NAMBLA & Rep. Foley: More Capitalist Collateral Damage

Interestingly, just before news of Congressman Foley's illicit advances toward young high school students, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a short "expose" on the evils of NAMBLA. I daresay most people outside the above-35 gay male community don't know what NAMBLA is or why I would link it to Foley. NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association. In my younger years, just coming out, it seemed to get a lot of backpage press in alternative gay news organs - this is like off-off Broadway. Gay rights activists fought with each other whether to include or attack this entity. I remember that Harry Hay, gay civil rights activists and communist, was a lone voice not in supporting NAMBLA, but discouraging attacks from gay men as showing division to the enemy.

Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.

This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.

Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.

This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?

Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.

This time, the prey are children.

The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.

While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.

My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.

By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.

In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.

The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?

Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.