ACLU priorities are bizarre
The Denver Post
July 25, 2001
Al Knight,
The American Civil Liberties Union obviously isn't very proud of its role as defender of the North American Man Boy Love Association. Nor should it be.
The ACLU represents NAMBLA in a wrongful death case arising from the 1997 torture, murder and mutilation of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley of Cambridge, Mass., but ACLU officials decline invitations to discuss the case. This policy can't be squared with the ACLU claim contained in court documents that the case 'raises profoundly important questions under the First Amendment.' The ACLU has been greatly aided in its desire to keep this case quiet by news media that seem uninterested in either the sexually motivated murder of young boys or lawsuits arising from such acts. The last story on the case in the Boston Globe was months ago, a brief item saying the ACLU would seek to dismiss the case. But when arguments on that motion were heard recently, the Globe printed nothing.
It is not the first time, of course, that the Globe's news judgment has been wrong.
The hearing produced a couple of very interesting items. For one thing, the ACLU asked the federal judge to 'gag' the attorneys for the Curley estate, saying they feared sensational headlines. That's a nice twist for a free speech group, but apparently the fear of inflaming public opinion was unnecessary. The case is still being ignored.
The second court development involved NAMBLA's attempt to show that it had no role in Jeffrey's death, that its website literature played no part in motivating the killers, one of whom, Charles Jaynes, had joined the group just months before the murder.
In making that argument, the ACLU is trying to overcome some very uncomfortable facts.
After the boy's body was found in a concrete filled container at the bottom of a Maine river, police found the most recent issues of the NAMBLA Bulletin in Jaynes's residence and computer records that showed Jaynes had accessed the NAMBLA website immediately before the kidnap and killing. There is other evidence that Jaynes obsessed about the topic of having sex with young boys and read and relied upon NAMBLA to provide support.
The NAMBLA website has been 'cleaned up' since the lawsuit was filed but it still contains a variety of offensive material on the twin themes that so-called consensual sex between men and boys is a positive experience and that laws imposing an age of consent should be repealed.
NAMBLA repeatedly claims that 'science' is on its side. Various studies are cited. One of them, in Germany, supposedly showed that while young girls who were sexually molested suffered from the experience, 'none of the boys experienced force or coercion and no negative outcomes were observed.'
Still another study reports that where the boys 'had a perception of freedom' there were no adverse effects from man-boy sexual relations.
The website also contains a variety of statements attributed to boys as young as 11, all of them glowing with praise for what are called 'man lovers.'
A so-called historical perspective written by a Dutch lawyer somehow manages to leave out the work of Greek philosophers who long ago recognized that a sexual relationship between a more powerful adult and a weaker child was morally wrong.
What the ACLU is arguing in the NAMBLA case is that NAMBLA was just 'talking.' The ACLU's problem is that there is case law to the contrary. In fact, one of the cases it tries to minimize involves a book on how to be a 'hit man.' The publisher of that book was successfully sued when someone followed the book's advice.
In any case, shouldn't it be up to a jury to decide whether and how much NAMBLA's literature affected the actions of one of the boy's murderers?
The federal judge, having heard the arguments, now has both the motion to dismiss and the request for a gag order under advisement.
Whether he rules to let the case go to trial or not, this much is certain. This isn't one of the ACLU's finest hours and from the ACLU's odd behavior one suspects that everyone associated with the organization knows it.
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