ADVOCACY

I have always recommended that if you read an SO/SA/SV article online, you also pay attention to the comments as well. The comments, I have said, give you an idea of how people (at least those who make comments online) are thinking as well as what they are thinking, and what the general themes and threads are and what the general level of discourse is.

What I have been doing in the past week is actually paying more attention to the comments than to the articles (and even making a few comments of my own where it looks like they might do some bit of good).

Thus I came across this article just yesterday.

I am not going to review the article here as is my usual habit. It’s a good one by a good author (a doctor who once worked in a prison in the UK) and you can read it for yourself if you wish.

Instead I am going to look at the comments. As you can see if you scroll down, I made several under the name of Pertinax.

I was responding on a thread where one commenter, good-hearted and concerned, couldn’t see the problem with intensifying State laws (in this case in New Jersey, originator and home of Megan’s Law and the infamous 1995 Poritz decision that moved Bill Clinton to erect a ‘national Megan’s Law’ in 1996) seeking to curb the specific type of ‘abuse’ that goes under the term ‘bullying’ (although who knows what the legal definition is, or what it will be tomorrow or next month?).

I was reminded that there are sincere and decent people who support all of the Mania laws, as they expand and intensify and expand some more.

It seems to me that there are two basic types of folks who support these things. Type G (for Goodie) is sincerely concerned, wants to see something done, and is closely focused on the problem itself – without any larger frame of reference, such as questions like:  What sort of consequences will there be? What possible unintended consequences that might be foreseen with some forethought? What sort of impact will such a law have on the government that has to enforce it? What sort of effect beyond the best-case scenario of simply achieving what its supporters hope it will achieve might or will this law have?

Then there is Type O (for Opportunity). This Type sees some advantage to be gained for him/herself. Perhaps there is an ‘angle’ to it in terms of making some money. Perhaps there is some status or just celebrity to be acquired. Perhaps, if one is a professional or paraprofessional, there are business or funding possibilities.

 As I just discovered today, for example, the (in-)famous S.N.A.P. organization (which has kept  the decades-long and seemingly sempiternal Catholic priest-abuse-victim ball rolling on and on, reputedly funded by kickbacks from the very tort attorneys who have made millions in fees representing the allegants – or allegators, I suppose ) is now in a tight spot.  It is apparently suspected of leaking information in a case that is under court-seal. Its boss is now claiming that – waitttt forrrrr ittttt! – there should be two standards of justice: one for evil organizations that promote “pedophilia” and another one for good organizations that are trying to stop all that (the similarities to current US government claims in foreign policy are blatantly obvious).

The bottom line being – it would seem – that ‘good’ organizations that lie or do bad things in a good cause against ‘evil’ organizations shouldn’t have to be held responsible for breaking the law. And the SO/SA/SV Community is verrrry familiar with this line of thinking, since it was deployed against the Sex Offender from Day One, although not with such outright clarity (but then, S.N.A.P. is now in a rather tight legal spot).

More on this is a separate Post. Apparently there is a gathering-conference up in Boston this weekend to celebrate – if that’s the word – the opening of Phase 3 (by my count) of the Catholic Priest Abuse crisis: the Phase initiated on January 2, 2002 (where does the time go?) when strategy shifted to bringing civil lawsuits against the bishops (and their deep-pockets insurers) rather than against the more or less poor-as-churchmice individual accused priests. Which the ‘Boston Globe’ reported as if it were all brand-new (in 2002!) and – O the times! O the customs! – got a Pulitzer Prize for.

Back to the advocacy thoughts.

Both the Type G and the Type O supporters (and these are conceptual categories, with many individuals blending elements of both within themselves) form a base for an ‘advocacy’. On that basis organizers go to some politician and make one of those ‘Godfather’ offers that a modern pol can’t refuse: if you give us the status and funding for our stuff, we will then use that status and funding to say really nice things about you with all the public access that your support has given us. On the other hand, if you don’t, we’ll hold a tearful and outraged press conference-cum-vigil outside your offices.

And thus a ‘deal’ is struck and the ball starts rolling. And who then can stop it? Who among the ‘players’ would want to?

On the basis of that rather narrow vision of what’s at stake (the advocates’ funding and the pol’s public image) any Larger Questions and Concerns are crowded out and ignored.

Blending thus with the larger advocacies and all their schemes, visions, and deals.*

So for example, in my Comments on one site I explain to one decent and concerned commenter who can’t see any problem with all these laws that you can’t use the criminal law as a substitute for a family and parents raising a child to live according to principles; you can’t deconstruct the family and parental authority and even any sense of morality and then expect that as those many many kiddies grow up with no control over their urges and desires and emotions and behaviors, that you can simply control them through the criminal law – making everything they haven’t learned not-to-do illegal and chasing all of them throughout their lives with the Sovereign police-power.

Nor can you simply use the criminal law for ‘shaming’ people who should be ashamed of themselves. A government that has the power to go after every shameful thing that individual members of a fallen humanity may perpetrate will have no bounds on it whatsoever (as we well know from the SO Mania Regime and the Registration laws).

And it would take a government exponentially more powerful and invasive than even the East German Stasi or the old Soviet NVKD and KGB to achieve this.

Which, as you probably have noticed, is precisely where this government of America is heading, both domestically (the Mania Regimes) and in foreign policy (invading Libya, for example, because that government’s troops were allegedly on Viagra and raping women with abandon).

At this point in time, the SO Mania seems to be dying down (this gathering in Boston is probably not only more of the same-old, same-old from a decade and more ago, but is also more of a Last Hurrah) in the civil world, it is migrating – as I said in prior Posts – to the military law system.

But as I also suggested, such awful inroads as the Mania is making there might – if the money holds out – make a comeback into the civilian world to further intensify the SO Mania laws.

Much remains to be done and the stakes are very very high.

As you might see in my Posts on the other site, the entire Framing Vision and Constitutional Vision have been quietly abandoned, replaced by what are essentially Marxist-Leninist principles. (Making, in the process, this country not so much the victor over Marxist-Leninist Communism but rather the heir to it.)

Indeed, it was precisely this quiet but lethal (and it still may turn out to be a fatal one) shift within the Beltway with all its deal-making pols and professional ‘advocates’ and their wagon-train of assorted cottage-industry Mania entrepreneurs  and law professors who think the shift has been the cutting-edge of world-historical reform and progress, that enabled the SO Mania Regime to get started in the first place.

You had to have convinced yourself that a totalitarian state (in so ‘good’ a cause) was a good idea before you could set up such a police-state regime as the SO Mania with its laws.

This New Year is going to be very important.

Let us so bear ourselves that it will be our finest hour.

NOTES

*You are invited to look at two longish Posts up on my other site, where I examine some of the basic elements of the long term radical-feminist strategies. Here and here. And if you hadn't already seen it, you might also want to see my Post on Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who made so much bad look like such a good thing.  

These Posts trace how the radical-feminists deployed Marxist-Leninist strategies to deconstruct the ‘hegemonic’ culture of ‘white, male, oppression’. This includes attacking any elements of that culture – including the Constitutional principles, democratic process, and – but of course – ‘males’. And this is where things become SO/SA/SV-relevant, since ‘sex’ is considered to be the basis of the entire ‘male hegemony’ and any way that one can attack males through the use of sex-charges contributes greatly to the overall Plan.

And that Plan is not merely to make life unconstitutionally hell for any SO or accused SO, but in a much larger focus to get rid of the patriarchy and the Constitution which – in the cadres’ view – supports and embodies it.

In case you want to put some substance behind what you might have been suspecting for decades now, I can humbly recommend reading the Posts and perhaps following up with your own research.

In that regard, let me take this opportunity to wish much peace upon SO’s and their families. I know that my approach is somewhat different from other SO sites in that I don’t focus on the travails of individual accused or convicted SO’s or their families. Please be assured that this is not out of any lack of concern.

Rather, it stems from my desire to a) demonstrate to the SO community that we are all engaged in much more profound work than the average bear would give us credit for – work which is vitally important not only to SO’s and their families but to all Citizens; and from my desire b) to somehow help the SO community gain the confidence of a Larger vision of what the stakes are, which perhaps c) might be of some use when those SO folks who meet with those in government power are trying to make their case on behalf of the SO mission.

ADDENDUM

I am including here a pair of the Comments I made on one of the site threads.

They are sequential, the second one responding to a reply-comment to the first one.

The first:

It's not what might be changed about the law. It goes much deeper than that.

The problem is using the criminal law against children. If they haven't reached the age of reason then the criminal law is (or should be) inapplicable as a means of dealing with them. This stems from the principle that to commit a crime you must a) provably commit the proscribed act and b) provably have the fully comprehended intention of committing the proscribed act.

Certain 'progressive' elements now want the law to pooh-pooh the 'principles' approach and just deploy the criminal law, like putting an automatic weapon on 'burst' mode and simply spraying the crowd.

This stems, I think, from the 'progressive' dilemma: having deconstructed the family and marriage and parental authority and largely the entire realm of pre-existing principles, while simultaneously having 'valorized' so-called 'total autonomy' for kids, they now have to deal with cohorts of kids who have been raised with no real sense of right or wrong or the ability to master their own urges and drives, let alone Shape them constructively.

The progressive-liberals’ solution - and it's not a good one - is simply to use the criminal law to replace the missing competences that should have been instilled by family and parental authority and education into the principled-life. Thus whatever 'actions' shouldn't be done, should simply be 'criminalized'.

But this dangerously engorges the police power of the State, already invited into the hearths and bedrooms of the Citizenry by the domestic-violence advocacy and persuaded to enact the eerily Stasi-like sex offense registration laws - and those are only the most obvious examples of the engorgement of the sovereign police power at the insistence of the Left (we had always thought that only the Right's law-and-order folk would invite the dangerous return to Leviathan, but over the past 25 years it has been the Left even more so).

I think this whole issue offers the chance to reflect on the larger and deeper concerns: there is a grave risk in all this use of the criminal-law as a substitute for 'raising children in principles' and as a 'teaching' tool and 'to send a message': the careful balance of the Constitutional machinery will be deranged and the tilt toward an invasive police state will begin.

And that tilt will also be assisted by a civil society already weakened by the weakness of its core source of vitality, which is not the government at all, but rather the vital social links that start with parenting and the family and extend out horizontally to others similarly engaged.

Progressive victimism - while perhaps well-intentioned - is as great a danger to the Constitutional balance as the old law-and-order Right of yore.

And the second:

The point about shame is well-taken. The world would be a lot better place if people didn't do things they would be ashamed of.

But what I am talking about is the criminal-law and in short order that takes us right to the profound matter of Constitutional balance and first principles.

And it is there that I would say we have to insist that you can't use the criminal law as a shaming device. There is too much at stake in terms of Leviathan and the engorgement of the police-power of the government. The Framers used the Constitutional machinery to limit the government.

They did this both because a) they didn't trust an expansive police-power in human hands and b) because they realized that government is not the core of a nation's or a polity's or a society's or a culture's life: that vital primary life is carried on by the people in their daily lives.

What has happened in the past 25 or 30 years is that under the mantra of 'the personal is political' the government has been invited into the most personal areas of every Citizen's life, and precisely with its police-power.

I can think of no greater danger to the Framing Vision.

Also, it would take a government with the knowledge and wisdom formerly ascribed to God to effect this type of authority wisely and without ill-consequence. And the Framers knew that no humans and no human government could be relied upon to exercise such omniscience as well as omnipotence.

If this sounds like a whole lot of 'basic stuff' and 'old stuff' then I can only say that this is precisely the level on which so much of the past 30 years' worth of laws were NOT examined and thus it is precisely here that we must look for why there seem to be so many problems with not only the specific laws but with the entire Constitutional machinery now.

And, since baaaad ideas tend to migrate in the Beltway, you can even see the results in foreign policy now, where the government claimed the right to invade Libya because women were reportedly being raped by Viagra-crazed troops and it is the right of any government to invade to stop such pain and outrage. On that basis, any government can claim the right to invade any other country.

It's funny how the constitutional night moves, but there you have it.