Terribly sorry to inform you, but this type of stuff happens with alarming frequency here in America. As I said, I spent 5 years as a counselor with Juvenile sex offenders, the overwhenming majority were victims first. Fact is, there are hardly enough placements to house all these cases. This is an area that I feel is totally under reported in America. You see it some, but few outside of the field really have any idea of the amount that really exists.

It's also noteworthy that the Ancient Greeks commonly condoned exactly what NAMBLA is promoting. The great dawn of Western Civilization was OK with it...It was pretty common in the Roman Empire as well.

Personally, I think it's sick, but, I can place it in a historical context, and accept the LAW in America that allows NAMBLA to exist. They have the same right to expand their opinions and speech as any of the rest of us.

Free Speech extends beyond the "social norm". That is an argument that I just refute. Free speech is Free speech. It is not dependant on the dominant culture.

Antny


I was going to write something similar, but then why recreate the wheel. But allow me to add this : Age of consent laws do have their problems. I can see why people think there are things wrong with them. Now when it is a 12 year old and a 30 year old, that's a pretty easy call. That is wrong. But what about when a 17 year old high school student has a 15 year old girl friend. That is a senior and a sophomore. If they are sexually intimate, when he turns 18 all of a sudden he is now a sexual criminal. It's ludicrous and States that have laws that don't have exceptions for age differences, maybe 3-5 years, are just as abhorrent and vile as the 30 year old trying to get their hands on a 12 year old. So age of consent... It's not like NAMBLA doesn't have a leg to stand on, I just disagree with their extreme views.

Sexual abuse and molestation are crimes and should be prosecuted as such. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it?

How can an organization legally exist when its express purpose is to promote an illegal activity, i.e. sex with minors?

As has been pointed out repeatedly, the express purpose of NAMBLA is not to promote illegal activity, but to make such activity - consensual sex between adults and those currrently considered minors - legal. NAMBLA is an advocacy group and their "express purpose" is to lower or eliminate age of consent laws. Period.

Much has been made of an article - one article - which appeared in the NAMBLA Bulletin in 1993, allegedly instructing members on how to identify "susceptible children" and "lure" them into sex acts (those quotes, by the way, are not from the Bulletin, but from the characterizatin fo the article). A second article, also from 1993, apparently offers advice on keeping an existing relationship secret - and on hiding pornography. As neither article has been reproduced anywhere, we have only the hearsay characterization of prosecutors to go by. Even if we do take those characterizations at face value, the Bulletin publishes ten times per annum - and has been doing so for thirty years. Assuming there are as few as five articles in each Bulletin, we are looking at one, maybe two, items out of six thousand. (And you know that if there was more to go on, NAMBLA's opponents would be trumpeting it from the rooftops.) Something tells me that the promotion of illegal activity is not the overriding concern of the organization. Until someone can produce a copy of this article and I can actually read it, I (unlike everyone else on the planet, it would seem) am going to reserve judgment.

NORML has been mentioned by way of comparison here several times - and I think the comparison is apt. Do some members of NORML grow and/or ingest cannabis? I rather expect they do. Does NORML advocate such illegal activity? No, they do not. Should every member of NORML be hounded out of the country because they're drug addicts? That would appear to be the reasoning. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine used to be a legal counsel for NORML. He told me that no one in their executive smoked marijuana (and none of their legal staff, either), which is why, I suspect, he eventually moved on.

Should any profession that involves working with children be allowed to check prospective employees for membership in this (and any other similar) organization?

No. Background checks for illegal activity - especially relating to child sex crimes - should definitely be the right of any organization which involves work with children (though whether even that should be grounds for dismissal, rather than alert, is another story). But simple membership of a legal advocacy group? No way. Even the case cited by DaffyGrl did not hold that the School Board would have had the right to dismiss Melzer merely because he was a member of NAMBLA. They justified the decision on the grounds of "the disruption caused by the public furor" over Melzer's membership. In other words, the storm of controversy which they created eventually justified their reason for creating a storm of controversy. In any other type of case, this would be considered persecution.

The other case cited in the first post was a case of entrapment. NAMBLA was not organizing or promoting this Mexican outing, the FBI was. It was the FBI which set up "a phony online company" and solicited men to travel to a fictitious rendezvous with underage boys. There is nothing to indicate that NAMBLA was in any way involved, apart from the fact that some of the men lured into the trap were also members of NAMBLA (at least, according to the article).

In neither case was there any "illegal activity" in relation to minors whatsoever. None. And just because someone here claims they heard something on the news once where someone said they heard that someone who might've seen something that someone associated with NAMBLA might have said once is not a sound basis for criminalizing the members of any organization.

Further to that point, there are an awful lot of people here mentioning a lot of purported "facts" about this - NAMBLA's raison d'etre is "the promotion of the victimization" of a "vulnerable population" - "such relationships damage their effectively helpless victims for life" - those "who are molested as children end up becoming molesters themselves" - "child molestation... is widely recognized as damaging to its victims" - "the members are specifically coached on how to infiltrate Boy Scout troops, the Little League or how to become Big Brothers or other types of mentors to young boys" - NAMBLA members "share resources and tips on how to elude, not so much the law enforcement authorities, but suspicious parents" - and not one of them cites a single source to back up a single one of their assertions.

I'm not saying that I doubt all of the above, but shoddy - or, in this case, non-existent - research has no place in such a debate. I'm mildly astonished that no one is calling these participants on this. (The one participant who did make such a request was met with an undocumented item in the coverage of a single case.) If I claimed that "It is widely known that Republicans eat their first-born" - and meant it - how long would such a statement stand before being widely questioned and derided? I'm wondering if, due to the unpopularity of NAMBLA's political agenda, people just feel as though they can get away with murder here. Apparently, they can.

Anyway, if members of NAMBLA - or anyone else - are engaging in illegal activity with minors, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law based on the evidence - especially if there is real abuse taking place. Otherwise, the last time I checked, we still had a First Amendment.

Is anyone else as conflicted about the existence of organizations such as these?

Nope. Like kimpossible, I am an advocate of the elimination of age of consent laws (and have written extensively about this elsewhere). This should be the position of any decent libertarian - but that is a separate discussion. In relation to NAMBLA, though, I should perhaps mention that in the 70s, I knew maybe a dozen members of the organization - about half of them minors who were also involved in various gay youth organizations. Should they be excoriated for "luring" adults into illegal activity?

I was fairly sexually active from the time I was about fifteen - and until the time I was eighteen, many of my partners were in their late teens or early twenties. Most of them were within about five years of my age, though I did have a relationship with a woman in her late twenties when I was sixteen. The last thing I would have wanted would have been for any of the people with whom I was willingly involved to have been arrested, convicted, jailed, murdered, and cremated with their ashes dropped into a septic tank.

I also had a girlfriend in high school who was nearly two years younger than myself. We continued having sex even after I turned eighteen. I guess my torched body belongs in the septic tank as well.

In any event, due to my own youthful proclivities, I contemplated joining NAMBLA myself - primarily to advocate changes in the law which would have protected my older partners. That is why everyone I then knew who was involved with NAMBLA had got involved. It's just as well I didn't join. I would now be being painted as a child molester. It is quite possible that NAMBLA has attracted a seedier sort since its foundation in liberation politics, but unless and until I see evidence of the group participating in illegal activity, I will continue to think of their members as themselves a soft and vulnerable target.

I have since come to the conclusion that NAMBLA is a stupid organization and that by focussing on "man/boy love" (rather than age of consent laws in general), they are leaving themselves open to perpetual attack and are defeating their own purpose. But if membership in a stupid organization is reason enough to fire someone, then there are lot more groups with much wider membership that I think should be cause for graver concern - Log Cabin Republicans, for example.

Anyway, "organizations such as these" - organizations established as lobbying groups - are not the problem. People who commit crimes are the problem - and, in some cases, the laws themselves are the problem. If I were a child molester, the last thing I would do is join NAMBLA and expose myself to law enforcement entrapment schemes. All the targeting and condemnation of "organizations such as these" is doing is driving those who might be genuine child molesters further underground.

And even if NAMBLA were guilty of waging an unceasing campaign on how to commit illegal acts and get away with them (which, as far as I can tell, they are not), they would still have the right to do so. Only the acts themselves can be prosecuted. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it?

I can't add much to what has already been said so eloquently. To answer the debate questions directly:

1. Because you can advocate any darn thing you please. This should be clear enough.

2. There seems to be a growing sense in the USA that any employer can demand anything from any employee. Given the fact that some members of this forum showed support for an employer who demanded that all his employees stop smoking outside work (and who plans to tell them to lose weight, too), a requirement that employees not belong to "bad" organizations may seem reasonable. This strikes a little too close to home for me. The fact that I belong to the Freedom From Religion Foundation may be seen as proof that I am not of "good moral character" (as required by the state licensing bureau of my profession.) So, no, I don't think that checking to see what organizations a prospective employee might belong to is a good idea. I don't see any way to prevent it, however.

3. No conflict here. NAMBLA is perfectly legal. What's the problem?

In general, I would like to say that the subject of pedophilia is one of those that tends to cause reasonable people to go into an emotional frenzy. This is perfectly understandable. Other such topics include drug abuse and terrorism and (in former times) Communism and witchcraft.

"Sting" operations, in which law enforcement agencies induce people to attempt to commit crimes that the agencies are supposed to prevent are never a good idea, and are not justified by The War On The Flavor-Of-The-Week.