That plank of the Platform does not call for ³child prostitution² and never
did. If you say the wording confuses some people, I will agree. But you
started this thread, giving it the title of ³debasing beliefs², with your
claim that the language advocated ³child prostitution². It does not. You
wrote:
Brian Holtz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
³In particular, does an LP Platform "debase libertarian belief" if it does
not call for any of the following?
* legalized child prostitution ["repeal of all laws that
restrict anyone, including children, from engaging in voluntary exchanges of
goods, services, or information regarding human sexuality"];
* ... ²
Now I assume you have changed your mind, and agree that no Convention ever
intended that plank to call for ³child prostitution², (or anything else
³debasing²).
I suggested some new language for two reasons. The construction,
³services...regarding² , sounds awkward. And people intent on discrediting
the LP could try to twist the existing sentence. The links you cite show
that such people exist.
Here is my suggestion:
We call for the repeal of all laws that restrict anyone, including minors,
from receiving medical services, information, prescriptions, or devices, for
contraception, for prevention or treatment of STDs, or for any other purpose
related to human sexuality.
As for the rights of children, I agree with the LP that children should
have all the rights of adults and more. I find nothing about ³thin ice² in
that belief. Children, depending on age, cannot exercise all of their
rights without a guardian. However, adults with diminished mental capacity
cannot make their own decisions, either. Those adults retain all of their
legal rights. Guardians have the legal obligation to exercise the rights
of individuals they protect in the best interests of those individuals.
Harland Harrison
LP of San Mateo County CA
on 4/17/07 8:45 AM, Brian Holtz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 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 tongue
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/965> 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.
>
