Remembering the good old days

When I was in medical school, our psychiatric professors said as soon as abortion was made legal, all our schizophrenics would get better, since most of them suffered from repressed sexuality and abortion would allow them to have sex.
When I was a doc in a small town, and there was a TV movie on incest, Newsweek had an article insisting that we shouldn't report incest to the police since a father who was jailed would result in family break up (not to mention that if he was jailed, he might be preyed on by other criminals).

When I had young boys, California decided non violent sexual predators could be treated out patient. Since we were on the interstate, we had one pedophile after another come through town, preying on our naive children.


I am not defending bishops who went along with the Johns Hopkins sex abuse programs and didn't report the cases of pedophilia, but back then, most cases never went to court, and the few that did usually resulted in more trauma to the children involved.  This was especially true in incest, or when cases involved someone with a relationship to the child (this would include teachers, cousins, and priests)...

So again our medical journals told us to be cautious in reporting such cases. And I know this is true, from two different hospital employees who confided their cases to me. So the best we could hope for was a plea bargain, so the girls wouldn't have to testify against a relative.

Ah, but who in the press remembers those "good old days"?

Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph has a couple posts on his blog about those days....the BBC is now being exposed for covering up a serial pedophile, and one of these days the US press will discover a similar problem with Hollywood.

His article on incest:

My article last week about the radical Left’s defence of paedophilia in the 1970s provoked all manner of paroxysms from today’s Lefties. How dare I blacken the name of Hattie Harman by pointing out that she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) soon after it campaigned for a more relaxed approach to sex with children?...

Another correspondent asked me to take a closer look at the NCCL Report on Sexual Offences (1976), which argued for a fundamental rethink on the subject of incest.
Yes, you read that right. Decriminalising incest was one of the pet causes of the brothers and sisters of the extreme Left represented by the NCCL. This is from its 1976 report:

“For hundreds of years the crime of incest has given rise to such intense feelings of revulsion that public discussion on the subject has often been ill-informed and irrational.” Note the distinctive finger-wagging.
“The present-day case against incest is firstly, that genetic damage may result in the offspring and secondly, that an incestuous union is disruptive of the union of the family.” Fortunately the NCCL was on hand to brush away these fusty prejudices.
“Recent studies” didn’t support the idea that incest caused genetic damage, it said, “and it is in contradiction to the practices of successful animal breeders. In any case the advent of reliable contraceptives and safer abortion weakens this argument.” So if a man had sex with his sister, he should use a condom or arrange for an abortion.
As for the effect of incest on families, “incest is not the cause but one symptom of a disrupted family… In our view, no benefit accrues to anyone by making incest a crime when committed between mutually consenting persons over the age of consent.” An age of consent which the NCCL wanted to lower to 14, incidentally, though only to placate public opinion: “It is both logical, and consistent with modern development, to suggest that the age of consent should be abolished.”

NCCL is now better known as Liberty and run by Shami Chakrabarti, Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and secular saint of the Guardian/BBC conglomerate...
But what happened to the woman who was general secretary of the NCCL when these stomach-churning views were expressed? Did she retreat into the grumpy subculture of ageing Marxists?
Not quite. Like a number of Callaghan-era hard Leftists, she reinvented herself as a New Labour loyalist. Indeed, the Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt (for it was she) served as secretary of state for health from 2005 to 2007. Though, to be fair, I don’t recall her saying a single word about incest.

---------------------------------------
an earlier article also points fingers at those who supported incest and pedophilia in the 1970's:

Harriet Harman is calling for an independent inquiry into the Jimmy Savile scandal. A key question, she says, is why so many alleged victims felt “they couldn’t complain”.
Well, one answer is that attitudes towards paedophilia in the 1970s were bizarrely relaxed – and not just in Catholic presbyteries or BBC dressing rooms. This was the era when activists on the radical Left lobbied long and hard for changes in the law to reflect a more “enlightened” attitude towards sex between adults and minors.
But that won’t be news to Hattie. In 1978, she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which – in its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee in 1976 – had said the following:
“Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.”
To be fair, the NCCL’s quite revolting parliamentary submission was written two years before Harriet joined its staff.  But one wonders why she wanted to work for an outfit whose views on sex with minors were known to be extreme, even by the standards of the day...

Ms Harman maintains that she always opposed child pornography, and is not on record defending belief in “harmless” paedophilia, though it was held by her employers while she worked there. But no such excuse can be made for Patricia Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 – i.e., during the period when it issued the notorious 1976 submission.
In 1982, the future Labour health secretary published The Police and Civil Liberties, in which she discussed the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, secretary of the Paedophile Information Exchange, for conspiracy to corrupt public morals. “Conspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof,” wrote Hewitt. The fact that O’Carroll was involved in distributing child porn “overshadowed the deplorable nature of the conspiracy charge used by the prosecution”.

-----------------------------------
a similar charge could be made for some of those at the forefront of the American intelligencia.