The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past

Posted on | February 25, 2014 | 18 Comments

You might think polyester bell-bottoms, disco music and shag haircuts were the worst thing about the 1970s. WRONG!

The links that left Harriet Harman being forced to deny support for paedophiles date back nearly four decades when the Labour deputy leader was an official in the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Miss Harman, along with her husband Jack Dromey — now a frontbench Labour MP — and Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, all worked for the council in the 1970s.
In 1975, the campaign group — which lives on today as human rights watchdog Liberty — controversially granted official “affiliate” status to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a body which lobbied openly for child sex.
Tom O’Carroll, PIE’s founder and described as a “sexually predatory” paedophile, was put one of the Council’s working groups, and in spring 1977 he was allowed to make a speech at the Council’s spring conference.
During this period, the Council stepped in to defend paedophiles against “hysterical and inaccurate” newspaper attacks.
One leaflet sent by PIE to MPs claimed: “Paedophiles are ordinary, decent, sensible human beings, no more sexually depraved than yourself, and with a capacity for loving and helping children which is at present being repressed.”
The organisation also submitted a report to MPs claiming that “girls as young as four months can achieve orgasm”, and that four-year-old children can “communicate verbally their consent to sex”. . . .

You can read the whole thing at the Daily Telegraph.

Harman has expressed “regret,” which isn’t exactly an apology — the Daily Mail has been all over this story — nor has the deputy Labour leader bothered to explain how it was that pedophile “liberation” became the sort of cause sophisticated left-wingers were expected to support (or, at least, not condemn) in the 1970s.

Having written about this subject before (see for example, “She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science,” June 8, 2013), what is obvious is this: After the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s, after the success of “Women’s Liberation” and “Gay Rights,” at a time when pornographic movies like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were the subject of controversy, and when magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler were widely available, it was rather unsurprising that the search for the next taboo to transgress brought the Cultural Left to arguing for legalized “consensual” sex with children. So widespread was this idea that, during discussions of the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark, George Lucas suggested a back story in which Indiana Jones first had sex with his love interest Marian when she was only 11. As I said of that revelation:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The best explanation I can think of: It was 1978, the same year that Brooke Shields starred in Pretty Baby, and so this theme might have been considered “edgy” in Hollywood at the time. Also, maybe they were snorting up lots of coke and just got crazy.

Drugs can make people crazy, and back in the 1970s, there were lots of people getting high and indulging in trendy radical talk about the need to overcome sexual “repression.” Quite naturally, some of those people turned out to be creepy perverts.

The Creepy Perverts Rights Movement was a logical extension of the same arguments made for other “liberation” movements. The 1970s were a time when praising Ho Chi Minh and quoting Chairman Mao were commonplace among leftists. Are we supposed to be surprised that common sense and basic moral decency did not restrain young radical Harriet Harman? No more than we are surprised by her refusal to apologize now:

‘I’m not going to apologise because I’ve got nothing to apologise for. I very much regret that this vile organisation, PIE, ever existed and that it ever had anything to do with NCCL, but it did not affect my work at NCCL,’ she said today.

Except, of course, Harriet Harman is lying about that:

Miss Harman — the Council’s legal officer in 1978 until 1982 — wrote a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill, which sought to ban child pornography.
Miss Harman had claimed such a law would “increase censorship” and argued that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered.

So, the Council’s official affiliation with a pro-pedophile group “did not affect” Harman’s work at the Council when she was arguing against a law to ban child pornography? It’s just a coincidence that Harman’s Council gave “predatory” pedophile Tom O’Carroll a speaking gig at their 1977 conference? The same Tom O’Carroll who pleaded guilty to child pornography charges in 2006?

Nothing to see here. Move along . . .

By the way, one of the oft-heard claims of the Creepy Perverts Rights Movement is that children having sex — consensually, of course! — suffer no psychological harm as a result.

The other day, I saw a TV documentary about serial killer Aileen Wuornos: She started having incestuous sex with her brother when she was 9 and he was 10. By age 11, Aileen was selling sex to neighborhood boys for pocket change and cigarettes. She got pregnant at 13 and gave the baby up for adoption.

At 15, Aileen’s behavior was so out of control that her grandparents kicked her out of their home and thereafter she supported herself as a prostitute, while also accumulating a criminal rap sheet that included charges like DUI, disorderly conduct, car theft, assault, forgery, armed robbery and resisting arrest. Somewhere along the way, she also became a lesbian and by 1987 she was living with her lover, Tyria Moore.

By then in her early 30s, Wuornos supported the couple by prostitution. In 1989, Wuornos and Moore went on a murder spree, killing seven Florida men in less than a year. Moore agreed to testify against Wuornos in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

So, yeah, if pedophiles want to argue that “consensual” child sex is harmless, maybe they should ask Aileen Wuornos about that. Except she’s been dead for nearly a dozen years. She was 46 in October 2002, when the state of Florida put her down like a dog.

Nothing to see here. Move along . . .

 

Comments

18 Responses to “The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past”

  1. vermontaigne
    February 25th, 2014 @ 4:08 pm

    If there’s a very strong correlation between paedophilia and murder, it’s only because you have sociopathophobia.

  2. Jerry Beckett
    February 25th, 2014 @ 4:13 pm

    What do they have to be ashamed of? Paedophilia is only something to get outraged about if it involves a Catholic priest.

  3. RS
    February 25th, 2014 @ 4:46 pm

    Given that Progressives rally to the flag with cries of “Épater la bourgeoisie,” it’s no wonder that they gravitate to anything which smacks as edgy and countercultural. And, of course, with Progressives there are no strange bedfellows, so they are incapable of admitting any mistake or failure, no matter how horrific, as long as the end result helped push civilization to the brink. That’s what Nihilists do for fun, and the rest of us pay the price.

  4. Zohydro
    February 25th, 2014 @ 4:58 pm

    See the whole bloody list!

    labour25.com

    (h/t) “ViolentElizabeth” on Disqus at Breitbart)

  5. M. Thompson
    February 25th, 2014 @ 5:11 pm

    Sadly true.

  6. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    February 25th, 2014 @ 6:47 pm

    Murder, smurder, think of all the good music is inspired out of Pete Townsend and Pink Floyd. Buggery is a right of passage in the UK.

  7. RKae
    February 25th, 2014 @ 8:16 pm

    Wrong headline. Should read “The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile FUTURE.”

    We’ve seen this sort of thing from them before: show their hand a couple years early… back off… wait a bit… then try it again.

  8. On ‘Liberation’ And Nihilism | The Camp Of The Saints
    February 25th, 2014 @ 8:52 pm

    […] In discussing the case of Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who has been found to have been a vehement supporter of ‘pedophile rights’ back some three decades ago, Stacy McCain remarks: […]

  9. DaveO
    February 25th, 2014 @ 9:09 pm

    Lest we forget, Mark Thompson, current CEO of the New York Times kept the late Jimmy Savile, one of the BBC’s top entertainers and uber-predatory pedophile, in the chips and children. Thompson escaped the US of A just ahead of the law. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10512203/Former-BBC-boss-Mark-Thompson-lied-over-Savile-evidence-Nick-Pollard-claims.html

  10. kbiel
    February 25th, 2014 @ 10:28 pm

    Lucas only suggested the back story for Indiana? No, he had it inserted; just without the actual age. Remember these lines?

    Marion: I’ve learned to hate you in the last ten years!
    Indiana: I never meant to hurt you.
    Marion: I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it!
    Indiana: You knew what you were doing.
    Marion: Now I do. This is my place. Get out!

  11. RKae
    February 26th, 2014 @ 4:06 am

    Odd question: We read every day about NSA intrusion, monitoring, phone tapping, TEA Party groups getting harassed, and now a tiny contingent of Hollywood conservatives getting harassed…

    …anyone heard thing one about any pedophile rings getting busted?

    Shouldn’t all our fancy, new-fangled, nigh-illegal technology be reeling these pervs in on a daily basis?

    I read about one bust a year or so back, and then it fell off the radar after a single day. No follow up. We never hear any names. We never hear about the conditions the kids lived in, etc. And any time kids DO come forward (Franklin Scandal, Elm House, etc.) we’re told that they’re making it up just to attack rich and influential people.

  12. Anon Y. Mous
    February 26th, 2014 @ 5:34 am

    Townsend was in The Who, not Pink Floyd. Or are you referring to someone else in Pink Floyd?

  13. NeoWayland
    February 26th, 2014 @ 7:24 am

    That’s a really good point, but do the ends justify the means?

    Do we want the alphabet agencies to have an excuse for breaking the law? Even if it’s a really good one?

  14. RKae
    February 26th, 2014 @ 11:18 am

    Not my point. I’m asking: If they ARE breaking the law to harass all the people I listed, why aren’t they also busting pedo rings?

    There’s a reason they aren’t.

    They don’t want to. Our law enforcement and government are chock-a-block with people who fully believe that sex is for adults and kids, and (for the nonce) they must do it in secret “because of all those damned prudes and people who are afraid of sex.”

    Think of how they’d get the public on their side! “Hey! Isn’t our unconstitutional spying great! We caught all these pedos!”

    But no. They don’t.

  15. Golden Gate Suicides: 46 and Counting? | Regular Right Guy
    February 26th, 2014 @ 3:40 pm

    […] The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past […]

  16. NeoWayland
    February 26th, 2014 @ 3:58 pm

    I’m not sure I agree, but it’s certainly something to think about.

  17. News of the Week (March 2nd, 2014) | The Political Hat
    March 2nd, 2014 @ 4:32 pm

    […] The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past The links that left Harriet Harman being forced to deny support for paedophiles date back nearly four decades when the Labour deputy leader was an official in the National Council for Civil Liberties. […]

  18. British Group Claimed ‘Research’ Showed ‘No Identifiable Damage’ of Child Sex : The Other McCain
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 1:48 pm

    […] Party officials’ ties to a group that lobbied on behalf of pedophiles in the 1970s (“The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past“). The controversy has continued, as the dishonest excuses of officials are […]