In a comparative historical context, the child sex abuse hysteria (CSAH) is at the core of a new kind of ideology in America that started after traditional scapegoats such as racial minorities and women’s suffrage passed out of the reach of hate ideology into the realm of socially accepted participants of society. What remained to be persecuted were sexual orientations, thus the movement for sexual voice that was the lead up to the Stonewall revolution, the watershed event that demarcated gay rights as the next battleground for civil liberties and equality—a battle that has rightly turned in favor of homosexuals, granting them access to marriage, civil unions, privacy of sexual practice, and a general acceptance as part of America’s social fabric.
Anthropology has found that part of the functioning of communities is a social conscience that works as a type of mob mentality, and that part of the galvanization of this conscience is the community’s need for a scapegoat, a unanimous victim upon which to lay the blame for various social conflicts and psychological paradoxes. When Hitler took power in 1933, his success was based on his remarkable ability to pluck the strings of German culture’s psychological fears. Through a campaign of propaganda the avatar of German anxiety became the Jew, reinforced by a history already rich with anti-Semitic doctrine. Of course the Third Reich did not stop with Jewish persecution, it went on to develop a class of “social outsiders,” those sexual deviants, liberals, and political dissidents who challenged the government’s claim to absolute control.
One must wonder at the profound absence of ethical fiber that progressed from simple hate speech, to state sponsored propaganda, and finally the systematic genocide of an entire ethnic group, and other “undesirables”. And could such a hysteria manifest in our contemporary climate? The answer, of course, is yes, and the new targets are pedophiles, or MAAs, adults who are sexually and emotionally attracted to children. Like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, the factors involved in the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany are eerily familiar to what is at play in the current climate of child sexual abuse hysteria and the scapegoating of minor-attracted adults. The comparison is not hyperbole; it is a contrapuntal equivalent different only in time and subject.
How should the tragedy of the Holocaust have been avoided? It should have been addressed from within the culture, from voices of power stating that such atrocious actions were unconscionable. But the very act of speaking out against the hysteria of the community would have branded any German a “social outcast,” and then they too would have become targets of arrest and internment.
Likewise, in America, in Montana, we should take a lesson from history and understand what Jessica’s Law means in a movement towards a new type of “cleansing,” for indeed, the radical language of “cleaning up society” is exactly the rhetoric being used by the proponents of this bill. From east to west, across the United States, the horrors of Nazi Germany are taking a new form and rhetoric in our culture. Where the Germans first initiated a campaign of rhetoric against the Jews, so too has America focused intensity of hatred upon the sexual minority of minor-attracted adults, persons pejoratively known as “pedophiles.” As the Jews were forced into ghettos only to be later rounded up and exterminated, so too are minor-attracted adults being forced into “Pedophile-free Zones” (PFZs); they are being pushed to the outskirts of cities, denied access to parks, museums, and other avenues of communal benefit. Indeed, some states have even enacted laws that allow for the death penalty of such individuals, the ultimate crime a society can bestow upon a person for committing no crime at all, except the act of love.
Jessica’s Law should be frightening in the extreme, for it says that Montana has agreed to take part in the systematic genocide of a sexual minority. Just as the persecution of the Jews created a unanimous language of hate, so too does Jessica’s Law: Liberal and Conservative alike support this bill with violent passion, speaking in harmony about the “need to protect Montana.” Finally there is a bipartisan issue that transcends political parties and religious ideologies; however, sadly, the common ground is tantamount to that common ground that prevented dissenting speech in 1933 Germany, and eventually lead to the slippery slope which marks the darkest days of the Twentieth Century.
Montanans Against Jessica’s Law begs the public to demand a rational conversation about the real nature of child sexuality and adults who are attracted to minors. It has been noticed that the faces of minor-attracted adults knows no social, religious, or political boundary. Like homosexuality and heterosexuality, pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is part of the organic, religious, and political nature of the individual. Every great religion, science, and art has known its “pedophiles”; from the ancient Greeks, the Romantic poets, filmmakers, writers, politicians, theologians, teachers, professors, mechanics—one, among many common threads, is that pedophilia is part of the human condition. This, instead of the codification of hate, is the conversation we need to have. We can protect children from real abuse without wandering into the waste land of fascism, if only we are brave enough. We must move above and beyond superstitions and propaganda into a level of sensitivity about the real nature of child sexuality and pedophilia.
Thank you, at the very least, for taking the time to understand that there is another perspective to this conversation.
Sincerely,
Montanans Against Jessica’s Law (MAJL)
