it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…
A former … civil rights lawyer who once headed Virginia’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter was sentenced today to seven years in federal prison for buying child pornography that prosecutors labeled sadistic and masochistic.
Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, pleaded guilty in June to downloading hundreds of pornographic images of children as young as 4. Authorities said Rust-Tierney used a computer in his 11-year-old son’s bedroom to view the files, which included a six-minute video that depicted sexual torture of children, set to a song by the rock band Nine Inch Nails…
A federal magistrate who declined to release him in March described the images she viewed as “the most perverted and nauseating and sickening type of child pornography” she had seen in 10 years on the bench…
Several dozen supporters, including parents from the teams he coached, turned out for the hearing. Many sobbed as Rust-Tierney spoke to the judge.
Until his arrest, he had worked for 17 years as a public defender,
So, first off, was a public defender.
Next, was the head of the state ACLU.
Third, he’s got a hyphenated last name, which – unless you’re Hispanic – is strongly correlated with either you being a liberal, or your parents having been liberals. For a man to have a hyphenated last name, especially a man of his generation, suggests that he changed his name upon marrying – which is just a cultural thing, and one can easily imagine other cultures doing it that way – but in this culture, is even more strongly correlated with left wing attitudes.
So: I’m not about to attempt to make a coherent case (because I do not have enough data here to make an argument, and I realize that my passions are high enough that anything I do string together would not be an argument anyway), so I will just say that it is strongly my intuition that left wing attitudes often result from, or lead to, a unmooring from moral norms.
Even if I was attracted to such things, I’d always have in the back of my mind “God is watching, and He’s got an opinion on this matter”.
Non-theist conservatives likely say to themselves “Cultures tend to condemn this, and with out a ton of data explaining why, it is prudent to assume that there is some emergent wisdom in that view.”
Whereas if you’re a soft-and-squishy leftist, the cultural history does not argue against breaking taboos – cultural history is an argument in favor of breaking taboos.
And for theistic leftists God – if She exists – may very well want one to experience new things.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=…
The videos described in the complaint depict graphic forcible intercourse with prepubescent females. One if the girls is described in court documents as being “seen and heard crying”, another is described as being “bound by rope.”…
As the leftists say “if it feels good, do it”.
September 8th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Even without the benefit of religious morality, any well-adjusted individual would think, “this is an unspeakably dreadful form of abuse.”
We do seem to hear news from time to time about religious authorities guilty of similar types of cruelty. If a person is interested in participating in this form of media, do you believe that a fear of God is necessarily sufficient to dissuade them?
September 8th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
“strongly my intuition that left wing attitudes often result from, or lead to, a unmooring from moral norms. ”
Two words demolish this thesis; pediphile priests. This kind of thing happens on both the left and the right, with the religious and the non-religious. I think you are exposing a selection bias in your analysis, but even if, for the sake of arguement, you inital hypothesis were true, you have only seen corelation, not causation.
September 8th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I will not try to defend religious authorities engaged in similar crimes. I will suggest that the observed population of pedophile priests (of any Christian denomination, and I’m only limiting it to Christian denominations because I simply don’t have much experience with other groups) is much lower than the observed population of pedophiles in general society.
And I will hazard a guess that the observed population is lower in Red States and higher in Blue States. Not because liberals are out to Do The Wrong Thing, but because the non-judgemental attitude that liberals pretend to have seems to prevent a lot of healthy stigmatism.
A conservative reads the Scarlet Letter and says “if only the minister had been stigmatized as well.” A liberal reads the same book, and says “it’s a great thing we have welfare today” (I may be overgeneralizing, but try reading a few hard core liberal comments on the fact that 70% of black children are born to single mothers; you will usually see incredible mental contortions to avoid blaming the parents for having the child — if it’s anybody’s fault it’s the pro-lifers — and we just need a bigger social safety net, so send money now).
September 9th, 2007 at 12:13 am
” will suggest that the observed population of pedophile priests (of any Christian denomination, and I’m only limiting it to Christian denominations because I simply don’t have much experience with other groups) is much lower than the observed population of pedophiles in general society.
And I will hazard a guess that the observed population is lower in Red States and higher in Blue States.”
I would have to see some numbers before I agreed with either of these suppositions. These are statements which can, in theory, be verified with objective evidence.
September 9th, 2007 at 12:21 am
“Pedophilia is a particular type of compulsive sexual disorder in which an adult (man or woman) abuses prepubescent children. The vast majority of the clerical sex-abuse scandals now coming to light do not involve pedophilia. Rather, they involve ephebophilia – homosexual attraction to adolescent boys. While the total number of sexual abusers in the priesthood is much higher than those guilty of pedophilia, it still amounts to less than 2 percent – comparable to the rate among married men (Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests).”
http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/hudson/tenmyths.html
This is pretty consistant with other data, and the null hypothesis which suggests the rate in the clergy is generally the same as in the rest of the population.
As for the red/blue state hypothesis, I haven’t found anything specifically around this issue, but there are a number of studies debunking the “higher divorce and spousal abuse figures in red states over blue”, and instead showing they are equal across the population.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1281259/posts
September 9th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Hyphened names are more common in Europe and it may be the name he was born with. The Spanish are big on tracing their heritage through their last names.
September 9th, 2007 at 10:28 am
[quote comment="80360"]The Spanish are big on tracing their heritage through their last names.[/quote]
Yeah, I know, I made reference to that in the post.
September 9th, 2007 at 10:40 am
[quote comment="80234"]Even without the benefit of religious morality, any well-adjusted individual would think, “this is an unspeakably dreadful form of abuse.”
We do seem to hear news from time to time about religious authorities guilty of similar types of cruelty. If a person is interested in participating in this form of media, do you believe that a fear of God is necessarily sufficient to dissuade them?[/quote]
Certainly not.
My argument is only that “X tends to Y ; S tends to T”.
Humans are complicated. There are no simple rules.