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My conclusions on the recent debate

Posted by Iron Marxist on 2010-May-24 04:56:19 EDT, Monday
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As one of the many pro-choicers on this board, and as a strong and serious proponent of civil liberties and constitutional democracy, I have come to some conclusions to clarify my position on these issues after my recent debate with one of this board's most distinguished anti-contact/anti-choice proponents. The initial thread was about seduction, asking what it was and why so many people consider it immoral or dishonorable, and this was sure to anger some of the members of this board's anti-contact and agnostic minority. However, the debate quickly erupted into the usual one over whether or not the AoC laws are justified, how those laws are defined, and what they actually mean. What follows are some of the things I have concluded on the basis of that recent debate, as well as many others I have engaged in over the past decade. I have striven to make them succinct and reader-friendly.

1) No truly free country should ever tolerate throwing someone in prison or censuring them in some manner if there is no evidence that they have caused an act of demonstrable harm to another person. The "it's better to be safe than sorry" mentality is utterly Orwellian and totally against the core principles of American jurisprudence.

2) A truly free country would prefer a guilty person to occasionally and temporarily go free than to risk throwing an innocent person in jail. The idea of throwing many innocent people into prison, or legally censuring them in some fashion, just on the possibility that one of them may have been guilty with no evidence to back it up is abhorrant to the very crux of democratic principles.

3) No draconian law is ever justified in a free society. It's never necessary to pass a draconian law to keep us safe; any perceived problem or threat can be handled entirely within the context of democratic ideals and by laws that do not require us to sacrifice any civil liberties. Draconian laws tend to be cumulative, as once we justify the passing of one, many others quickly follow in rapid succession, so that a constitutional democracy eventually becomes a borderline police state. We have seen this clearly occur with the sex abuse panic, the criminalization of anything that remotely suggests the expression of underage sexuality, and (on another note) both the War On Drugs and the War On Terror. The continued progression of these laws will negatively impact on all common citizens in that society, and any type of panic or emotionally driven hysteria plays right into the hands of the power elite. As such, no draconian law must ever be tolerated (this is precisely why I lost all of the remaining respect I had for Febri-Chan when he explicitely declared that he was going to support the AoC laws and didn't care how draconian they were).

4) One must always think with their reasoning faculties, never with their emotions. While everyone gets emotional from time to time, and humans are very emotional creatures, we must strive to contain them and not let them overcome our sense of rationality, otherwise even the most rational people can end up supporting laws that are entirely unreasonable and which hurt rather than help society. This is one of the main problems that the anti-contact people have; most of their arguments are based on emotion, not reason or logic.

5) The AoC laws were not designed to prevent younger people from being abused by older people; they were designed to prevent a form of mutually consensual sexual activity. Attempting to rationalize their purpose in a manner that goes outside their actual and original intention doesn't change this basic fact, nor does it justify the laws. Anti-contact people need to do some research and learn the original reason those laws as we know them today were implemented (and that they were the result of a social panic in Britain caused by factually deficient statements made about underage prostitution by infamous yellow journalist W.T. Stead in his "Maiden Tribute" series of articles during the 1880s).

6) No law is in harmony with democratic prnciples when it seeks to protect people from something or someone that they do not want to be protected from. This is exactly what the AoC laws are intended to do. Hence, they are incompatible with a society that is supposed to be based upon civil liberties and democratic precepts. It's frankly ludicrous to attempt to compare laws based on a Nanny State mentality (as the AoC laws are) with laws that are designed to protect people from things that they do not want to happen to them and which result in actual demonstrable harm, such as cold blooded murder, armed robbery, arson, battery, and actual rape. This is a fatal and utterly laughable mistake that the anti-contact people often make when arguing in defense of the AoC laws.

7) I fully support the concept of "small government" in regards to civil liberties and our personal lives. The only justifiable reason for the government's legal system to intervene in our lives is if someone is either causing demonstrable, empirically observable harm to another person or group, or if someone is attempting to infringe upon the civil rights of another person or group.

8) While it can be argued cogently that children need special protections, this does not translate into or justify special prohibitions. Children can be steered in directions that are not harmful to them by a combination of incisive education, guidance, and support, but they must be allowed to take emotional risks or they will be unable to grow as people and build the type of life experiences that they are frequently assumed not to have. Attempting to artificially preserve their state of inexperience or dependence on adults so that certain types of prohibatory laws against them can be justified is a form of extremely dirty political pool.

9) We must not pass laws in a free society that are based upon extreme mistrust of the nation's citizens. While it's reasonable to acknowledge that evil people with bad intentions do exist, assuming that everyone is a bad person with negative intentions off the bat without proof in regards to certain relationships or actions is a form of misanthropy masquarading as "realism," and should never be codified into law under a system that purports to be based on civil liberties and democratic freedoms.

10) Laws based upon assumptions rather than actual evidence are never justified in a free society. Assuming something without evidence to back it up doesn't simply "make an ass out of you and me"; it can easily result in judicial abuses that erode civil liberties and democratic freedoms, and when passed, they can become a precedent for other liberty-eroding laws. A free society must always consider everyone innocent until good evidence is provided to establish guilt, and guilt must never be assumed on a "just in case" basis.

11) The argument that "freedom is only an illusion anyway" is not a reasonable justification for draconian laws. Total, unexpurgated freedom is never desirable, of course, but that doesn't mean that a society cannot have as much freedom as possible. As noted above in a previous point, freedom can be extended to a vast extent, with only laws preventing demonstrable harm and the infringement of the liberties of others being justified.

12) No action should be criminalized as long as the important principle of consent was present, and as long as said action was not likely to enable one person to cause serious and demonstrable physical harm to another. This is why it's beyond silly to pass laws prohibiting seduction or any other type of simple persuasion, which is present in virtually all instances when physical intimacy occurs between two human beings.

Is there anything here that anyone would like to add? Or any other comments? I wanted to clarify all of my positions and conclusions, but I didn't want to get overly wordy or lengthy so as to prevent some people from reading this post all in one sitting, but I tried to be clear on everything. I hope I succeeded.

Iron Marxist

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