Nine Cowards

OK—I admit it. I’ve spent most of the morning contemplating this one sentence, drawn from The New York Times:

In the trial court, the state had argued that restricting marriage to a man and a woman would make heterosexual couples act more responsibly when they had sex.

The state is Utah, which for two brief weeks allowed—well, was forced to allow—1,300 same sex couples to marry. In a state that is heavily Mormon, that didn’t sit well with the majority of residents, and the attorney general of the state lost no time getting up to the US Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit. And they said, “no dice—we’re not giving you a stay until you can appeal.” And why? Here’s The Salt Lake Tribune:

According to the order, the state failed to demonstrate it was suffering "irreparable harm" as a result of the legalization of same-sex marriage and also failed to show it had a "significant likelihood" of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.

Right—that’s pretty clear. So then the state, desperate to get the ruling on hold, went to the Supreme Court. Nor is that word “desperate” only mine: google “Utah desperate” and you get the following Christian Science Monitor headline:

Utah, growing desperate, to ask Supreme Court to halt gay marriages

The request went to Sonia Sotomayor, who oversees the 10^th court. And she had the choice to rule on it alone, or give it to the entire court. And what did she do? Turfed it to the entire court. And they, late last week, finally gave Utah what it wanted. So for less than 20 days same sex marriage was legal.

And then it wasn’t.

In the process of getting to the Supreme Court, Utah dropped its insane contention that barring same sex marriage would force heterosexual couples to “act more responsibly when having sex.” Instead, according to The New York Times, they fell back on the old argument: children do better when raised in father / mother household.

What was the problem? Well, here’s the Times itself:

 Lawyers for the couples challenging Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage responded that the assertion “is not true.” For evidence, they cited “the scientific consensus of every national health care organization charged with the welfare of children and adolescents,” and listed nine such groups. The view of the groups, the challengers said, “based on a significant and well-respected body of current research, is that children and adolescents raised by same-sex parents, with all things being equal, are as well-adjusted as children raised by opposite-sex couples.”

Utah responded that it would not be swayed by “politically correct trade associations,” referring to, among others, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. “We are not ruled by experts,” the state’s brief said.

OK—I agree with the last line….

Finally, Utah cooked up one last argument. The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of diversity in deciding who could attend public universities, and so they announced something called “gender diversity.” Scratching your head? A man and a woman—that’s diverse. Two guys or two women? Not so much.

The three arguments are breathtaking in their absurdity. But does it surprise me? Of course not—the state is hardly going to come out and say the truth, which is that the idea of two men or women married is repugnant to them. But what does bug me? Well, here are the first two sentences of the Times’s article:

The Supreme Court’s order last week halting same-sex marriages in Utah was two sentences long. It was provisional and cryptic, and it added nothing to the available information on where the Supreme Court stands on the momentous question of whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Well, who am I to tackle the Times, and especially Adam Liptak, the author of the article? But I think this stay tells us a lot about the Supreme Court. And tells us that the court, like Utah, is also desperate. They know perfectly well that all of the states who have passed laws defining marriage as between a woman and a man have disenfranchised five to ten percent of the population. They know perfectly well that history will find it amazing that we could have believed in such a thing. They know that all but the most conservative of them would have to find the defense of marriage laws unconstitutional.

In fact, the “victories” in June were anything but. What did the court do? Nothing—they ruled on technicalities. And they’ll do it again—because the 10^th Court of Appeals put it pretty plainly: Utah didn’t have “a ‘significant likelihood’ of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.”

They’re buying time. But here’s the question: how will they get out of it this time?

The Silence Coming Out of Japan

For reasons completely obscure, I got it into my head to watch the documentary below about the meltdown at Fukushima, the Japanese nuclear energy plant which was damaged by the earthquake of March 11, 2011. The damage was not enough to prevent a cooling down of the reactors, and the plant was shutting down. Then the tsunami hit.

Anybody who has lived in hurricane alley knows—it’s not the wind, it’s the water. And unbelievably, the backup generators were located in the basement of the buildings. Oh, and while there was a sea wall in place to protect against tsunamis, it wasn’t high enough, since nobody imagined….

You remember what happened—or if you don’t, you can see it in the video below. It was, as my mother would deem it, a shambles. And then, the day after the tsunami, some 300,000 people were evacuated; the area around the nuclear plants to this day remains evacuated, and it will likely be years, or perhaps decades, before anybody can live there again.

There was, at the time, real concern about whether the world—not to mention the Japanese themselves—were getting the real information about what was happening in the plants. Part of that is that the plants had no electricity: workers were using car batteries to take vital measurements, such as radiation levels and pressure levels.

Ah, guys? Car batteries? This, as my brother would say, does not inspire confidence.

The plants were—and still are—being run by a company called Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which understandably was scrambling to put the best face on the matter. They were reluctant to say that the situation was essentially out of hand, and getting worse by the minute.

Into this picture sails—quite literally—the USS Ronald Reagan, who were first responders and who spent four days in the area. Here’s one account of what happened….

Meanwhile sailors like Lindsay Cooper have contrasted their initial and subsequent feelings upon seeing and tasting metallic “radioactive snow” caused by freezing Pacific air that mixed with radioactive debris.

“We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!” Cooper said. “My thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next. My menstrual cycle lasts for six months at a time, and I cannot get pregnant.

“It’s ruined me.”

In fact, the lawyer representing the sailors reports that of the 71, half of them are suffering from cancer.

The lawyer, you ask? Why do the sailors have a lawyer?

Do I really have to answer that?

Well, the sailors put in, in some cases, 18-hour shifts, and then left after four days. Then what happened? Japan refused them entry into the harbor. Oh, so did South Korea. And also, unbelievably, Guam. So the USS Ronald Reagan drifted around at sea for two and a half months.

Here’s the same source’s description of the ship:

Senior Chief Michael Sebourn, a radiation-decontamination officer assigned to test the aircraft carrier, said that radiation levels measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe at one point.

There’s always been controversy about TEPCO, which had been dumping and denying radioactive water it the Pacific for months; they later admitted it.

Which they may no longer have to do. Why? Because Japan has passed—apparently, the Internet decided to drift off somewhere…—a state secrets act, and what happens if a journalist or a leaker like Snowden blows the whistle? Up to five years in the can. Here’s Reuters on the subject:

Media watchdogs fear the law would seriously hobble journalists' ability to investigate official misdeeds and blunders, including the collusion between regulators and utilities that led to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

A probe by an independent parliamentary panel found that collusion between regulators and the nuclear power industry was a key factor in the failure to prevent the meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co's (Tepco) tsunami-hit Fukushima plant in March 2011, and the government and the utility remain the focus of criticism for their handling of the on-going crisis.

Tepco has often been accused of concealing information about the crisis and many details have first emerged in the press. In July, Tepco finally admitted to massive leaks of radiation-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean after months of media reports and denials by the utility.

Oh, and who gets to determine the secrets? Top departmental officials of the government.

The documentary below features one authority who says that everything is fine—the fish is safe to eat and the ocean is safe for swimming even in Japan. So not to worry, readers in California who might want to go to the beach.

Me?

I’d stick to the pool….

Death Comes to the Cafe

Don’t believe it when people tell you the subject is taboo.

Or maybe it is, and maybe that’s why people want to talk about it. At least, everybody to whom I’ve spoken about Iguanas has been fascinated.

“She was 89-years old, going blind, couldn’t move around well. But the worst was that she couldn’t write—she was a fine poet. And then she thought that she might be getting Alzheimer’s, and she hated the idea of rotting away in a nursing home.”

I was telling an oddly sociable stranger the nuts and bolts of my mother’s death—the death that I had chronicled in Life, Death and Iguanas.

“So what did she do?”

“Well, she decided to stop eating and drinking,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Story got a little more complicated than that,” I said, and went on tell him that my brother and I had wanted to help my mother to her end via a helium tank and a mask. She would place it over her nose and mouth, and then, with her aged, shaky hand turn on the valve. My eldest brother had balked, calling it assisted suicide, and threatening to turn us in to the DA.

Or so we had thought….

“So there we were, three feuding brothers and the problem of what to do with old Mother, as she once called herself. So the eating and drinking thing was all we could do, and initially I thought it would be a terrible death. But I was wrong; my brother was right. She had a wonderful death, having said goodbye to all her friends, and mended her fences. She died in my arms at her home in the woods of Wisconsin. And she changed everybody’s lives.”

“Wow,” he said, “that’s wonderful. Was it difficult for her to do?”

“I asked her in the middle of the fast, and she said ‘it hasn’t been too bad.’ And the best thing? I lost all my fear of death. I know now there’s a way out, and that I could do what she did, if it came to it.”

We chatted a bit more, and he left after a bit.

I tell you this because he also reacted as does everyone—by telling me about his experiences with death, in this case the death of his father.

“I never got to say goodbye to him,” he said. “So I remember the last time I saw him.”

“Happened that way with me, too…”

Well, I been floating about, hoping for some flotsam to write about, and then it hit—the death café! Here’s the skinny, drawn from the website:

At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death. A Death Cafe is a discussion group about death rather than a grief support or counselling session. Our objective is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'. 

The Death Cafe model was developed by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based on the ideas of Bernard Crettaz. 

Our Death Cafes are always offered:

 On a not for profit basis

In an accessible, respectful and confidential space 



With no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action 



Alongside refreshing drinks and nourishing food – and cake!

The first death café was given in London in September of 2011, and since then, there have been some 460 across Europe and the United States. Best of all, they have a tremendous website and an extensive guide as to how to organize your own death café.

Tremendous idea!

Cut the Bullshit

He does it every year, and every year I froth at the mouth.

The “he” above is Jorge Raschke, and the “it” is an event called “Clamor a Dios,” which thousands of Evangelicals attend, as well as local “dignitaries” and shameless politicians. None of that bugs much less surprises me—so what is it that makes me crazy?

It’s held on the steps of the capitol, the very building that I, an atheist, help pay to maintain.

“Do you think they’d ever let a bunch of faggots hold an event on the capitol steps?” said my friend Pablo, as we passed the event one year.

I saved my breath.

Well, the rumor on the street is that the event is getting less crowded every year, which may have prompted Raschke to turn up the heat. And that may be why he announced recently that—owing to his Godless agenda—the governor may be the victim of hit men brought in from outside.

And the gov should take this seriously because guess what? This isn’t just Raschke talking; rather, God him-or-herself revealed it directly to Raschke. Take a look at this….

“En las escuelas trataran [sic.] de enfermar a nuestros niños con la ideología de género, como ya está ocurriendo en el estado de California, donde ni los inodoros se escapan de esta agenda que acapara a las escuelas, colocando en peligro a nuestros niños”, adujo el evangelista. 

El controvertido religioso afirmó que el presidente Barack Obama lleva a la nación estadounidense a su peor destrucción y aquí nuestro gobernador García Padilla sigue ese mal ejemplo.”

(“In the schools they are trying to poison our children with gender ideology, as is occurring in California, where even the bathrooms don’t escape this agenda that monopolizes the schools, putting our children in danger.

The controversial religious affirmed that president Barack Obama is taking the United States to its worst destruction and here governor García Padilla is following the same bad example.”)

Good news—it’s not too late. According to the reverend, García Padilla has a chance: it’s late, but not too late. What does the gov gotta do? You got it—repent and apologize to the people of Puerto Rico.

And what, you ask, has the governor done?

Well, he and his party have come out in favor of LGBT issues, and this has put us all in jeopardy.

OK—my father got after me and made me watch 6 minutes of pretty dreadful eternity in which Raschke bangs the usual drum: the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle. And he drags out the usual bromide, too—he loves the sinner, but hates….

No.

You slimy bastard, you are NOT getting away with this. Not until every gay kid can come out and be sure that his parents won’t kick him out of the house. And if forty percent of the kids on the street are LGBT—about four to eight the rate of LGBT folk in the general population—well, who do you think is to blame?

You know, Raschke, what’s gonna happen to these kids? Sure, some will be OK, but a lot of them won’t. They’ll fall prey to prostitution, drugs and drink, and crime. And it’s not just the kids that you’re shooting down the drain, Raschke. It’s also families, and however misguided these families may be, is there any parent who could want his or her child out on the street, especially now, when it’s 30 below zero in my hometown, and for much of the rest of the nation?

Because those people listened to you, Raschke, and guess what? The Leviticus got in well enough, but the loving the sinner? Not so much.

You know, Raschke, my parents weren’t religious, but they were very socially conservative, and there were years when I was sure that if I told them I was gay, they’d be devastated. You know how that feels? Two things at least: first, you have some terrible sickness in you, a spiritual or psychological illness worse than cancer. Because the cancer isn’t you, and can be cut or zapped out. But being gay? That’s you, and you think that it’s the worst thing in the world. So you hate yourself.

The second thing? Since your parents would be destroyed if they found out you were gay, it means you’re not worthy of their love. You know, I once decided that it would be better for all concerned if I just faded away from the family, that it would spare my parents if I just disconnected. Surprise? My parents were distraught. You have two daughters, Raschke—could you live with yourself if for some reason one of your daughters drifted away?

Because that’s what we did for a long time. We came home as little as possible; we left our boyfriends and girlfriends at home on Christmas Day. And wondered if we’d still have them when we got back home.

Oh, and another thing about those days. It was generally better to glue yourself to the television, since the last thing you wanted to do was talk to the people you loved. Because yes, you still did, as much as a person who had stopped loving himself could.

The days were bad, the nights were worse. I didn’t have the luxury of a religion, but could I cure myself if I went to a shrink? But how would I get the money?

You have blood on your hands, Raschke—you and everyone else who has trotted out the self-justifying line about hating the sin but loving the sinner. Because telling somebody that the deepest part of him, the most essential part of him, is sinful?

I think that’s a sin.

Lady and the Monkey

It was a day when about all I could do was listen to the story of Lady and the monkey.

I could have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas; the trial of the son is in its 11^th day, and everybody is talking about it. Nor is it looking very good for Casellas, who is accused of killing his wife as she sat by the pool one weekend morning last year. The wife is reported not to have struggled against her assailant; a neighbor—though admittedly a junkie—reported seeing a man driving a light grey Mercedes. Nothing too unusual there, but how often do you see someone fling a quite rare and expensive pistol out a car window? Fortunately, the junkie knew what to do: he went down to the drug punto and sold it for a thousand bucks (and some marijuana) to the pushers there. Oh, and today’s news is that the bullets match the gun that Casellas reported as stolen months before the murder.

OK—so a guy whom a friend told me was seriously entitled even as a child is—apparently—not getting away with murder. Anything else happening on the island?

Well, the teachers are furious, as are the judges—both groups got their pensions slashed. So the judges did what judges do: go to court. The teachers went to two very predictable allies—the fire-and-independence breathing archbishop and the new mayoress of San Juan. And the archbishop instantly invoked the magic word: without teachers, he thundered, there is no patria.

Astute readers of this blog will know: anytime you want to talk independence covertly, the word patria is invoked. So the archbishop and mayoress are getting together at the Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico, along with assorted others, to forge together “amendments” to the bill.

It’s hard to imagine what amendments could be done to the bill, but it’ll fun to see. In all likelihood, the teachers will propose to increase their retirement to higher levels than they were before the reform, and will lower the number of years teaching to be eligible to retire from thirty to five.

People aren’t getting it—we’re broke, and one more degradation of our credit rating will sink us into junk category; the party, as one economist put it, is over. Nor is it just the central government: El Nuevo Día reports that 16 of our towns have unemployment rates above 20%; one town up in the mountains has a rate of 27.5%.

“Mommy, the teachers begin teaching the moment the bell rings,” said the son of a friend of a friend, whose mother had sent him for a year to Alabama to learn English. The child was astonished—in Puerto Rico, the teachers chat in the hall for ten or fifteen minutes before ambling into the classroom.

So the question on everybody’s lips is whether the two-day strike that the teachers announced for next week will really only be two days. Or will the strike be extended? No one knows.

That said, it seemed easier, yesterday, to hear the story of Lady and the monkey.

“I never liked that monkey,” said Lady, who owns the coffee shop and two other businesses, and she showed me a picture of it: it was barring its teeth in a truly frightening way.

Nor was it an empty threat; the monkey attacked and nearly killed Lady’s stepfather. Among other things, it carried the stepfather up a tree and then dropped him. So Lady’s mother had to go wrestle with the monkey, who was pulling the legs one way as mother was pulling the shoulders the opposite way. Eventually, the monkey let go, and mother dragged the stepfather into the house.

It was a brutal mauling, with large chunks of flesh….OK, I’ll spare you. And Lady, then seven years old, was stunned

There was a bar next door, and one of the patrons, who was completely sloshed, decided that someone had to dispense the monkey. This he proposed to do, if he could get out the door. To no one’s urging, he left the bar, found the monkey, whipped out a gun, and on the first shot got the monkey right between the eyes.

“He was a hero in the town, after that,” said Lady.

“Nonsense,” said Saúl, who had stopped by to use the Internet, and who had stories of his own. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Lady considered this, and went on with the story. A hurricane arrived—these things happen in Puerto Rico—a few days later, and since everybody wanted to be close to the hospitalized stepfather, and nobody wanted to be up in the mountains, their veterinarian offered to take the kids. And Lady was having a hard time of it—having frequent nightmares and flashbacks of the monkey.

And one night she had a particularly bad nightmare, woke up screaming and crying, and went down to get some milk—not knowing that there were two refrigerators: one for food, one for dead animals. So what did she see when she opened the refrigerator door?

Right—the monkey!

We go on to talk about animals—which ones can interact with humans, which cannot. Crows, says Saúl, are very intelligent; snakes are—well—snakes. And he once knew a guy who had a 20-foot long python, as well as a six-year old daughter. And one day, the python began losing weight. The vet, when consulted, was stumped, until he asked, “were there any kids in the house?”

“The python is making room for your daughter,” said the vet, “so tell me what to do with it, ‘cause you’re not taking it home….”

We sit and ponder this for a moment; Lady has to go off to paint casitas, the ornamental plaster house facades that she sells.

“It’s like a sit-com, coming into this place,” said one of the employees. “You know that the regulars will be there, in their usual places, doing their usual things.”

Lady comes by, kisses me, tells me, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”         

That Old Devil Agenda (reposted)

Apologies to my dear Readers: no new post today. But because I promised to give you updates regarding yesterday's post, I will repost this one from August 19, 2013, which deals with a similarly unfortunate topic: the anti-gay agenda.... Thanks for understanding, and stay tuned!


 
It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

Dutch Justice Redux

OK—I have email evidence that at 1:40 AM, I was busy occupying whatever mind I had at that time with the burning question: Was Prince Claus of the Netherlands gay, and if so, was he raping boys in the underground sex cellars of the queen’s personal lawyer, Frits Salomonson. Here’s a jarring excerpt:

I was brought to Salomonson in a black car. His house is decorated with lots of marble details. There was an enormous living room. On the right, a stairway down into the cellars. Leather hats, whips, chains, all that sort of things would hang on the walls. That’s when I saw prince Claus. I was under the influence of drugs and was penetrated. Mister Karel Maasdam abused me in Salomonson’s cellars.

Dear Reader, it has to be said: not everything you read on the Internet is necessarily true, though I can tell you that this blog is ruthlessly and insanely trustworthy. Therefore, I asked Mr. Fernández, who, in regard to the European royal houses, is a walking Hola magazine.

“It’s been rumored for years,” he said. As is the rumor that he had been photographed in gay bars in New York. Oh, and got thrown out of a diplomatic post somewhere or another because of a relationship with a man. And did I mention the rumor that the Dutch government is being blackmailed by Demmink, which accounts for the remarkably relaxed…

Wait, stuporous…

Try somniforesce….

What am I trying to say? That comatose people move faster than the Dutch judicial system when the vexing question of pedophilia strolls into view. Here’s what The Guardian had to say in a report from 2000.

Not just once but repeatedly, evidence had come to the attention of police in England and the Netherlands, that, for pleasure and profit, some of the exiled paedophiles in Amsterdam had murdered boys in front of the camera. Some of the evidence had been pursued. Some of it had been ignored. None of it had led to a murder charge. For a short while, the Bristol detectives thought they might be able to make progress in tracking down the truth; but when two of them flew to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1998 to pass on their information to Dutch officers, they hit a wall.

Terry had described the flat in Amsterdam where he had seen the video; he had named the owner of the flat who was, by implication, also owner of the video; he had provided the name of the man who carried out the killing; he had described events on the video in detail; he had provided the approximate age and the first name of the dead boy.

Dutch police said it was not enough: without the full name of a victim, they would not begin an investigation. Having fought their way through the swamp of inertia which surrounds British policing and prosecution of child abuse, the Bristol detectives had now hit the deeper swamp of virtual paralysis that afflicts its international policing. Within their own jurisdictions, there are now specialist paedophilia detectives - for example, in London and Amsterdam - who will work relentlessly to lock up predatory child abusers.

Yeah? Dutch police won’t investigate a murder without the full name of a victim? And by the way, what’s going on with the Dutch? Here’s the BBC from 2006:

A political party with a paedophile agenda has been registered in The Netherlands, prompting outrage among many parts of society.

The party plans to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and for legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals.

Well, it raised eyebrows and ruffled feathers. But despite efforts to disband the party, a group of judges ruled in April of 2013 that the organization had committed no crimes and could not legally be abolished. Oh, and by the way, guess who was on the board of directors.

A priest!

Yup—here’s Huffington Post:

The order's top official in the Netherlands, Delegate Herman Spronck, confirmed in a statement that the priest – identified by RTL Nieuws as 73-year-old "Father Van B." – served on the board of "Martijn," a group that campaigns to end the Dutch ban on adult-child sex.

Oh, and what do the Salesians—the order to which Father van B belongs—do? Here’s more from Huffington:

According to its website, the Dutch arm of the Salesians has 14 employees and 400 volunteers and aims to help poor children.

Stayed tuned for tomorrow, when I confidently expect to announce the news: man bites dog…..

Dutch Justice

Full disclosure—in the sixties I would have been called a practicing homosexual. I since progressed through the decades from being gay activist to a radical queer to a militant gay radical to….

…you get the picture.

Second disclosure—one thing nobody has ever been able to call me is a pedophile. There are highbrow and lowbrow reasons for this; the high being that I’m in a monogamous relationship, the low being that I’m not into kids.

A further disclosure: I visited the famous red light district of Amsterdam thirty-odd years ago, nor was it a visit that gave me any pleasure. Why? Well, I was in my late teens, and very much in the dark night of wondering about my sexuality. Nor did it help that I was with two couples—my parents, who had a ferocious Midwestern sense of sexual decorum, and a Dutch couple, who were just a bit rubbing their European sophistication in. So we strolled along, my parents rigidly looking straight ahead, the Dutch couple casually looking into the windows and commenting on the virtues or—perhaps more likely—vices of the women displayed there. It was a walk of perhaps three blocks that lasted seemingly hours.

For those of you with insufficiently lurid imagination here’s a photo:

The thinking at that time was that prostitution was an age-old vice; better to legalize it and regulate it and—presumably—make a little money off it. And what are we thinking now? Well, here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s article on prostitution in the Netherlands:

The Netherlands is listed by the UNODC as a top destination for victims of human trafficking.[22] Countries that are major sources of trafficked persons include Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine,[22] Sierra Leone, and Romania.

Or how about this, from the same source?

When the Dutch government legalized prostitution in 2000, it was to protect the women by giving them work permits, but authorities now fear that this business is out of control: "We've realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities", said Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam.[

Well, in a city where things got a little out of hand, the most out of handedness may be the case of Joris Demmink, who was or maybe is (my Dutch being rusty) the Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice. Oh, and who may have raped boys in Turkey in the 1990’s, as well as trafficked kids in Amsterdam.

Or maybe he didn’t because, guess what? Despite having six witnesses come forward, despite four police reports naming Demmink as a suspect, despite the statement of a Turkish policeman who was supposed to protect Demmink but instead pimped for him, despite a lawyer—Adele van der Plas—who has dogged him for most of a decade—well here’s what she said:

“There has never been a credible investigation into his behavior.”

She said the investigations simply are halted.

“The Dutch Ministry of Justice doesn’t take any child abuse case seriously at all,” she said. “All the pedophile rings in Europe have been investigated and some have gone to jail. Not in the Netherlands. The Dutch have been cited by the U.N. as a center of child trafficking.”

Nor was it just van der Plas who thinks so: here’s what Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey said in a congressional hearing last year:

That investigation has never happened – the investigations that have taken place have been a travesty and have done nothing to clear Mr. Demmink’s name. Rather, they have raised further questions,” he said.

So Demmink is or isn’t a pedophile. What do we know about him?

He’s the head of the Dutch judicial system….