Harland Harrison wrote: BH> Grammatically, the second sentence as written in the 2004 Platform appears to call for the legalization of child prostitution. <BH
HH> No, Brian, that sentence has nothing to do with prostitution, and never did. <HH I note that you did not assert the negation of my claim above. HH> Even without "Therefore", a sentence remains part of its paragraph. That paragraph calls for medical care, information, etc. for minors. <HH The paragraph's only mention of minors is in the sentence in question. You don't deny that the absence of "therefore" decreases the contextual connection with what preceded it. It's not unprecedented for a plank to make a sweeping assertion that is wider than what the scope of the plank would be without the assertion in question. For example, the 2004 "Women's Rights and Abortion" plank has a sentence that expands the scope by stating a principle that include men's rights: "We hold that individual rights should not be denied or abridged on the basis of sex." HH> Someone might criticize the wording, but you already dismissed Howard Pearce's suggestion that it was only a problem in wording: "If it's merely bad wording, it managed not to get fixed in any Platform from 2004 all the way back to at least 1990. Nothing in the context of these platforms rescues this wording;" <HH When I scanned the platforms before 2004 for the presence of this problematic phrase about "goods, services or information regarding human sexuality", I didn't notice that the sentence had a prepended "therefore" in the earlier platforms. The "therefore" goes a fair way toward rescuing the language in the 1990-2002 platforms, but the problem remained in the 2004 platform where I first noticed it. It turns out the "therefore" removal was part of a general purge of most therefore's as the planks got re-arranged into the Atlanta format. However, it's not like there isn't precedent for the LP Platform to push the envelope in the area of treating children as adults. Introduced in 1978, the Children's Rights plank was notorious before it was finally removed in the 1996 Platform. The 1978-1982 version of the plank put "children" in scare-quotes when it said: "We believe that 'children' are human beings and, as such, have the same rights as any other human beings. Any reference in this Platform to the rights of human beings includes children." Even until the 1994 platform, the plank went on to call children an "artificially defined sub-category of human beings". Indeed, the 1990-1994 platforms categorically advocated "the repeal of all laws regarding consensual sexual relations, including prostitution and solicitation", and we know very well that Libertarians mean "all" when they say "all". Only in the 1996 house-cleaning did the Platform first make an age distinction regarding sexuality: "We affirm the right of adults to private choice in consensual sexual activity." The 1984 platform also had this egregious language: "We also support the repeal of all laws establishing any category of crimes applicable to children for which adults would not be similarly answerable". The sentence continued with "such as curfew, smoking, and alcoholic beverage laws, and other status offenses", but the problem was still glaring enough that "answerable" was changed to "vulnerable" by 1990. It wasn't until the 1992 platform that the Children's Rights plank added any acknowledgement that guardians might have some power over their children. Since as far back as 1984, the plank had mentioned "guardians" only as people who provide "care for their children" and perhaps "administration and protection of their rights" -- at least until the child exercised her right to either take over these tasks or seeks better guardians. Except perhaps for that word "administration", the plank was exclusively about insisting that children had either equal rights as adults, or extra rights in terms of switching or ditching "guardians", and not about admitting children ever had less rights. In 1992, the plank finally "recognize[d] that children who have not reached maturity need guardians to secure their rights and to aid in the exercise of those rights", but even that language is extremely vague about what it's actually recognizing. Thus you would be speaking out of ignorance to claim that the LP Platform does not have a long and checkered history of deliberately skating on thin ice regarding the topic of whether children should have all the rights of adults. Our male prostitute friend Starchild believes that the removal of the Children's Rights plank from the Platform meant that the LP had "abandoned some of its principles". Are you willing to say whether you agree with him on that score? (See http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/ for the sources of the quotes above.) HH> Only somebody who wanted to discredit and destroy the LP would try to twist that statement about birth control into a supposed endorsement of child prostitution. <HH Why do you now suggest better language, if you think that only an LP-destroyer could have misread it? Would you oppose re-adoption of the 2004 Platform if it meant living with the disputed language? I'm of course trying to immunize the LP from further charges that it advocated legal child prostitution e.g. at http://world.std.com/~mhuben/morb.html http://members.tripod.com/~Kevin_OConnell/child1.htm http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/05/264093.shtml http://www.l4l.org/library/lp02-pop.html http://fetter.org/~shackle/rants/licensarians.html http://thepeopleunited.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=4235 Searching Usenet for >"libertarian party" "child prostitution" platform< yields 44 hits. If there was anybody who could quote our platform and make a prima facie case that we advocated legal child prostitution, then our platform needed fixing. Do you disagree? I wonder if your innuendo above is meant to suggest that a reasonable person could infer from what I've written on this topic that I want to "destroy the LP". We'll probably never know, since I suspect you have neither the "spine" to say I so want, nor the basic decency to say you don't think I so want. Instead, we'll probably just get more innuendo from you, like your ironic recent claim that I "launched an attack on [your] character on a county party discussion list" when I had been biting my <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/965> tongue for an entire year there about how your earlier indefensible and undefended churlish behavior cost that county an officer. Oh, and the rest of your comment on LPplatform-discuss -- "because of what I wrote here" -- was demonstrably contrary to fact, as I've so often shown about your statements. When I cross-posted <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1722> to LPSM-discuss, it was from cal-libs, not LPplatform-discuss, because it was on cal-libs that you exclaimed I made a "personal attack" on you while I was DEFENDING you against Art Tuma's call that you specifically be opposed in any internal or external election because of your policy positions -- even though in the past you invoked my philosophical positions to oppose my LP candidacy over your county vice-chair signature and even refused to sign my candidacy petition. I'd ask if you have no shame, but the answer to that question is obvious. You at least were cagey -- or another adjective that starts with 'c' -- enough not to dare mention my name in your hit-and-run deceptive innuendo on LPplatform-discuss, since you knew that doing so would cause me to surface the above facts on that forum. Perhaps you're finally learning not to throw such rocks my way from inside your glass house.
