I’m not surprised that you’d accuse me of understating the spat about the overuse of the term anti, and the low signal-to-noise ratio of a lot of the recent arguments resulting from that. You’re determined it seems to see it as far more significant than it actually is, and to do so you have to do quite a bit of ignoring of your own. Taf-kat, one of the targets of the recent misuse the anti label and a poster you cited by name as having been “right all along”, also was threatened with a cooling-off ban at the same time as Demosthenes.

No, I don't see the fight with jd and the lack of a response by others as a significant event in itself. As I've already stated a number of times (and which everyone seems to keep ignoring), it's one of the little things that haved added up to make one big thing. What I see on this board by many is indicative of a communal mentality that reinforces its own delusions, rewards those who support those delusions and punishes dissenters--in essence, a cult. And when two supporters get into a dispute, even when one is clearly in the wrong, no one is willing to get involved. This is a problem I've seen again and again here, and it inspires dreadful thoughts about what sort of things such people would do in a society where they had their way and adult-child sexual contact were legal. There is no reason for me to think that they wouldn't get together and reinforce their delusions both with themselves and with their child lovers in real life if they do so here.

I recently watched a film about a real Canadian cult leader who had several women under his thumb. He abused them every which way, and yet they stood by him and refused to rat him out, not even when he cleaved off the arm of one of the women. A couple of the women finally came to their senses and turned him in, but most of them still worship this guy and await the day he returns from prison. These are adult women, and suspect they guy--as insane as he was--did love all of these women on some level. But how much easier it would be to control children and teens in this manner!

You can pontificate all you like about how there would still be laws to protect them, but the problem is, alot of these situations begin innocently and legally and gradually progress (or rather, regress), and by then the abuser already has the person under his control and the damage is being done before the victim ever realizes what is happening. Even the abusers themselves do not always realize that they are being abusive until they've fallen into a habit of it.

My point is, love is not enough, and the constant mantra of CLers that they love the children (although no doubt true in most cases) does not guarantee the childrens' protection. There is enough self-delusion in this community alone to indicate that legalizing adult-child sexual contact would be a bad idea, but as I've also maintained, it isn't REALLY this community I'm worried about--it is the non-CLers who would pose as CLers, and you can bet they would come out of the woodwork if such things were legal.

I wonder if you’ve forgotten that a while back, taf-kat was the one guilty of accusing Dissident of being an anti as a result of refusing the grasp any of the subtleties of Diss’ stated positions. Taf-kat didn’t like one aspect of it, so Dissident was summarily dismissed as “anti-parent”. This all sounds rather familiar does it not, and yet taf-kat is the one who was “right all along”. Yikes.

Irrelevant. None of us are perfect. Perhaps that, in the end, is the strongest evidence of all against legalization of sex between minors and adults. Every relationship I've ever known of has been subject to failures of character on the part of it's members at one time or another. We should expect no different with CLers and children. The difference is, children are not generally emotionally equipped to either understand or handle such failures of character on the part of an adult. It isn't the good times that would potentially harm children--it's the bad times: the moments of anger, jealousy, bitterness, errors of bad judgment by the adult, horniness.

Children can often be sensitive to an adult's moods, as I'm sure you're quite aware, and they are eager to please. A child might give in to an adult's request for sex many times because they sense it is what the adult wants, even if they have grown to hate it over time.

A more sober approach would probably be to acknowledge that there is an inevitable divide in this community about kids’ place in society, and that from time to time posters on each side of the divide are going to make buffoons of themselves to varying degrees. The same posters then go back to making quite sensible points, and go back to debating rather than berating. Of course that wouldn’t lend itself quite so well to doomsday scenarios of open-minded fence-sitters transforming into rabid antis, or of the same people who occasionally lose their cool in cyberspace losing perspective in relationships with flesh-and-blood kids.

Ah, but it does. A small thing like immature attacks can very easily change a person's mind if they have had longstanding doubts to begin with (and I've already acknowledged that I have had such doubts--in essence, I've been on the fence for awhile but simply kept my mouth shut about it--until now.) And I AM a ped! Imagine a non coming here, seeing the people who seem to treat this whole thing as a game rather than the very serious issue that is (and such people know who they are)--would they not be justifiably horrified by that?

As for your second point, I disagree for precisely the reason that many CLers give to as a reason to legalize adult-minor relations--many CLers see children as peers. Which leads me to expect that if the gov't recognized them as legally no different than adults in most respects, they would treat them precisely as they treat their peers here . . . meaning if a child defied their wishes, they would verbally abuse them, or at the very least, subject them to guilt trips, the cold shoulder, etc., manipulating them to get what they want.

Your whole approach to this issue smacks of somebody nursing persistent doubts, and becoming fixated on largely insignificant negative aspects of certain posters who represent certain views, in order to validate your doubts (while ignoring the very same real and imagined flaws in the behaviour of posters whose positions re-enforce your doubts).

Like I said, I don't deny that I've nursed persistent doubts, and many of those have come about because of my interactions with this community, or rather, certain members of it. The most rabidly pro people here are, generally speaking, the ones I'd least trust with a child. They are convinced they are right beyond doubt, and they have exactly the kind of mentality that cult members have. Every legitimate argument has flaws, and a willingness by supporters of an argument to acknowledge those flaws is proportional to the maturity level and seriousness of those individuals, but few people here will accept that there are problems with their viewpoint. Therein lies the danger, and the heart of the cultishness of the CLer community. It has become more than an argument to these people--it has become a religion, and as such, subject to its own forms of mysticism. CLers' mystification of children is not necessarily any better than society's--it's simply different, opposite in some regards but mystical no less.

And I do not ignore the failures of those who are non-contact. I certainly have plenty of my own, and I've taken issue with taffy on some points. For one thing, the nature of his fantasies, which he has openly acknowledged do not take children's feelings or needs into account. I'll say one thing for tafkat--at least he's honest. I suspect there are others here who feel the same way but won't say so. tafkat recognizes that he MIGHT be a danger to children under the right circumstance if adult-child sex were legal, and he is wise enough to know that he cannot be alone in that regard. Thus, he is equally wise to oppose legalization and remove all temptation to do harm, both from himself and others.

And, while I certainly love children and would not want to willingly hurt one just to sate my own lusts, I will readily admit that I am far from perfect and certainly capable of slipping up. Nothing drastic, but it doesn't always take drastic acts to do harm.

Hence, “the jd thing” can be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, despite it having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how any of us would likely deal with sexual relationships with kids.

See my point above. I just don't buy it--sorry.

All that happened was that he was nasty to you, as per his posting style. If it was a poster holding views more along the lines of Lux or tak-kat who was nasty to you, would that have made your doubts shrink?

I seriously doubt it. And since you mention Lux, here is a good example of someone who is non-contact, but whom I wouldn't want anywhere near a child. In fact, his non-contact tirade came across to me as not the least bit genuine. I imagine the whole thing was done to impress the authorities who were about to send him up the river by demonstrating that he was remorseful for his actions and did not support the sexual exploitation of children. I had been privy to some activities by Lux before he was arrested that suggests he was very much a danger to both people in this community and to children, but I kept my mouth shut. But I soon realized he was a class A hypocrite, as are many religious types.

And now that the Code of Ethics of the CLer Faith has become all but set in stone here, I can see a great deal of hypocrisy running rampant in this community as well. This community IS a cult and I am now a heretic, as are Myrddraal, tafkat, Dante and anyone else who is non-contact.

You took issue that (quite rightly) nobody else bothered to get involved in your flame war with jd, and said that it was another indication that your doubts were valid. But it wasn’t just those here who want child-adult sex to be legal who never got involved. Nobody did, including by definition all the posters who share your doubts that legal child-adult sex would be a good thing. Why didn’t their refusal to waste their time on yours and jd’s flame war reflect badly on their views on a totally unrelated issue that you were having trouble with? You chose which side of the divide was wrong when both sides behaved in exactly the same way. This is about you.

No, I took issue that no one stood up and supported me when jd was clearly being abusive. It was not a flame war at that point--it was a one-sided attack and belittling on the part of jd. Once I started fighting back, I had no delusions of anyone else supporting me, else I never would've done so. I also got the distinct impression that several people were secretly amused by the whole thing and were even baiting me to some extent, which is what REALLY irritated me and made me question the loyalty and trust that so many people here rely on for their safety and security.

And that, in turn, lead to deeper questions about the kind of people who compose this community--when I tore away the veneer of civility, what I saw was an underbelly of secret jealousies, passive aggression, self-delusion and a whole gamut of other emotional insecurities and problems, and to be sure, I do not disclude myself from that assessment. There is no way we are ready to deal with sexual relationships with children maturely, and looking at humanity as it is (rather than as I wish it to be), I realized that it never will be. I have been fooling myself to think so, and so are the rest you.

This is about you.

Yes, but it's also about you, and everyone else here and beyond. It's about all of us.