srparedon – editorials (archive)

April 2006

This month the US government’s sentencing case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” in the 9/11 disaster, was rocked by revelations of gross prosecutorial abuse. A government lawyer working with the prosecution gave witnesses transcripts of other witnesses’ testimony and coached them on what they needed to say and what they should not say. (Since Moussaoui has already been judged guilty­ thus never to be free­ the government’s effort to script the testimony against him is now solely in pursuit of his execution.) Upon learning of the misconduct, the judge in the case called it… Continue reading →

March 2006

Last month school officials in Brockton, Massachusetts, suspended a six-year-old first grader for “sexually harassing” a classmate. Allegedly, he put two fingers inside the waistband of a female first-grader during class. No further contact was alleged.

The case generated national attention with most commentary suggesting that it was absurd to charge a toddler with sexual harassment. Editorials, psychologists, and educators parroted the same line: six-year-olds don’t have an understanding of sexuality and thus it’s unfair to punish them for sexual harassment.

While such challenges to the school’s absurd policy are welcome, they are terribly… Continue reading →

February 2006

Last December, the New York Times ran a long story “Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid World Online.” It detailed how Justin Berry ran a gay-for-pay website starring himself for five years, from ages 13 to 18. Berry outlines how, after being offered $50 to take off his shirt shortly after going online with his first webcam, he learned to entice men to send more and more money, processed as online credit card transactions. Soon he was making, by his estimates, up to $900 an hour for masturbating for his online subscribers, and was… Continue reading →

January 2006

Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI, has directed that gay men, or any men with “homosexual tendencies,” are unfit to provide pastoral care to Catholic parishioners. They are, according to the new Pope, “objectively disordered”; therefore, he has ordered that seminaries scrutinize men studying to become priests and throw out those tainted with homosexuality.

Many Roman Catholics have reacted with horror. “If [this] is not a witch hunt,” Rev. Richard Prendergast, pastor of Josaphat Church in Chicago, told the New York Times, “I don’t know what is.”

Of course, Ratzinger should… Continue reading →

December 2005

In newspapers, television reports, and press releases, President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court Samuel Alito is billed as a “conservative.” Indeed, Alito boasts of his conservative judicial outlook, and pundits suggest his conservatism was a key factor in Bush’s nomination.

For most people, political conservatism embraces key principles: limited governmental intrusion into peoples’ lives and commerce, a commitment to individual freedom, a government reined in by checks and balances, and an appreciation for the stability lent society through respect for legal precedent.

By all these measures Samuel Alito is no conservative.

In… Continue reading →

November 2005

This past summer, a sex study conducted by researchers in Chicago and Toronto supposedly demonstrated that most of those men calling themselves bisexual respond to sexually-charged visual stimulation more like gay men than straight men. The implication, widely picked up on by both the gay and mainstream press, was that most self-reported bisexual men were either self-deluded or misrepresenting their attractions: “Gay, Straight, or Lying?” as a New York Times op-ed piece put it.

The study involved about one hundred men recruited from ads in gay and “alternative” publications. Study subjects fell into roughly equal… Continue reading →