Box Turtle Bulletin

Enraged

This may ramble a bit, and I’m sorry, but I was enraged yesterday — not annoyed, disgusted, or weary, but full-on enraged — and I need to vent it out.

The National Organization for Marriage is promoting the idea that same-sex marriage provides the best possible cover for pedophiles and opens the door to the “new” possibility of creating children expressly for the purpose of being abused.

As loathsome as that is, it’s not what enraged me. Before continuing, though, let me warn you that this posting discusses child sexual abuse and human trafficking.

NOM links to an article at the fiercely anti-gay mercatornet.com, which reports on two gay men who have been convicted of abusing a child born to them through a Russian surrogate.

The pair began sexually abusing the child when he was less than two weeks old. They also took him around the world and allowed him to be abused by at least eight men in several countries. Photographs and videos were uploaded to a paedophile site. The men told the child that the abuse was normal behaviour and coached him on what to say if he were ever questioned.

American police say that the child was created “for the sole purpose of exploitation”. “Personally… I think this is probably the worst [paedophile] rings… if not the worst ring I’ve ever heard of,” was the comment of an investigator from the US Postal Inspection Service.

This is foul and disgusting. How can it not break your heart. But the artitcle’s author, Michael Cook, somehow managed to look past the horror and see it as an opportunity to attack same-sex marriage:

Child abuse, sadly, is nothing new. What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused. The toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible…

Children are created as an industrial product in overseas baby farms. They have no mother. They are brainwashed to accept abuse as normal. Their owners are entitled to a presumption of respectability because of their status as a committed (and perhaps married) couple. And suspicions can be doused by treating them as homophobic paranoia.

Probably only a few of the gay couples who enter same-sex marriage will be paedophiles. But the ghastly story of Newton and Truong suggests that same-sex marriage will be the best possible cover for those who are.

Perhaps Michael Cook is primarily concerned with children, but his anti-gay bigotry is so strong that it overwhelms his ability to think these issues through. Or perhaps when he read the case his first thought was, “Hey, I can get a column out of this!”

Do you see why I call our opponents desperate? This opportunism in the face of a child’s tragedy isn’t just disgusting — it’s fakery as well, which can pass for truth only if you ignore basic, verifiable facts.

First, most abused children are victims of a man in a heterosexual relationship with a relative of the child, a relationship that grants access more easily than the rigors of adoption or surrogacy. This is the best cover for pedophiles. This is what gets ignored when you demonize gay men in committed relationships.

Michael Cook must realize that presenting one horrific case does not establish a trend or persistent danger. So he works hard to link it to something broader, and that’s what makes his article so outrageous. In the article’s comments I responded:

What a terrible article, reducing this child’s tragedy for an illogical and factually wrong attack on same sex marriage. For instance, this:

“Child abuse, sadly, is nothing new. What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused. The toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible.”

The first sentence, sadly is true. The rest is nonsense. Is the author saying that no heterosexual parent has ever brought a child into the world for the purpose of abuse? If so, can we see evidence? As for the idea that “the toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible” — does it not occur to the author that two heterosexuals having sex also makes that possible?

This sort of logical blindness, this apparent psychological handicap that makes some unable to think clearly or see the obvious when it the issue involves homosexuality, is exactly the reason the word “homophobe” was coined.

I was immediately attacked for making “no mention of the evil crime committed against a defenseless child.” Which of course is untrue. A stronger rebuttal came from another source:

So you want evidence of a negative do you? I don’t know what philosophy 101 class you took but you should ask for your money back.

While the notion that you can never prove a negative is nonsense, he’s correct to say I’ve set Michael Cook an impossible task when I ask him to prove no child had before been created for the purpose of abuse, if only because we can’t account for every child ever born.

All this means, though, is that Michael Cook is basing his entire article on an assertion that cannot be proven. How much more damning can you get? Well, a little more damning, as it turns out.

This led Cook’s defender and me into an argument over burden of proof (Does Cook need to prove that this is “new”? Do I need to prove that it’s not?).

But all that was moot when it became clear that children have been created for this purpose. First, I found cases like (WARNING: YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH): Steven Deuman Jr, who orally raped his 3-month-old daughter to death; a man from Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, who filmed himself raping his baby daughter; and Danny Friddle who began videotaping himself raping his daughter starting the day she was born. Do we know these men created children expressly to abuse them? I can only say that we have the same evidence that we have for the monsters in Cook’s article: that the abuse began almost immediately after birth.

Then one of our regular readers, “Spunky,” offered a solid link to stories of child exploitation and sex trafficking, which sent me off on a whole new bout of research, which led me to something blindingly obvious.

Slavery.

Children born into slavery become slaves. And slavery isn’t dead, of course. We simply call it by a new name: human trafficking. If you’d like to research this, use the terms “human trafficking” and “intergenerational prostitution.” But be careful. The stories you’ll encounter are what sent me from heated intellectual dispute into actual rage. I added this comment to the article:

I kept researching and researching, and I’ve discovered that this article is promoting an untruth: that “What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused.”

To say such a thing is to show callous disregard for children born to prostitutes who are forced into prostitution themselves. It’s been going on worldwide for years. These women are sexual slaves, and the reason their masters allow them to take a child to term (even if it means reduced earnings from the woman) is so that they can acquire a sexual slave. Google “intergenerational prostitution.” By implying that having children in order to exploit them is something “new” to same-sex adoption, the author is blithely ignoring the plight of these children around the world.

At this point, NOM’s Jennifer Roback Morse entered the fray — which was appropriate, since it through her NOM site that I found the article. She entirely missed the point:

Rob, you do yourself no credit here. No one on this thread, certainly not Michael Cook, would advocate in favor of prostitution, and in favor of prostitutes offering their children to their clients. No one on this thread is “blithely ignoring the plight of these children.” This site is on record as being opposed to human trafficking in all its forms. I feel sure I am speaking for the other commenters here on this point.

Actually, Dr. Morse does herself no credit when she sets up a straw man like this. Of course Michael Cook is opposed to human trafficking — at least, I’d certainly been assuming so. But that simply reinforces my point: Our opponents are desperate. So desperate that they’ll ignore what they know is true; throw out unprovable, easily disproven statements; and blind themselves to great moral evil — as long as it allows them to mount a sad, gasping, despicable attack against us.