Comparitive Perversion I

I am opposed to the death penalty as a matter of principle. Seeing as to how it is so frequently prosecuted in a manner that is clearly criminally negligent, I believe that contemporary society does not have the proper sense of responsibility to ethically invoke such a sentence.

That being said: I believe we should bring back the death penalty for child molesters.

That being said: there is a difference between child molestation and pedophilia that is being disregarded by the public at large in response to ultra-right and ultra-left wing hysteria and totalitarianism.

I have seen the two terms used synonymously in the press -- by the news outlets of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for instance, which I usually expect to know better -- often enough in the last couple of years to conclude that the current anti-pedophilia hysteria is just another witchcraze. My position on this issue is as follows: Not all pedophiles are child molesters, and not all child molesters are pedophiles.

And those two statements are not opinions. They are facts. To differentiate, we must first properly define a few terms.

1. A pedophile is a person who, through classical conditioning, has a sexual attraction toward prepubescent children; in short: a fetish. The pedophile commonly fantasizes about having sex with inappropriately aged partners, but has not yet put those fantasies into action.
2. A child molester is a person who has sex with an inappropriately aged partner, and such a person will fall into one of two categories:
   • Preferential child molesters; who are pedophiles putting their fantasies into action, and,
   • Situational child molesters; who have sex with inappropriately aged partners, but who are not pedophiles. Some rapists fall into this category.

As I intimate, however, the public is not differentiating. In typical reactionary fashion, the one equals the other, and since they are both the same, we don't have to use the proper terminology when referring to the more evil of the two. We can use the term for the lesser evil to describe the greater evil, and thereby equate the lesser with the greater.

This habit was almost certainly started by ultra-conservative religionists. Unfortunately, the press has picked up the habit as well. Probably since about the time in Great Britain, a couple of years before this, where the tabloids set off on a holy crusade to protect children and safe, homey neighbourhoods; a crusade that could have wiped a few individual sex offenders out of existence. The mob mentality sparked by this holy crusade caused the press to back off when a mob of hysterics showed up in front of one house to picket the occupant. At least one mob member carried a picket reading "Peados (sic) out". The high crime committed by the occupant of the house? She was a pediatrician.

And now the city of Lafayetteville has taken it upon itself to thoroughly vioate the rights of a person on the grounds that he is a convicted child molester, and, because of that, he does not continue to enjoy constitutional protections. Basically: because of his previous convictions, we are allowed to assume that he is guilty until he proves himself innocent, and the crime which he was summarily found to have perpetrated was thinking certain thoughts. That there can not possibly be any admissible evidence to support the charges in a sane and rational court is irrelevant. We don't even need to take this case to court. We can just pass a bylaw right here in city hall.

Child molesters are vile scum. No doubt about it. But either the system in a free society works, and it works to protect as well as to condemn everyone, or it doesn't work. And one of the tenets upon which the system is based is that you cannot be tried for something you didn't do. Including, alas, child molestation. Even if this John Doe has previous convictions, you cannot convict him of additional offences until he commits them.

Frustrating. Isn't it?

But the alternative is a literally Orwellian police state. We do not have the benefit of a Minority Report or Star Trek type society where you can be arrested for crimes you are going to commit. And even in Minority Report the issue under examination was: How do we know this system works properly so that we are using it responsibly? A Minority Report scenario, like our own reality, cannot be subjected to experiment. If a pre-crime report comes in that a crime is going to happen, you can't say: let's test the system by doing nothing and then correct for it after the fact. If you stop the crime, then you have no way of knowing whether it would have never happened if you did nothing. If you do nothing and the crime does happen, the system would have worked in that instance. But that is no guarantee that it works for every instance. The only real answer would be to allow a crime to happen and then go back and stop it when you have incontrovertible evidence that it will happen unless you intervene.

Of course, this is all speculation. Time travel of any kind into the past is an unexplored potential and is likely to remain so for the next few centuries if not millenia. So, let's drag this back on topic. What can we do about people like the Lafayetteville John Doe? Absolutely nothing unless and until he re-offends. And I mean physically, not philosophically. In my books, a crime is a physical action committed against another person against that person's will. Just thinking about wanting to do something is not crime. Plus, I firmly believe that if we are going to punish someone for a crime, the right person must be punished for the right crime. And if we want to get into thought crimes, then quite literally everybody, in keeping with the precepts of an Orwellian society, is a double-plus, ungood crime thinker or wants to be. We all have our prejudices and passions. We all have an equal capacity for hate and anger. We all fantasize from time to time about perpetrating violence. Even the society matron who says, "Oh! I'd like to slap her face!" My personal favorite fantasy is to push certain present or former elected parasites in front of a speeding bus and watch them being crushed underneath its wheels. In the mindset of the thought police wannabes, that makes me a murderer both de facto and de jure. The thing is, psychologists hold that fantasizing along those lines is good and healthy. It's only when a person tries to put those fantasies into action that he trangresses against society.

Unfortunately, the current popular concensus of reality is otherwise. If you think about a woman as a sex partner, then you have sexually harrassed her, even if she never knows about it. If you look at pictures of nude women, you are a rapist. If you think about having sex with an underage partner or look at photographs of nude children, then you you have molested them as surely as if you had physical sex with them.

Do we need to protect our children from molesters? Most assuredly. But the knee jerk reaction is: Something must be done. Not necessarily the right thing, but anything at all. No matter how badly flawed it is. Whip up the lynch mobs and strip the (fill in the blank) of their human and civil rights, because anything it takes is perfectly justified. This is necessarily a bad thing, because it diverts resources from protecting our children from the real threats. Those who do physically molest children.

In the case of this John Doe, he is getting psychological counselling to deal with his fetish. Will treating him as an outcast support that treatment or degrade it? If it degrades his treatment, as I believe it will, then he will be at a higher risk to re-offend yet again. Which means that the popular concensus of reality, as is almost invariably the case, is counterproductive. Instead of protecting children, it will actually place them in harm's way. I have no way of estimating how many resources were dedicated to the persecution of John Robin Sharpe, who apparently has never physically molested a child, but I do know this. Every man-hour dedicated to convicting him of thought crimes is one man-hour that was diverted from identifying and prosecuting those who actually do molest children. And the expenditures for due process could have been better spent on prosecuting real sickos and perverts.