Playing the NAMBLA Card

Picture this: a mild-mannered college English teacher gets out of his car after driving to campus. He slings his book bag over his shoulder and starts toward the classroom building.

Suddenly, shots ring out. The teacher slumps to the ground, felled by assassin’s bullets. From a grassy knoll across the Quad, the shadowy figure of a member of the militant group, PAP, (Parents Against Plagiarism) disassembles a rifle, stuffs it in a gym bag, and steals away into the misty dawn air.

Why was the teacher shot? Because a commentator on national television had falsely claimed that he didn’t care if his students plagiarized or not. Despite the fact that he got plenty of students put on academic probation for turning in copied work, he lies dying in a pool of his own blood because a wacko anti-plagiarist got it into his head that he turned a blind eye toward students passing off other people’s work as their own.

Less humorously, what if someone had seen Mark Hyman call John Kerry a murderer and a traitor, and assassinated him as a result? What if someone had tuned in and heard Hyman slander philanthropist George Soros as a Nazi collaborator who identified Jewish people in hiding, and in a fit of rage, murdered Soros as a result?

According to Mark Hyman’s own logic, he would bear responsibility for these acts and could be sued for millions by the families of the teacher, Kerry, or Soros.

That’s what comes from Hyman’s recent trilogy lambasting the ACLU for defending NAMBLA in a lawsuit accusing the pedophile-friendly group of bearing responsibility for a murder of a boy by a man found with NAMBLA literature in his possession.

Calling ACLU the “Anti-Children Litigation Union” (perhaps we should assemble a scrapbook of the various witty plays on the ACLU’s name Hyman has used), Hyman slams the organization for taking the case and defending NAMBLA in the suit filed by the parents of the murdered boy against the organization. (The suit against the organization was actually thrown out of court, but it’s going ahead against several individual members of NAMBLA.)

In fact, Hyman actually claims that “the ACLU doesn't want to separate men from copulating with young boys.”

No. What the ACLU doesn’t want is for individuals to be held accountable for the unintended consequences of their words without having a chance to defend themselves in a court of law.

Remember that, in addition to NAMBLA, the ACLU has defended the rights of Nazis, Jerry Falwell, and lots of other individuals and groups who are hateful and whose views aren’t shared by the ACLU. The beauty of the ACLU is that they defend the principle of free speech regardless of who is practicing it.

Now, it’s certainly possible for an individual to be found civilly culpable for a wrongful death based on what they say, if a court finds that they intended to incite violence with their words (the best example of this is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s successful lawsuit against white separatist Tom Metzger).

But that bar is set awfully high, and for good reason. As morally culpable as Mark Hyman would be if someone killed George Soros based on the lies Hyman said about him, it would be another matter to find Hyman criminally or civilly liable for the crime. If every criminal could use the excuse that something they saw or read made them do it, then freedom of speech would be a thing of the past.

Not that NAMBLA is a group that deserves much sympathy. They are a microscopically small group of pathetic losers and criminals who get way more attention from the media than they deserve to get. But what they *do* deserve, as does every American, is to have their day in court if they are accused of something.

Hyman tries to portray NAMBLA as openly advocating violence against boys by calling some of their materials a “Rape and Escape Handbook,” a phrase that was coined by the lawyer filing suit against NAMBLA, not the group itself (although Hyman does his best to suggest otherwise). Any materials that are meant to facilitate statutory rape are despicable, but the NAMBLA materials apparently don’t advocate or advise how to commit violent acts.

NAMBLA is a disgusting group, and as such, couldn’t find a lawyer to defend them until the ACLU came to the aid of their members. Apparently Hyman thinks people should be convicted without trial if they belong to a reprehensible group or believe despicable things. But that’s exactly the sort of speech that needs to be defended. It might even turn out that the members of NAMBLA will be found liable for the child’s death, but that only has meaning if they received an adequate legal representation. That’s what the ACLU is providing, just as they provided it for Nazis, Falwell, and, if necessary, they would provide to Hyman if my wife sued him for instigating my death at the hands of a radical member of PAP.

So that’s the substance of the issue. The big picture, of course, has everything to do with the upcoming election. In recent weeks, Brent Bozell of the conservative Media Research Centre tried to link Nanci Pelosi to the ACLU/NAMBLA case, and the laughingstock of Ohio, Ken Blackwell, tried to link his Democratic opponent with NAMBLA in a debate last week.


This is apparently what you resort to when you’ve run out of ideas.

Or, in Hyman’s case, never had one to begin with.

And that’s The Counterpoint