Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Certain members of the American religious extremist faction have started trying to get the force of Bush's eensy weensy "mandate" behind the idea of punishing the producers of sinful entertainment. But I have to ask, in light of:

It doesn't take 25 years of study to learn that sexual repression has a direct connection to rape and other sex crime, including sexual abuse of children. That's one of the first things you learn once you start studying sex crime. And the next thing you learn is that an obsession with punishing people is entirely unhelpful. It protects no one and just creates more sex criminals. So if you care about preventing sex crime, you absolutely do not run around trying to make people feel sexually guilty and repressed.

... I have to ask, But think of the children! why do these purported moralists want to increase sex crimes? Ironically using the phrase "harmful to children" as part of their justification, yet?

Oh wait, the answer is in the final sentence of that paragraph:

Only two kinds of people think shame and repression and punishment are the answer: people too lazy and ignorant to bother to find out where the problem actually arises, and people who are more interested in repression than in preventing sex crime.

Subvert their attempt to control the language of discourse. Point out that they're protecting nobody and ask why they're in favour of unhealthy sexual repression and an increase in sex crime that actually hurts people (as opposed to "crimes" such as owning more than five dildoes (illegal in at least two places, as far as I know (and no, I'm not going to re-rename my journal today to match that observation -- maybe some other time))).

Some of the criticism of that criticism in later comments in that thread suggests that declaring that the motive is malice is simplistic, overlooking the "or" in there: whether the leaders of that movement are maliciously promoting an agenda of repression or merely intellectually lazy, it's a good bet that most of the "grass roots" support behind them is swallowing rhetoric without chewing it first. We do not need to attribute to malice a thing that could be explained by ignorance or sloppiness in order to say that it is wrong; we need only to point out that it is wrong.