Kiddie Porn at Work

Pornography is big business, and internet child porn is a big subset of that business. Here is a story from an Insurance industry publication in which an employer is found liable for the internet porn viewing habits of employees. The employee cruised kiddie porn sites at work. The employer told him to stop, but didn't report him to anybody.

In 2000, there were reports that the employee was acting “strange” in shielding his computer screen. Suspicions that he was visiting illicit sites were confirmed in 2001 by the IT director and by senior managers who found child pornography. They discovered the employee had been posting images of his 10-year-old stepdaughter to a child pornography site. Authorities arrested him and seized the computer, finding thousands of pornographic images, including child pornography.

The minor's mother sued XYC, alleging it had breached its duty to report the employee to authorities for his child pornography computer activity. The mother claimed the company's failure enabled him to continue secretly photographing the stepdaughter and molesting her.

Interesting detail not highlighted in this story, which is after all, an insurance publication: the man did not photograph his daughter. He photographed his stepdaughter. Research shows that children are in far more danger from unrelated men in the household than they are from their own fathers. And, children are in more danger from their mothers' boyfriend, than from their mothers' husband.

Do Teachers get a Pass for Child sexual abuse?

Here is a different child sexual abuse story. The different twists: the predator is a female teacher; she is getting a ten year sentence and the school district is not being sued, as far as I can tell, in any way shape or form.
One other interesting tidbit: the story mentions as an aside that the typical sentence for teachers convicted in similar cases is 18 months to 2 years.
Is this form of child sexual abuse less serious than what the priests did? Why aren't teachers who abuse children treated as toughly as priests? Just wondering.

A sixth-grade science teacher who was accused of having sex with a 13-year-old student has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Rachel L. Holt, 35, had pleaded guilty to second-degree rape. She sobbed in court Friday as Superior Court Judge Calvin L. Scott gave her the mandatory minimum sentence.

Prosecutors had wanted Scott to sentence Holt to the maximum of 25 years.

Holt was initially charged with 28 counts of first-degree rape.

Police accused her of having sex with the boy that many times during an intense weeklong affair. She was also accused of plying the boy with alcohol and allowing him to drive her car.

Holt's attorney, John S. Malik, said the sentence was much longer than what teachers convicted in similar cases got. He reviewed 40 such cases and found the average was 18 months to two years.

Score Another Point for Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza, author of The Enemy at Home, has been getting beat up over at National Review Online. Now, I have no expertise on the subject of Islam, what Muslims actually beleive, and whether we are likely to find any Muslim allies, and if so, of what kind. That is what he is getting beat up about. But, I do think his position on domestic politics is exactly right: the Left fears George Bush and the Right far more than it fears Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Whether the Left has an explicit handshake with the Jihadists, a wink and a nod, or just a coincidence of interests doesn't really matter. I think it is now quite obvious that the American Left wants America to lose the war in Iraq.
Be that as it may, the WSJ reported yesterday that the British Left is actually forming political alliances with their domestic Muslims. Read it here.

Violence Against Women?

The University of Kentucky Kernel reports that the Center for Research on Violence Against Women will get the opportunity to raise more money for itself. Whoops! I mean, they will get money to conduct a survey of violence against women, to prove that the subject needs to be studied and funded further.
Fox guarding the chicken coop anyone?
Will there be a Center for the Study of False Accusations Against Men? Don't hold your breath. Although, maybe some Duke University alumni could fund such a study at Duke....

Gender Imbalance

One of my newsletter readers picked up on the point in my Women's Studies speech where I pointed out the problems of educated women having no one to marry. She writes:

Was I the only one to say uh-oh, when Oprah decided to fund a highly unique education experiment with 40 girls in South Africa?

My very first thought was "Who are these girls going to marry?" If Oprah had really wanted to create an "idyllic" scenario for the girls, she should have had a boys companion school with 200 boys, so those 40 grown women could have a real choice of men. Men seem to manage just fine in marrying less educated women.

My daughter attends what used to be a girl's finishing school in southern Virginia. It was created as a sister school to VMI - and the plan worked well for over 100 years.

It is still politically incorrect to mention this, but yes, women find it easier to "marry up," than men do. In fact, women themselves don't like to "marry down." Since we aren't allowed to talk about anything assymetric between the sexes, don't hold your breath for the MSM to pick up on this problem.

Women's Studies

One of my newsletter subscribers sent me a post she did on the inanity of women's studies programs. A member of the Northern Alliance of Radio bloggers, Janet Biehoffer writes from the campus of Saint Cloud State Univeristy in Minnesota.
You can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Women's Studies at University of Virginia

I just returned from the University of Virginia, where I debated the topic "Are We Getting it Right? The State of Women's Studies." My opponent was Amy Richards, one of the founders of the Third Wave Foundation. The debate was jointly sponsored by the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW, an alternative to feminism women's group), Feminism is for Everyone (FIFE), College Republicans, The Virginia Advocate, the Jefferson Literary and Debate Society and the Washington Literary and Debate Society, in cooperation with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
I was surprised by how tame the feminists were. My opponent did not seem to have much "fire in the belly." I got no sense of what was important to her about being a feminist. For all I could tell, her view is that a Women's Studies class should be a combination self-esteem therapy and Great Books class. There were many students who identified themselves as feminists by wearing a little pink sticker saying, "This is what a Feminist Looks Like." I expected tough questions from the audience, given the number of them out there, but they were really quite mild.
The full text of my prepared remarks is on my other website, here.

Response to the University of Kentucky Kernel

Last month, I visited the University of Kentucky and gave a speech entitled, "A skeptical Look at Domestic Partner Benefits." That speech was well-received by many in the community, and may have even played some role in the ensuing debate in the state legislature.
However, the article in the student newspaper was not very well-informed. I have my doubts as to whether the author even attended the lecture, since she did not seem to know what time of day it was held. So I wrote a reply to the editor of the Kentucky Kernel (no, I'm not making this up: that is the name of the student newspaper.) But they have not published it as far as I know. So, to set the record straight, I am publishing the letter here.

To the editor,

I write in response to the February 15, 2007 article entitled, "Legislators, speaker 'skeptical' of benefits.” As the “speaker,” I consider myself qualified to know what I said and didn’t say. For benefit of anyone who was unable to attend the lecture, I have posted the entire talk, complete with footnotes, on my website:

http://www.jennifer-roback-morse.com/articles/domestic_partner.pdf

People can decide for themselves whether I “just talked about what I felt” or whether my factual claims have empirical support.

As for the questions from the audience, several students seemed to want to minimize the importance of the research on cohabitation. So let me reiterate: years of research on cohabitation among opposite sex couples has shown convincingly that cohabitation is not equivalent to marriage and is in fact, inferior to marriage. Domestic violence, including child abuse, is more common, and relationship satisfaction is lower among cohabitors than among married couples. In response to one question, I agreed that these effects are stronger among people with lower levels of education and earnings, but the independent effect of cohabitation persists even after taking account of income and education.

Perhaps the law students in the audience believe that as educated people of relatively high income, the impact of cohabitation will be negligible in their own experience. Maybe you think you’ll be able to dodge the statistical bullet. But the University’s plan would subsidize not only cohabiting couples among the faculty, but among the clerks and cooks and custodians of the University.

There is nothing “progressive” or “tolerant” about a policy that provides ideological gratification to the rich while harming the poor. Encouraging opposite sex cohabitation, a lifestyle known to be destructive, is bad public policy. The taxpayers of Kentucky should decline to pay for the University’s domestic partners proposal.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Roback Morse

Rejoinder to Glenn Sacks.

Rejoinder to Glenn Sacks

I want to take this opportunity to thank Glenn Sacks and the Gentlemen of the Fathers’ Rights Movement for their thoughtful response to my article “Are Dads Disposable?” I apologize for not responding sooner. But Glenn’s posting came just as I was leaving for an intense and exhausting travel schedule. This is my first opportunity to formulate a reply. I continue to believe that the lesbian custody cases will not prove helpful to the interests of fathers, quite apart from Glenn’s hopes.
Here are the crucial issues for the lesbian custody cases. How shall parental rights be established for a same sex couple who wish to jointly parent a child? For opposite sex couples, their marriage suffices to establish the paternity of the husband. The marriage law radicals and same sex marriage advocates want to apply a similar rule to legally valid same sex unions. The second issue is how much discretion shall family law courts have in determining parentage? I maintain that the “bright line” rules of the common law are good precisely because they limit judicial discretion. Instituting a new category of “de facto parents” parents” gives judges way too much discretion, and is completely unnecessary for meeting the needs of same sex couples who wish to parent together.
The common law for opposite sex couples held that a woman’s husband is presumed to be the father of any children born to her during the life of their marriage. In the Miller-Jenkins case, Lisa and Janet decided together to raise a child. But suppose instead that Lisa had come home pregnant with the child of the proverbial milkman. Who, besides Lisa, has rights and responsibilities to that child? Does Janet automatically have responsibility for the child who resulted from her partner’s infidelity? Does the father of that child automatically lose his paternal rights? There is neither justice nor common sense in applying the “presumption of paternity” to this case.
For opposite sex couples, that presumption of paternity was not intended to protect either the wife or the husband. The presumption was intended to protect the Marriage: under the presumption, the Marriage could survive the wife’s infidelity. In a same sex union, the presumption does not and cannot serve any such function. If one partner comes home pregnant by a man who is by assumption, outside the union, there is no purpose to be served by the law pretending something which can not be pretended, namely, that the other partner is the parent of the child.
For parental rights to be clearly established within a lesbian couple, some specific steps need to be taken, in addition to them establishing a legally recognized union and having sex. The paternity rights of the father need to be terminated. The parental rights of the second mother need to be established. Everyone would be better served by making these decisions explicitly, rather than implicitly. Glenn quite correctly noted that if a man donates his sperm to a sperm bank, he automatically relinquishes those rights. My point is that, one way or another, he must relinquish his rights before the lesbian partner can take up any parenting rights.
This is what the dissenting judge in the Washington state case was saying. The legislature has specified criteria for establishing legal maternity in the case of opposite sex couples. These criteria cover all the possible cases, including giving birth, sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy and of course adoption. Judge Jackson maintained that these criteria can be applied to same sex couples, without creating a new category of “de facto parent.” The couple lived together for several years after the birth of the little LB. Therefore, there was plenty of time for the lesbian partner to take steps to legally adopt the child. Since she did not, she was not a parent. No matter how nice she was to the little girl, no matter what the ladies talked about over the course of their relationship, she is not a parent. The court has no business making these detailed enquiries into the understandings of the parties. She didn’t adopt the child when she had the chance to do so. Therefore, we may presume that the birth mother did not give her consent to share parenting rights with her.
This would have been a superior ruling in both the Washington case and in the Miller Jenkins case. The two women would have had to confront the question of parentage directly. The lesbian partner would have had to ask herself, do I want to adopt this child and have all the responsibilities that entails? More importantly, the birth mother would have had to ask herself, do I want to allow this person to adopt my child and share all the legal rights of parenting that I have?
One may reasonably suspect that in both the Washington case and the Miller-Jenkins case, the birth mother was reluctant to assign parental rights to her partner. Perhaps they had misgivings all along. It is impossible to say in retrospect. But in both cases, the couples had the legal opportunity to do a second party adoption and did not.
The Washington Post published an article about the Miller and Jenkins case since I published my original article. The WaPo article reported facts originally unknown to me, which strengthen my original contention that these cases do not portend any good for displaced fathers. A social service worker advised the lesbian partner that she really ought to do a second party adoption. Miller and Jenkins now dispute whether they even discussed adoption as a possibility. But whatever they may or may not have discussed, the fact is that they didn’t do an adoption.
Moreover, when the birth mother first retained an attorney, she hired someone she found in the Yellow Pages. As it turned out, the attorney she randomly picked out, was a gay rights legal activist. That attorney advised her client that her partner had parental rights and she just needed to get used to that. The attorney applied her own rereading of the common law dictum, “children born into the union are the children of both.” She declined to advise her client that this legal presumption is rebuttable and that she had the right to try to rebut it. In my view, this was legal malpractice, but let that slide. The activist attorney made her position clear: the law should treat same sex couples exactly like opposite sex couples, even when they aren’t alike. This is the position of the radical marriage law advocates, as well as of the gay rights advocates.
This brings me to the second point: how much discretion should judges have? The marriage law radicals want to institute “de facto parent” as a status that supplements biological parents. Family law judges would have discretion to assign parent status to biologically unrelated individuals. In my view, the innovation of “de facto parenting” gives far too much discretion to judges.
Glenn seems to think that I ‘sympathize’ too much with the biological father in the Washington case who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple. My sympathy should be irrelevant. Glenn’s sympathy should be irrelevant. More to the point, the judge’s sympathy should be irrelevant. The only relevant fact is that he is the child’s biological father. Unless and until he relinquishes his parental rights, or the court terminates his rights due to his unfitness, he should be recognized as the father.
The institution of “de facto parenting” is in fact designed to break down the distinction between biological parents and the parenting function. To become a de facto parent, the person need not use the already established procedures for becoming a parent, through biology or adoption, or some form of surrogacy contract. A person becomes a de facto parent by convincing a judge that he has met some multi-part standard for care of the child. This system gives the maximum discretion to the judge.
I can not see for the life of me, how fathers can expect to do well in a system that allows people to present their sad stories to the arbitrary decisions of family courts. This is precisely the system that has served fathers so poorly up until now. Women are likely to prevail over men in any system that relies on generating sympathy and presenting oneself as a victim. Men don’t look like victims and they don’t like presenting themselves as victims. Judges, male or female, are more likely to view the “little woman” as the victim. And as Warren Farrell has pointed out, men are suckers when women cry.
On a slightly irrelevant note, I must say I found it amusing that Glenn described me as a “conservative columnist.” I actually think Glenn is more conservative than I am, in that he appears to accept things as fixed features of the social landscape, simply because they have been established through time and (relatively) long usage. But I am unwilling to accept as given things which I believe to be wrong.
For instance, I do not take as given the current legal institution of “anonymous sperm donors.” This legal fiction allows women to have children without having a relationship with the child’s father. This means that the woman is making a life-long decision that her child shall have no relationship with his or her father. Now I can understand why a woman might wish to do this. What I do not understand is why the law should assist her.
The law deliberately separates children from their fathers and mothers and fathers from each other. This separation is a completely artificial creation of the state, not possible in the ordinary course of male and female interactions. It is a profoundly anti-social act. There is no public purpose served by creating this permanent estrangement among individuals who ordinarily would be forming the most basic and most intimate of social unions. And incidentally, it contributes to the entirely pernicious social vision that fathers are unnecessary.
And why does the state do this? Simply because the woman wants it.
I accept as a fact that under current law, becoming an anonymous sperm donor is one way for a man to relinquish his paternity rights. But I do not take the institution of anonymous sperm donorship as a given. It is a deep injustice in which the state should decline to participate.
Glenn, I truly wish you well in trying to defend the rights of fathers who have been unjustly separated from their children. But I do not think the lesbian custody cases will serve that end.

Taxpayers Left Holding the Baby

Taxpayers Left Holding the Baby is the name the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs gave to my article about the fact that 55% of births in that state were paid for by Medicaid. I don't cite the usual cuplrits. The young women of Oklahoma are not stupid. But the older people who make policy may be....

Presumption of Parenthood

is not exactly equivalent to the Presumption of Paternity that has long reigned in family law. This is just one of the many issues involved in the Miller-Jenkins custody dispute that involves both Vermont and Virginia law. One of the attorneys birth mother Lisa Miller hired early in the case told her that under Vermont's civil union statute, there was a presumption that any child born within a civil union was presumed to be the child of both parties to that union. A rule that makes perfect sense in the case of an opposite sex union makes no sense in the case of same sex unions. Here is an excerpt from a long article on the Miller-Jenkins case::

JUDY BARONE HAD BEEN A FAMILY LAW ATTORNEY IN RUTLAND for more than 20 years when she agreed to represent Lisa. Barone concluded that her new client had been unjustly deprived of her right to argue that Janet was not Isabella's parent, she said. So she filed a motion asking Judge Cohen to withdraw the waiver of that right.

Cohen wanted to know if Barone was suggesting that Janet was not entitled to any parental rights solely because she had no biological connection to Isabella.

"No," Barone said. "The law in Vermont is clear that a child born during the time of the marriage to one of the people in the marriage . . ."

"And civil union," the judge interjected.

"And civil union," Barone agreed. "Would be rebuttably presumed to be a child of the civil union, the marriage. That leaves the right of either party to rebut the presumption. My client chose to rebut the presumption. She noticed the court of her choice, and it was waived involuntarily by her counsel that morning. Our request, judge, is that we put that issue back before the court."

Lisa and Janet's breakup had exposed a fundamental flaw in Vermont law, Barone suggested. Vermont's civil union statute made it a rebuttable presumption that Janet was Isabella's parent, yet spelled out no specific grounds for rebuttal. Other Vermont statutes, which predated the civil union law, detailed two routes to establishing legal parental rights: having a biological connection to a child, or adopting. Janet would not meet either of those standards, Barone said. "I think this case is really about the standard in Vermont that we have to be able to establish parentage," Barone told the judge. "What can be more basic and important?"

Janet's lawyer, Theodore Parisi, said that he found it a "huge stretch" to think that the Vermont statutes requiring proof of adoption or a biological connection to establish legal parental rights applied to people in civil unions.

Cohen agreed. Janet "is presumed to be -- in my view, your client without question is presumed to be the natural parent . . . by the basis of the civil union," Cohen told Parisi.

"We've got to look at the law," Barone countered. "That's our job here . . . If there is a problem with this law, then that's not your fault, my fault, this couple's fault. The solution will come. But we can't deny her her rights . . . There's a law that says who the parents are. We've gone by this for years in marriage, and in civil unions we have to work this out. It may be uncomfortable, and I grant you that it is for everybody concerned. But it's important."

Score Another Point for Dinesh D'Souza

My friend Joanna Bogle writes from London, of her mixed interactions with the growing Muslim population there. On the whole, her experience attests to the truth of D'Souza's proposition that there are some Muslims with whom the West should try to make common cause. Since registration is required to view this site, I have posted the entire article:

Islam Challenges Us in Ways We Don’t Expect

Joanna Bogle is asked to debate a Muslim who sees Britain as fertile ground for advancing his religion – and finds herself with prayer-fed prudence and courage she didn’t know she had.

BY Joanna Bogle

February 4-10, 2007 Issue

Posted 1/30/07 at 8:00 AM

A television studio can be a scary place. All the more so when the camera is trained on your face in a heated debate.

So I found out recently, when I was asked to bump heads, so to speak, with an Islamic spokesman. Islamic anger had been roused by events and then further stirred up by the media.

It is difficult for Americans to understand what it is like living in a country where there is a large, growing, confident Islamic presence in every major city. Imagine going to Mass past a baying mob thrusting aggressively anti-Catholic placards and hurling vicious insults at the Holy Father. Imagine learning later that the police will be taking no action — not even against those who publicly pledged to murder the Pope. Apparently such a threat doesn’t constitute a “hate crime” in modern Britain.

And yet there is another side to the picture. Two days after my TV encounter (more on that in a moment), I had another experience. Running late for a meeting in an unfamiliar part of London — and I do mean running in the literal sense — I asked a local resident for directions. “I need Peter Avenue,” I said. “Do you know where it is?” The kind stranger went to his car to consult a map. We were in a suburban maze of wriggling streets, all of which look alike. “Ah, here it is,” he said. “It’s not far away.” Then he looked at me and offered: “I’ll give you a lift.”

From earliest childhood we are taught to never, ever, accept a lift from a stranger. I started to say, “Oh, no, really, I …” — but something made me decide to accept. He was elderly, he was kind and he struck me as utterly sincere. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d been out cruising around. The car was parked outside his home and I’d stopped him on his way inside.

As we drove along, I explained that I was due at a Catholic church to give a talk on marriage preparation. “I think it’s a red-brick building,” I said. We spotted its tower and he pulled up in front. As I turned to thank him, he spoke with seriousness: “It is a great pleasure for me, as a Muslim, to help a Christian sister like you.” I was touched and, for a moment, couldn’t speak. I held out my hand. “Thank you,” I finally said. “And God bless you. God bless you.”

I told the incident to the young people at the marriage-prep group. They were delighted. Maybe even inspired.

Two days earlier, the TV interview had been difficult. It is so easy to be accused of being “anti-Islamic” or of having “Islamophobia.”

“We just want Pope Benedict to acknowledge that Muhammad is a prophet,” said the Islamic spokesman.

“He can’t do that,” I said. “He doesn’t think Muhammad is a prophet. Nor do I.”

As a Catholic, I can’t expect much sympathy for my faith in the mainstream media. The Church’s message on many issues is, here as in America, routinely attacked and denounced. In Europe, the emergence of Islam as a strong force gives us new pressures. What of the cross on our country’s flag? The granite crosses that mark our war memorials? All these offend Islam. Are we to tear them all down?

But there is a way forward: neighborly kindness, courtesy and mutual respect for one another’s dignity as human beings created by the one true God. And there are values that matter to both our religions. Devout Muslims share our disgust with pornography, for example, along with our exasperation over popular culture’s promotion of Godless lifestyles and other secularizing forces. And, oh yes: They pray.

So it is that I have lately been learning that, in today’s Britain, there are many opportunities to apply Pope John Paul’s exhortation to “Be not afraid.” And many ways to apply it, too.

Joanna Bogle writes from London.

Women Don't Want Men? Ha!

That is Glenn Sacks' reaction to the NYT Cheerleading for divorce. It's a great article. Read it here.
Glenn is an indispensible resource for the reluctantly divorced, especially, the reluctantly divorced man.

Cheerleading for Divorce?

A reader responds to my article debunking the NYT article. This is a single professional woman:

I wanted to comment on your latest release regarding the Cheerleading for Divorce. I was divorced in October of 2005. It was a very quick divorce and I really had no say in it. He had women on the side (one pregnant), and he wanted out..NOW! Since that time, I have had several friends, male and female experience the same thing. ...
In my past year as a new divorcee, I have been reading and researching what's really going on here. We're not being taught about relationships, committment, or honesty at an early enough age. As I found with my divorce, as soon as you express there might be something wrong with your relationship, you don' t hear.."you should get into marriage counseling." It's "off with the old, on with the new". And you better buck-up once you're single and show a brave face, as if you're enjoying single-hood, or you're going to hear about it. I've seen my 40+ friends getting on dating sites and the biggest thing I've noticed is...everybody wants someone 18-30 or 35, like that's going to help their situation any. ...
We have 60% of divorced women living in poverty and an unheard number of single dads raising children. So how much of that 51% can be really walking around smiling? The Boomers are the most significant number of people, we as a society has ever had to deal with and surprise, surprise...the "Me" generation hasn't gotten any better at sharing with each other either. 40+ers are out the door at the first sign of trouble....

Gay Adoption in the UK

Into the gay adoption row in the UK, comes this cheerful report: a group of gay social workers ran a pedophile ring for years.

Liam Lucas was just one of the children abused by predatory paedophiles who took advantage of far-Left Islington Council's childcare policies in the Eighties and Nineties, when it pro-actively recruited gay social workers.

Paedophiles exploited its well-intentioned commitment to equal opportunities and soon most of Islington's 12 children's homes had child molesters on the staff who cynically pretended to be ordinary homosexuals. Numerous children and other staff made allegations of abuse, but were branded homophobes and ignored.

Liam - now 29, in a permanent relationship and the proud father of year-old Isabella - was even falsely classified as gay by Islington social services, which decided he should be fostered only by single men.

This is the kind of professional negligence for which the Catholic Church has quite rightly been sued all over the US. Look at how much more easily this British Left-wing local government agency got off.

Quaker couple Brian Cairns, 57, and his wife Kate, 56 - who became friends with the future Archbishop when they were students together - fought to foster him instead. The horrors Liam later disclosed eventually helped end a 20-year regime of appalling abuse.

A lengthy investigation by The Mail on Sunday's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, resulted in government-ordered inquiries, but at least 26 members of Islington social services staff, despite being accused of grave offences, were simply allowed to resign, often with glowing references. ...


Islington admitted 32 'gross errors' in its treatment of Liam, and paid him £5,000 compensation.

His principal abuser quit Britain for a Third World country and is believed to have adopted a boy there. ....
During school holidays he was fostered by a man later imprisoned for abusing another child in his care. When Liam was nine, Islington placed him in its children's home in Grosvenor Avenue, run by two single males. Both were eventually accused of abuse but escaped investigation by moving to Thailand.

Last year, Thai police charged the deputy head, Nick Rabet, 57, with serious sexual offences against 30 Thai boys, the youngest six years old. He escaped trial by killing himself. ...

Liam was abused by a friend of Rabet's, a senior social services colleague. It is believed he backed the council's decision to find the boy a gay foster father.

Mr and Mrs Cairns spotted Islington's advertisement in 1990 in a fostering magazine.

Mrs Cairns was haunted by the then 13-year-old boy's photo, and the council's claim that he was 'suitable for a single man'.

She said: "I instinctively felt that the ad was aimed at paedophiles."

Mrs. Cairns explains why she decided to go public with this story that took place in the nineties. It was in part to defend the Archbishop of Caterbury, Rowan Williams, who is being attacked after expressing support for a religious exemption to the anti-discrimination statutes about to go into effect. But in part, it was this:

I have a close relative who is gay, and I am emphatically not opposed to gay adoption. I am, however, deeply concerned by the bullying, intolerant nature of the present attacks on people with religious or other concerns about it.

"It feels horribly familiar and I fear that rigid thinking about equal opportunities may again blind people to paedophiles who claim to be gay, when all they really want is access to vulnerable children.

"On radio and TV this week I have repeatedly heard politicians insist that every adoption agency, whatever its religious beliefs about the best home for children, must offer gay people "equality of access to all goods and services".

"My blood has run cold every time I have heard that. Children in care are not goods or services, chattels to be claimed or shared. They have, however, often been treated like that, as Liam's appalling experiences show.

Arguments for same sex adoption should not be made in terms of adult entitlements, but in terms of the needs of children. The cover-up by non-predatory gays, and intimidated bureaucrats is what makes this story so chilling.

Should the HPV vaccine be mandatory?

Evidently, Merck, the manufacturer of the vaccine thinks so. They have invested heavily in lobbying the state legislatures to make vaccinations against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease, mandatory for 12 year old girls. How much does Merck stand to gain?

Drug-industry analyst Steve Brozak of W.B.B. Securities has projected Gardasil sales of at least $1 billion per year — and billions more if states start requiring the vaccine. "I could not think of a bigger boost," he said.

Sorry to disagree with my friend Glenn Sacks

But I think he has it wrong here.
He is comparing the plight of a lesbian "social mother" with the plight of divorced dads: both are being excluded from their children's lives by birth mothers. True, but there is a big difference between these kinds of cases: the lesbian "social mother" has no biological connection with the child, while the father does. The test for paternity is straightforward. The "test" for parental rights for an unrelated adult is necessarily subject to judicial interpretation.
I'm writing a full column on it. More later.

End the State-Supported Separation of Parents

That's what this proposed bill would do: outlawing anonymous sperm donors. Think of it: the law creates a distinct legal category for men who donate sperm anonymously: they are "legal strangers" to their child. They have neither rights nor responsibilities.
The state should stop enabling this.

Overblown Reaction to the Gay Sheep Story

The scientist on the gay sheep story tells his side of the story here. Dr. Charles Roselli is a much more sympathetic character than his detractors. I'll take an honest scientist over gay radicals and animal rights extremists any day of the week.

Score One Point for Dinesh D'Souza

The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in the UK are both requesting a religious exemption from the non-discrimination law regarding same sex adoption. The govt is unlikely to grant it. An outrage, comparable to that perpetrated in MA.
Guess who weighed in on the side of the Churches? The Muslim Council of Britain.
One of D'Souza's points is that traditionalists of all faiths have enough in common with each other that they sometimes need to ally with each other against assaults by radical secularists. Here is a case where he is correct.