...it's gradually been getting to the point where many individuals outside our community who have a sincere degree of respect for the notions of justice, civil rights, and democracy are getting fed up with aiding and abetting the witch hunting and routine violation of American legal principles and jurisprudence that occurs as a result of the "CP" issue. It's becoming increasingly clear that punishing people simply for looking at certain pictures, no matter how offensive or abhorrent our Western cultural upbringing conditions us to believe the idea of an adult finding anyone under 18 to be sexually attractive may be, has been eroding our democracy and pushing us towards a police state mentality and a bonafide surveillance state. Sooner or later, this was bound to cause many who take democracy seriously to "wake up."

In the past, many such individuals in legal positions have been too afraid to openly challenge the witch hunt, out of fear that they will be accused of all the usual things (e.g., "soft on child abuse," "pro-pedophile," "insensitive to victims"). But over the past three decades, the witch-hunting and fear-mongering over this issue has gone too far, as draconian measures inevitably do, and it's become increasingly evident that many more people than simply MAPs are being harmed and targeted by it. As is always the case when such measures begin to overreach for a while, honest people begin asking serious questions about the "wisdom" of these measures, and they don't like what they see when they do. What I believe we are witnessing here are the more obvious examples of the incremental backlash against this latest emotionally driven moral panic -- not only the matter of underage sexuality, but also the modern version of the old recurring white slavery panic that's occurring with the popular sensationalism and paranoia in the government and the media over the "sex trafficking" issue, which is really just a moralism-driven, re-framed attack on sex work (as made clear by a link to a great article from a former sex worker that Baldur provided the board yesterday).

Women remain a minority group despite the gains they have made in civil rights since the 1960s, and we see with the "sex trafficking" panic that no minority group is safe from having their rights taken away from them "for their own good." And many leading the charge are fellow women, which shows that ignorance and draconian attitudes to fulfill an ostensibly moralism-driven agenda are not limited to any particular group of people (e.g., white heterosexual adult males only). In fact, the MAP community have our own equivalent of the "Uncle Tom's", much as the mainstream gay community has always had. This proves that being an adult is no guarantee that your rights to live as you choose will be respected even if you limit your mutually consensual activities with other legal adults if your choices are morally offensive enough to large numbers of people. Such individuals get away with this nonsense within a democratic framework by carefully framing the words they use (e.g., "trafficking" instead of sex work, "sexual abuse" instead of intergenerational relationships even if mutually consensual, and the ever-popular use of the vague and often loaded term "exploitation" in regards to either, etc...). Note how the media often attempts to combine two separate moral panics and issues into a single one in order to consolidate allies and efforts to further the emotional impact on both. The goal of both panics is not to protect the "rights" of any group of people, but to protect certain moralizing attitudes and control human behavior by criminalizing any choice that those in positions of power do not personally approve of.

The bottom line: We cannot dismiss all Nons as "breeders" who are destined to remain hostile to either us, women's rights, or youth rights forever, because these draconian measures always overreach and go too far in time, and ultimately prove destructive to everyone in a democratic system. Prohibition of any kind has never worked or proven a better alternative than democratic measures to deal with any social issue, either real or perceived. Our true enemies will never be a specific group of people (e.g., teleiophiles), but the intangible attitudes like ignorance, moralism, hatred, intolerance, and draconian inclinations (and the latter even with the sincerely best of intentions). All human beings are capable of these attitudes, and all human beings are equally capable of overcoming and opposing them. We forget these things at our peril.