A matter of conscience
Submitted by Heather on January 24 2000 at 14:50:18
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It has been a while since I've posted much at CBF, which makes it all the more unfair that this post is about a matter of conscience I've been struggling with, and with which I'd appreciate your help. It's about boylove, so I can't exactly trot off to my neighborhood priest to ask his advice. About a month after I arrived on the boylove boards two years ago, I fell into a brief e-mail conversation with a child advocate who had read several of my RDC posts. She accused me of being an enabler – a person who was enabling boylovers to have sex with boys with more ease of conscience. At the time, her accusation seemed ridiculous to me. I was involved in almost daily debates with RDC members over whether man-boy sex was moral, debates which occasionally spilled over into BoyChat. Though I could not be sure whether my presence on the boylove boards had any positive effect in this area (I hoped that it had a positive effect in other ways), I was sure that it did not have a negative effect – that is to say, I was sure I wasn't an enabler. I had developed an unwritten code for myself by that time: I would not offer my opinion on man-boy sex unsolicited, but if the subject was raised by the other person, then I'd present my views. The code seemed simple enough to follow, but several incidents that have occurred during the past year have concerned me about whether I've been following my conscience in this matter. 1) I was at a party filled with boylovers last year, and toward the end of the party – when the festival atmosphere had reached its heights – I fell into conversation with a boylover whom I had never met before and whom I would never meet again, because he didn't visit the boards I did. He began to explain his pro-man-boy-sex perspective. Now, you have to envision us with drinking glasses in hand, surrounded by other boylovers engaged in loud conversation, so that this boylover was practically having to shout his remarks at me in order to be heard. Every minute or so, somebody would elbow their way past us. All of this made the conversation a little hard for me to follow, and I decided that a party was not the place for me to be holding a debate on man-boy sex, so I simply listened and nodded to what the boylover was saying. Afterwards, I had pangs of conscience. This was probably my only opportunity to meet this particular person, and he could not have helped but received the impression from our conversation that I agreed with his views. Should I have made clear my own views on man-boy sex? Was this the proper venue for such a debate? 2) I've been in conversation recently with a group of boylove rights activists. Some of them were highly suspicious of me at the start, because I held the triple handicap of being opposed to man-boy sex, of being a Christian, and of being a woman. Where one characteristic didn't damn me, another one did. At any rate, I was looking for opportunities that would allow me to show that, while I didn't share their views on man-boy sex, I was a person worthy of conversing with. Such an opportunity seemed to arise when someone brought forward a new paper by Rind. I reviewed the paper, in the process making clear that I approved of Rind's work – as indeed I do, for while I can't assess the mathematics of his own work, Rind's critique of the weaknesses of present-day child sexual abuse research seems to me right on the mark. What I didn't mention in my review was that I didn't think that Rind's research settled the question of whether man-boy sex is moral, because, even if his findings were scientifically correct, I felt that scientific studies could only supply a few of the answers needed in deciding the moral question. Now, the boylove rights activists well knew by this time that I was opposed to man-boy sex, but by not making explicit my views on the Rind research, was I neglecting to offer them a new perspective on man-boy sex? Was I so eager to be accepted as an equal conversational partner that I was keeping quiet about matters on which we'd disagree? 3) In recent months I fell into a brief conversation with a boylover about how his life had been going, in the course of which he hinted, as part of the joyful news he was sharing, that he'd had sex with his young friend. The boy in question appeared to be prepubescent or just arriving at pubescence. It was like having someone tell you, "Oh, I've been having a great time – I was finally able to divorce that horrible wife of mine." Sympathy is obviously out of the question, because the other person is sharing what he considers to be good news. Congratulations are also obviously out of order, because, from my perspective, what had happened was a tragedy. What was the proper response in such a case? Once again, I was silent, telling myself that the boylover and I had debated man-boy sex in the past, that we would no doubt do so again in the future, and that this wasn't the right moment to discuss the matter. But this incident, like the previous ones, left a sour taste in mouth, a feeling that I had remained silent when I ought to have spoken up, like not saying anything when someone cheerfully makes a "nigger" joke. Have others here dealt with this problem? Have there been times when someone you were talking with offered views that you thought were dangerously wrong, and you were uncertain whether this was the moment to offer your own perspective? If so, how did you resolve the matter, balancing the desire to keep on friendly terms with the other person alongside the desire to share your views? I'd appreciate your thoughts. Heather |