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?

Actually, if the Internet had existed in that time and the communists had gotten together in the virtual realm, things might've turned out alot more positively for them. You can never really predict the direction society will go based on either technology or social trends, but all of my instincts tell me that there is safety in numbers--united we stand, divided we fall.

Sadly, I’ve not come across one instance where the group labelled as witches were able to do anything themselves to improve things.

Then you aren't looking very hard. The blacks were your proverbial witches up until the early sixties. Granted, it wasn't the blacks themselves who won their freedom, but it was primarily the blacks who won their right to be equals. Similarly, the gays did much to further their own cause. In fact, in that case, they carried the brunt of the work. Like us, the gays more or less had to start from scratch.

Granted, these two groups weren't exactly the brunt of the kind of hysteria that witches and communists faced in the media, but many of the accusations against them were similar to the accusations against us: that they're all criminals and immoral, that they want to recruit "normal" people into their lifestyles, etc.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, the popularity of the KKK and similar groups was at a fever pitch, as high or higher than the anti-ped hysteria is now.

Most of what we’ve built up with this community is still pretty much out of the public eye.

How do you figure? Granted, what you see on the surface isn't all of it, but it certainly is the majority of it. This webpage may not be the easiest thing to get to, but its far from difficult to find if you're looking. The fact is, most of what constitutes the ped community is all surface, and that is my primary complaint, and, I believe, Lindsay's. What we do is present a high public profile without any real substance behind it. The public doesn't know that--they hear about the "vast underground network of pedophiles," and since they can't really verify that, they fear the worst.

My point is, they already think we're far more organized than we are, but they think we're up to no good. So, what harm is there in showing there is organization but that its oriented towards good deeds? I honestly cannot see how that would engender the kind of sentiment you suggest it will. The worst case scenario I can imagine is that absolutely nothing happens--no media coverage at all and no one hears about it.

Trust me--any media coverage of us doing charity work will register on the public as "peds doing charity work" and that's it, which is a win for us. The average viewer is not inclined to read too much into any particular story. You far overestimate the average media consumer's willingness to go beyond the bare facts, even when the story is obviously slanted. I say this as a person holding a degree in journalism.

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.

The problem with this is two-fold. One, you again underestimate the public's awareness of this movement. I have first-hand knowledge that we are front-and-center in the Culture War. The evidence is everywhere; there are visual and verbal clues in every public space these days. Why do you think the gov't and media spends so much time on sex offenders? They are afraid, and rightly so, that the public is coming over to our side of the fence.

The politics of fear and hatred can only be carried so far before people grow weary. Fear and hate are not the default emotional stance in people; their first inclination is toward acceptance and peace, the path of least resistance. We have only to be ourselves and to do so publicly, and with enough people doing that, we'd win acceptance easily. Now the debate over adult-child sex is another matter entirely, but we could easily win acceptance if we were willing to do the work.

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).

In fact, I am quite certain its precisely the opposite. Lindsay is right--the less we do, the further back we get pushed. That's simple logic; it's entropy. We must build up and maintain an organized and proactive community and fight to protect it, just as every other minority community has done. By doing nothing, we allow the antis to push us back and to continue to redraw the lines further and further away from our goals, but if we're doing something--anything--proactive, then we are making it much, much harder for them, and we will ultimately advance. We can be extremely passionate, we CLers, but we need to learn to channel that passion in the appropriate directions.

Look, the deal is, we are losing ground as it stands, and very quickly. If we don't start doing proactive things now, we might as well surrender to the inevitable and just kill ourselves now. What's the point? There is no more time to think about what we're doing--the time for action is here. How many more ridiculous laws and restrictions, how many more biased stories will it take to convince you that we need to act? While you and others sit and think and discuss, the media and gov't is pumping out more laws and propaganda. Point blank, there is NO MORE time.