From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   There are people endorsing hysterically prudish attitudes by saying that many   
   people get traumatized through sex.   
      
   That some people get traumatized through sex no more damns sex than that some   
   people get traumatized through family damn family.   
      
   There are all sorts of ways in which people can get traumatized. People get   
   traumatized in war. People get traumatized in bad upbringing. People get   
   traumatized when their families get shot or their countries get destroyed. Sex   
   is one of the many things    
   that can go wrong. Sex abuse victims don’t own traumatization.   
      
   You want to trauma-d*cksize? I will win. I had the whole world that I came   
   from completely destroyed. I had a hideous home situation. I was taken to an   
   alien country where people treated me like dirt regardless of how much effort   
   I put into things. I had    
   a woman whom I loved, whose stepmother manipulated her against me. I have been   
   relentlessly and viciously persecuted for years on end by people accusing me   
   of a crime I did not commit. In none of these cases did it have anything to do   
   with sex.   
      
   So I had a friend tell me that we don’t rehabilitate sex offenders. Why on   
   earth not? Socrates was a sex offender. He liked little boys. Mohammad was a   
   sex offender. He had sex with a 9-year-old child. Thomas Jefferson was a sex   
   offender. He had    
   children by a teenage slave. If someone is guilty of a sex crime, he is just   
   that: someone guilty of a crime. He is not an animal, he is not subhuman, and   
   he is not damned for life.   
      
   I want to see these matters dealt with in a sane and humane manner. Clearly we   
   cannot have people raping children or giving Rohypnol to college girls; but   
   neither can we have witch hunts and demonization.   
      
   Right now, we see some people so convinced of their goodness, yet they treat a   
   section of the population as less than human. By taking that stance they   
   become worse people themselves. When we treat someone as less than human that   
   also dehumanizes us.    
   That is even the case with people who are genuinely bad.   
      
   At the heart is not who sex offenders are as people. It is who we are as   
   people. Are we the kind of people who run witch hunts? Are we the kind of   
   people who dehumanize others? Are we the kind of people who relentlessly   
   persecute people we do not know?    
   Or are we – and our countries – better than that?   
      
   Do we let sex offenders off? Not at all. We prosecute sex crime like any other   
   crime. However we don’t dehumanize these people. As for sex, it is important   
   to correct hysterical thinking about it. Sex is just one of the many things   
   that can be used for    
   wrong ends. That does not make it bad in itself.   
      
   Ilya Shambat   
   https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatthought   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)