.

Lawson claims that, as part of their relationship, Bean asked him to bring younger men to the West Hills house. He also says their relationship allowed them to have sex with other men, so long as the other approved.

On Jan. 3, Lawson says, he became suspicious that Bean had entertained a man whom they had met on a different dating site, Adam4Adam. He knew Bean had an extensive video surveillance system throughout the house; there were security cameras visible in places such as the kitchen, the foyer and hallways.

Lawson says he accessed the security system and thumbed through video images to see if he could spot the other man. There, he says, he discovered videos taken in Bean’s bedroom. They included Lawson and Bean having sex, as well as video of at least six other men engaged in sex acts at various times.

He made screenshots and later confronted Bean about the recordings, some of which appeared to date back months.

It’s a misdemeanor in Oregon to knowingly video-record another person who is naked without his or her consent if the person being recorded has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Read more here and here.