Families of SOs Community Group
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After reading this review it makes me really want to read the book now. What an interesting take on the topic and look at the big picture.
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/first-they-came-for-the-sex-offenders/
I know I rag on conservatives and people like Coastie get mad at me for it. I have said numerous times that we need a liberal to win the white house so we can get another liberal on the SCOTUS. This author mentioned though that both the left and the right are causing harm, it was a very interesting concept and new to me:
"It is not only the repressive right that got us to this juncture. The left and feminism have done their part, too. Lancaster points out that the left’s “fixation on injury” is balanced in more expansive times by a politics of liberation. But these are not expansive times. Even social service and economic justice advocates who understand the systemic causes of people’s troubles are nonetheless hunkered down defending the statutory protection of favored constituencies defined by harm. Mainstream feminists, obsessed with sexual victimhood, have formed tight alliances with moral conservatives and the paternalistic and racist forces of law and order (anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminists can be thanked for those distortions in the granting of refugee status)."
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/first-they-came-for-the-sex-offenders/
I know I rag on conservatives and people like Coastie get mad at me for it. I have said numerous times that we need a liberal to win the white house so we can get another liberal on the SCOTUS. This author mentioned though that both the left and the right are causing harm, it was a very interesting concept and new to me:
"It is not only the repressive right that got us to this juncture. The left and feminism have done their part, too. Lancaster points out that the left’s “fixation on injury” is balanced in more expansive times by a politics of liberation. But these are not expansive times. Even social service and economic justice advocates who understand the systemic causes of people’s troubles are nonetheless hunkered down defending the statutory protection of favored constituencies defined by harm. Mainstream feminists, obsessed with sexual victimhood, have formed tight alliances with moral conservatives and the paternalistic and racist forces of law and order (anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminists can be thanked for those distortions in the granting of refugee status)."
Here is a key phrase of the article----------
" I sometimes think the panic will end only when every American knows someone whose life has been destroyed by it."
This nonsense will never stop until enough people who have had a family member or loved one affected by registration laws----this state of moral panic--- say, "No more. Enough is enough."
Nobody really cares until it happens to their family or a loved one. When enough families are affected, we will see change. At this point, the outrage will be so evident that the politicians and our leaders will have to do something.
That may be years from now.
rewdiazepam
and it's very, very true that until either enough people have been affected by all the BS or until enough 'important' people with power feel what we all feel and go thru it will continue for years!!!
Another great paragraph in a sea of great stuff written about this book:
"Lancaster, a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, says that in the process the criminal justice ethos has been transformed. Today, “the protection of innocence trumps the presumption of innocence,” the victim’s “rights” to comfort and “closure” elbow out the constitutional rights of the accused or convicted, and a lust for punishment has supplanted a faith in rehabilitation."
Wow, definitely true, and I'm sure it hits home for all of us.
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
We've come a long way since then. However, the anger produced by those feminists who grabbed onto the rape issue was just grabbed onto by others who promoted hatred. They used the feminist movement as justification for their hate. That is where we are now.
We've become a schadenfreude society. (If you don't know this word, look it up!) We looove to hate. Its just a way of not looking at ourselves. As the Bible says, its a way of justifying our failure to recognize the logs in our own eyes.
Someone told me once that our society is like a perpetual adolescent. American society is not yet grown up. We will grow up as we recognize that hating others does not make us love ourselves. As we learn to love ourselves, we will learn to release, or at least recognize and shift out of, our schadenfreude.