AquaVita

[mod hat on]

Allright folks, let's keep the discussion focused here. I'm noticing a few comments on moderation and borderline insults and non sequiturs all around.

The subject at hand is clearly stated in the OP, if you want to deviate from that, feel free to start another thread as appropriate and within the guidelines of our sacred commandments, as it were.

But further snide remarks and such will not deign to further this thread in any way, and it will be closed if that's the road on which it continues.

Thanks for your attention.

Aqua-MF&P Mod.

[mod hat off]

yguy

I distance myself from that creep with varying degrees of emphasis whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Do you understand?

AquaVita

I would agree that perhaps it is important to distinguish oneself from a group of people who might otherwise detract from your good name(such as the honourable reverend phelps )

But I'm not yet convinced that pedophiles are really in any way connected with gay people. To me they are two very different types of people. Some Pedophiles may be gay, some gay men or women may be pedophiles. This doesn't mean that ALL are the same. Quite the opposite it would seem.

I think pedophillia is a serious problem that cannot be pigeonholed so easily. I just don't see how you are making the connection so simply. Gay men and women are attracted to their own sex. What does that have to do with children?

yguy

This, of course, is what I've been saying from the beginning. Not difficult to grasp, is it?

You can see that it is at least in a political sense in NYC. I don't know how many posters on the pro-"gay" side of the issue live there, but the sense I'm getting is that nobody wants to talk about it. Out of sight, out of mind?

Look at Dane Hall's complaint about the spinelessness of the organizers. How come they can't just tell these people to get lost? I think it's because the NAMBLA creeps are essentially spoiled children inside, whom their mother - the radical homosexuals collectively - can't bear the thought of disciplining. If they try to draw a line and put pedophiles on the far side of it, they do to them exactly what society did to homosexuals before they were accepted. They haven't got a moral leg to stand on.

The best thing the "gay" community could do for itself would be to boycott the parade in droves. I mean, what the hell does that parade do for them anyway besides give the world an excuse to look at them as freaks, even without NAMBLA?

Young man, your honest inquiry is an oasis in the middle of the Sahara. I don't know if I can do you justice, but I said earlier in the thread that I thought homosexuality, pedophilia and gluttony had a common root. By that I meant that all compulsive behavior is made of the same stuff, if you will. It's not that homosexuals are all latent pedophiles, any more than religious hypocrites are all latent Torquemadas. Homosexual activists can't say no to NAMBLA for the same reason Cardinal Law couldn't say no to pedophilic priests: excessive identification with and sympathy for the wrong in these people.

Godless Dave

How many puppies did you torture today, yguy?

contracycle

Careful, you gonna get edited

Abacus

The point is, even if you didn't, no one around here is going to assume that you approve of Phelps. That's why you haven't seen any threads titled "Attention, homophobes" calling YOU out.

Abacus

And besides, most pedophiles are heterosexual anyways. The heterosexuals on this board owe it to themselves to repudiate the pedophilic nonsense, lest some are given any more reason than they already have to draw any connection between heterosexuality and pedophilia.

Amen-Moses

So why isn't heterosexuality made of the same stuff? Surely it is just as compulsive a behaviour.

Amen-Moses

noli

I agree with you.

What happens with groups such as NAMBLA is that in their own minds and literature they promote the notion that pederasty and homoeroticism are linked.

If you go to the front page of NAMBLA's web site, there are two articles which help explain this a bit.

David Thorstad's speech:

The issue of love between men and boys has intersected the gay movement since the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the first gay rights movement in Germany. In the United States, as the gay movement has retreated from its vision of sexual liberation, in favor of integration and assimilation into existing social and political structures, it has increasingly sought to marginalize even demonize cross-generational love. Pederasty - that is, love between a man and a youth of 12 to 18 years of age - say middle-class homosexuals, lesbians, and feminists, has nothing to do with gay liberation. Some go so far as to claim, absurdly, that it is a heterosexual phenomenon, or even "sexual abuse." What a travesty!

Pederasty is the main form that male homosexuality has acquired throughout Western civilization - and not only in the West! Pederasty is inseparable from the high points of Western culture - ancient Greece and the Renaissance.

In Germany, in the late nineteenth century, pederasty was an integral part of the new gay movement. The first gay journal in the world - Der Eigene, published beginning in 1896 (one year before the formation of the first homosexual rights group, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee of Magnus Hirschfeld) - was a pederast and anarchist journal "for male culture" with an individualist anarchist outlook based on the ideas of Max Stirner (author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum). Its publisher, Adolf Brand, was a leading figure of the gay movement throughout the first decades, until the Nazis came to power. The journal continued to appear until 1933. Brand died in an Allied bombing of Berlin in 1945.

Another leading pederast and writer, Benedict Friedlaender, was also a leader of Hirschfeld's committee, until 1908 when he committed suicide. Not unlike today, the two groups - the pederasts in the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (the Community of Self- Owners) and the Hirschfeld group - constituted two wings of the gay movement. Although they collaborated in some things (for example, both opposed the sodomy statute, Paragraph 175), sharp ideological and scientific differences separated them. In uncanny ways, many of these differences persist in the quite different circumstances of today.

What is meant by that is in the US, Harry Hay is frequently cited as one of the founders of the homosexual rights movement. Hay epitomized the ideology that homosexuality is a separate entity amongst many which need to be liberated from the confines of society rather than included in society:

Hay had strong opinions and never pandered to popular opinion when he voiced them — whether he was attacking national gay organizations for what he saw as their increasingly conservative political positions ("The assimilationist movement is running us into the ground," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in July 2000) or when he condemned the national gay press — in particular, the Advocate — for its emphasis on consumerism. He was, at times, a serious political embarrassment, as when he consistently advocated the inclusion of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in gay-pride parades.

HAY’S UNEASY relationship with the gay movement — he reviled what he saw as the movement’s propensity for selling out its fringe members for easy, and often illusory, respectability — didn’t develop later in life. It was there from the start. In 1950, when Hay formed the Mattachine Society — technically a "homophile group," since the more aggressive idea of gay rights had yet to be conceived — his radical vision was captured in a manifesto he wrote stating boldly that gay people were not like heterosexuals. Indeed, Hay insisted, homosexuals formed a unique culture from which heterosexuals might learn a great deal. This notion was at decisive odds with the view put forth by many other Mattachine members: that homosexuals should not be discriminated against because gay people were just like straight people. By 1954, the group essentially ousted Hay.

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/...s/02511115.htm

Hay's own thoughts are highlighted on NAMBLA's site here.

Referring to his experiences with older men at the ages of twelve and fourteen:

We have allowed all this discussion of child molestation to go on and on, but we haven’t spoken as gay men. We should have been sharing long ago, because, after all, the younger generation coming forward…who are reaching out for that person for them to trust—we haven’t shared ourselves in that trust, giving it back to the younger generation…. We’re the ones who are going to be responsible for their coming to happiness and understanding. And we should be about sharing and beginning that responsibility. Thank you.

The tension between Hay's ideology of homosexual rights as liberation and those of inclusions are mulled a bit by this gentleman:

Having come to terms with S&M, I still have problems with NAMBLA and their reason for existing. The problem with the consensuality theory here is we usually think of "consenting adults". The North American Man/Boy Love Association maintains that the underage partners in their relationship are consenting. But legally, being children, they are not responsible for them- selves and are considered to be not ready to handle a sexual relationship. Probably the point could be made that some children are able to handle a sexual relationship and some cannot. I see this as similar to alcohol and its regulation - while some children could handle alcohol and some could not, it is best to limit the sale of alcohol to people who are legally responsible for themselves. The same argument could stand for sexual relationships.

However, keeping the status quo on sex with underaged partners does not help out the NAMBLA members. They obviously have as strong a sexual drive as anyone else, and nowhere legal to vent it. I see them as being in the same situation as the whole gay community before Stonewall. As much as society would like them to change their sexual drive to something more "appropriate", I'm sure that's just as impossible as changing from gay to straight. So what are they supposed to do? I unfortunately do not have an answer to this, but since I am not a trained psychiatrist and have never done research on this subject, I will have to take the views I have heard as correct and view a sexual relationship as unhealthy for a child.

But to answer my friend's question about Gay Pride Day Parades, yes, leather groups and Radical Faeries and, yes, even NAMBLA have just as much right to march in a parade as Dignity and the Spruce Street Singers. Now if someone actively would like to prevent any of these groups from fulfilling their goals, he has the option to lobby against their legal efforts. But no one has a right to prevent the group from existing, or from displaying their pride in a parade that celebrates it.

http://www.webcom.com/~erique/writing/pride.html

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Gays and homosexual rights activists who are advocating Inclusion (derisively referred to as Assimilationists by Hayists) generally do not accept pederasty as a natural expression of homoeroticism. However those whose roots are in Liberation are pretty much saddled with NAMBLA both historicly and ideologically.

Sorry for the long tangent, but I hope it adds to the understanding why there is so much confusion...and why such old-line centres of liberalism and of the Gay Movement (NY and San Franscico) still have NAMBLA in their Pride parades.