Ugh. I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of doing something good that also benefits us, or even because it benefits us. A good deed is a good deed, even if I personally find some charity efforts to be grotesque ‘generosity contests’ in the way people give them donations. But if the donations do some good, then that good isn’t negated if some donors get their egos massaged. My worry with this is whether it could actually do a hell of a lot more harm to us than it brings benefits.

You’re right that groups subject to witch-hunts tend to get absolved. It’s history that does the absolution though. People look to the past and say ‘God, can you believe people were so irrational hunting witches and communists like that!’ Then they go out and demand tougher laws against paedophiles and get their kids microchipped. Witch-hunts seem to just gradually run out of steam. The witches don’t get together and make charitable donations and other public outreach efforts in order to educate the masses to put down their pitchforks. Could you imagine the reaction to RedCharity.net when McCarthy was still taken seriously? Sadly, I’ve not come across one instance where the group labelled as witches were able to do anything themselves to improve things.

Most of what we’ve built up with this community is still pretty much out of the public eye. We’ve taken our status as witches and tinkered with it and called ourselves Girl Lovers, to give ourselves an identity where we can find some respite. But to the outside, it’s still a witch-identity. We’ve seen what happens when one of those goes public (look at NAMBLA). As I’ve stated before, the Girl Lover identity just about does its job as a bulwark with which people can shelter themselves from the excesses of the hysteria of the outside world. Like all identity politics it’s deeply flawed, but it allows its adherents some kind of sanctuary. But I’m not at all happy about taking this identity and using it to try and engage the public. People will be more apt to disengage safety. To them, we’re still witches, and promoting a slightly more palatable flavour of witch is unlikely to get us very far, so we’d be unable to gain very much. What we could stand to lose though, if we took this identity public and tried to showcase our good side with it, is the chance of going unnoticed for a little while longer until we can come up with a better idea. “Girls Lovers”, annabelleigh.net, et al., would be in the public eye, not just “paedophiles”. It’s unlikely that people will see the difference between the two identities. The backlash from drawing attention to ourselves could see places like this chased off the Internet sooner rather than later. That would be a disaster, as we need all the thinking time we can get to figure out how to pull off a World First, and actually force people to deal with the fact that we aren’t witches (until we ditch the identity politics, I don’t see that happening).

A really crucial question is what affects have the permeation of social life by mass media had on the nature of witch-hunts. Are they easier to perpetuate? Are they easier to direct? Will people get bored with them faster (so far, it doesn’t seem like it)? What can the witches do if they can’t reasonably hide and wait for the damn thing to blow over? Until we have decent, rigorous answers to these sorts of questions, it’s best not to play our hand early. Call me risk-averse if you will, but I don’t think we should be taking any public stances--as any flavour of paedophile--that involve the lives of kids until we can be reasonably certain that doing so won’t further strengthen the still ongoing witch-hunt.

And about the pointlessness of a non-perv public charity that rejects paedo-hysteria: haven’t you heard of entryism ;) The fact that anyone could donate would a strength, as it allows such an organisation a great deal more leeway in criticising people’s hysterical ways. And it would be more likely to get results that would make people take notice due to its wider appeal and subsequent deeper pool of resources, and therefore would be more likely to have its views considered than a bunch of perverts. It would just mean more work.