Your point about “love is not enough” is one I’ve made myself on here more than once, and strangely I’ve not as of yet been banished from the cult because of it. Maybe I missed that synod. The idea of this place being cultish seems to be another product of your skewed perspective, viewing the discourse here through your doubting prism, which blanks out several important facts about the makeup of this community. We have old hands who’ve been having the same arguments here for years, for one. It’s not surprising that some may feel that in a way they’ve had all the arguments, made all their points and so lose patience and are more dismissive than constructive when it comes to going over the same ground once again. It’s not fair on people who are still working things through and I’m not saying it’s a positive thing; merely that it’s not some cultish conspiracy to make sure their dodgy views go unchallenged. There will also be posters who carry on as if they were in a game rather than as if they were dealing with real people because it’s the Internet. GC is hardy unique in that respect.

Where we are unique is that we’ll get a lot of people coming here looking for a respite from the near-ubiquitous detestation they face from society at large. Some of them are sure to see people making ‘pro-contact’ arguments and draw moral support from them to counter that detestation. It’s in this respect that GC can be most closely (but still nowhere near credibly) described as cultish. If people invest in arguments that there’s nothing inherently wrong with kids and adults enjoying sex together and that criminalising it is fundamentally unjust, then even rational counterarguments may leave some fearing they’ll end up on shaky ground again if those arguments undermine their source of moral support. You can see the same thing happening with people who draw support from the other side of the fence too when they invest in the view of adults having sex with kids being wrong wrong wrong to prove to themselves that they’re not like the monsters in the popular imagination that they’re supposed to be like. And then, of course, thoughtful posters will occasionally go off the deep end for various reasons.

There are probably plenty of other relatively benign reasons too why people make ill-tempered posts. None of them imply that we’re beasts with just a veneer of civility coated over the top, or that we’re a cult, and other things that you say point to something sinister are also overblown at best, such as your implication that nobody got involved in “the jd thing” because it’s bad form to interject into a spat between fellow cult members. Plenty of posters with various degrees of establishment within this community make asses of themselves; sometimes people get involved but mostly they’re left to get on with it as it’s just viewed as par for the course, largely. Nobody came to my defence when I became the target of an intoxicated posters’ rants, despite the fact that I am more established on this board than he. Erich H. Krycek was tolerated until it became unavoidably clear that he was too much of a loon to be worth the trouble. Now somebody like that would be bad PR for a ‘pro-contact’ cult! Not one post or series of posts or even an unsavoury poster gives genuine authority to a fence-sitter to dismiss a whole viewpoint. Not here, or anywhere else on the Internet which, as others have already pointed out in their posts, is a pitiful indicator of how the same people would behave when offline. Only people looking on some level to have a notion confirmed or the chronically illogical are going to see an exchange on the ‘net and conclude that because Participant x was an ass while putting across a certain point of view, then the point of view itself is suspect.

I wonder if from the reasons above, the ‘emotional investment to counter detestation’ one hits closest to home with your situation, and whether it’s why you’ve decided the discourse here that supports what you invested in is cultish. You valued the activist wing’s outlook here to such an extent that you became a large part of it, yet simultaneously there was a nagging part of you saying ‘this isn’t right, this isn’t right…’ The results of an insecure-at-heart person kicking off as their doubts win out over their attempt to find solace in a particular school of thought in this community would seem to overlap quite a bit with your own recent conduct. Of course, the goings on inside your head that brought about your change in views are only known in full to you, and don’t matter massively at the end of the day as long as you put the views out there for debate. I look forward to debating them with you in this and future discussions ;)

Broadening from addressing just this community to how children would in general would benefit or suffer if they were legally allowed to consent to sex has already been done by other posters in this thread, so I’ll not say much on it now. I must admit though it’s funny to see you warning that children’s eagerness to please would leave them too open to exploitation while turtle raises the old bugbear of children eating only junk food if they could pick their own diets in the same thread. If only we could transpose this eagerness to please and use it to get them to eat their greens!