Sexual Fascism in Progressive America

2-23-2008 National:

Note: The writer ("PARIAH") remains anonymous because he writes and is politically active in several completely unrelated social justice movements. He fears that the shunning and marginalization he describes for those who write about this topic could compromise (unfairly) his other work.

Progressives in America are rightly concerned about increasing signs of fascism in this country, such as a so-called war on terrorism that allows massive invasion of privacy and wholesale imprisonment without charge; such as state manufacture of propaganda for its own people; such as the assertion that anyone who challenges government policies on these matters is a traitor; such as a "great leader" who puts himself clearly above and outside the law. They ought to be concerned also about another sign of the demise of American justice and human decency: scapegoating. One sign of fascism has always been the creation of a scapegoated class whom people are taught to fear and hate, and whose very existence demands a totalitarian state apparatus of surveillance and control. A class whom no-one would dare defend.

There is a class of people in America today, numbering two million or more, who have been utterly scapegoated, ostracized, demonized and shunned. There is no longer any defense available for these people. Almost no-one on the left or the right, civil libertarians or ordinary citizens, will defend their rights. They are regularly vilified with the most vicious and hate-filled language--language previously reserved for classes now protected: Jews, Blacks, homosexuals. They are fair game as targets of abuse and vandalism. They are subject to utter public scorn. About 600,000 of them have been rounded up and forced to register--many soon to be monitored for life with electronic bracelets and global positioning devices. Nearly 4000 have been locked up for life, not on criminal charges, but by civil commitment, and those numbers are growing by the day. The remainder are mostly in hiding, desperately afraid of sudden exposure and witch hunts by neighbors, fellow-workers and friends, whom they fear will suddenly see them as monsters beyond redemption. They are a class defined not by specific crimes (though they are accused of many offenses) but by their very being, their desires, their constitution, as allegedly broken human beings. Presidents and Governors call them "despicable," "disgusting," "incapable of rehabilitation or reform," "beyond help." They are loudly reviled as examples to be shunned by fundamentalist and bigoted preachers, but also by left-wing media, progressive community leaders and feminists.

Who are these scum? Arab terrorists? Muslim fanatics? No--those evil-doers appear almost benign when compared to this heinous mob. These are the most awful people in the world: SEX OFFENDERS! Worse, many are PEDOPHILES! In fact, these two terms become mingled. Jeb Bush recently alluded to all the sex offenders in Florida as child molesters, though fewer than 1/3 of those incarcerated in that state for "sex crimes" involved people under 18. Bush went on, "These are a group of people who are the sickest of the sick. They are truly perverts and it's not curable. Instead of civil detention, we ought to make sure...these pedophiles...are locked up forever."

Of course among these sex offenders are indeed some criminals who have caused extreme harm: violent rapists of adult women as well as children. A few of them have kidnapped, tortured or murdered their victims. Dr. Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins University Sex Disorders Clinic in Baltimore estimates that such crimes account for less than 1/10th of 1% of all sex offenses in America. His studies also show that fewer than 10% of child sex offenders re-offend--though recidivism is usually given as a reason for draconian measures against them. As child abuse experts point out, about 50 children are reported kidnapped and raped or murdered by strangers annually, compared to more than 3,000 children murdered by parents and other family members in non-sexual cases. Most sex offenders, says one therapist who works with sex offenders in a state prison system, are "Gentle grandfathers who made one mistake in judgment years ago and fondled their grandchild. Or lonely, geeky gay men--teenagers some of them--who sought mutual sexual release with adolescent boys. Or young female teachers who succumbed to the wiles of handsome adolescent boys or girls. Or young men who got drunk and pushed their girlfriends over a line that is now called date rape." Yet the media, police, prosecutors and politicians continue to insist that children are in dire need of protection from serial rapists and murderers. Two-thirds of parents surveyed said they feared their children would be kidnapped and or murdered by strangers. Facts simply do not matter when hysteria is involved.

Study after study of sex offenders--as well as the countless media exposés--insist that most sex offenders are ordinary men and women from all walks of life, indistinguishable from others in every way except their sexual desires or orientation. The New York Times recently published a sensational story about a teenage boy who went on line to entice more than 15,000 customers to watch his own pornographic images of himself. The Times reporter, acting less like a reporter and more like a crusading cop, coaxed the boy away from his life of debauchery, reminding him he would instantly switch from "victim" to "perpetrator" when he passed his 18th birthday. (Actually, those under 18 may be treated as perpetrators, too.) He helped get the boy to the FBI to close in on many of his key customers, whom the Times had further investigated on its own. These customers included police officers, lawyers, ministers, rabbis, social workers--and especially those who work with children and adolescents. Many also were parents and grandparents with ostensibly happy families of their own. Surely one sign that something is wrong with this picture is that the "heinous criminals" are otherwise law-abiding, decent human beings with successful careers and "normal" personal lives. No. With
scapegoating, such apparent normalcy is just one more sign of devious perversity.

The key ingredients of this scapegoating campaign are of course sex and children. "Nowhere," wrote Linda Williams in Children and Sex (1993), "is sexuality more feared in America than in the lives of children." (Williams has spent her professional career assuring that these ingredients produce repression.) The core demon in the campaign is the recently created category of "pedophile" (which does not predate the 1960s as a so-called scientific construct). Although defined by the American Psychiatric Association as persons with a dominant sexual desire for pre-pubescent children, the pedophile tag now applies to any person who every entertained a sexual desire or had a sexual incident, however minor, with anyone under 18. In some circles, the term pedophile is now used to put down any older person who has an affair or shows interest in younger persons-- 35-year-olds, for instance, who "prey on" 20-year olds. By the early 2000s, pedophile had become morphed with the still broader "sex offender," with even mainstream media free to refer to the feared and hated class as "pervs" and "perps" and "deviants."

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