The NCCL was right to affiliate with PIE

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Indeed, the ACLU has also defended the speech and association rights of paedophilic groups. In a court case in the early 2000s, it represented the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in a civil suit in which the association was being sued by the parents of a 10-year-old boy who was raped and murdered by two paedophiles. The parents claimed NAMBLA's (non-pornographic) website fuelled the outlook of the two paedophiles. The ACLU argued that there was no evidence to back this up and defended the right of NAMBLA to continue publishing its ideas and campaigning for the abolition of the age of consent.

Why did the ACLU do this? Not because it is pro-paedophile, of course, but because it is pro-freedom of thought - consistently and seriously. It recognised how extremely unpopular NAMBLA is; in her book Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today, Wendy Kaminer, a leading member of the ACLU at the time of the NAMBLA case, and today a contributor to spiked, said 'virtually no group of people is more unpopular' than paedophiles and revealed that 'the ACLU [was] excoriated by many and lost considerable support' over its decision to defend NAMBLA. But it was the right thing to do, she wrote, because a 'simple appreciation of freedom of thought and expression' should make it clear that we must have freedom even for 'offensive, unpopular speech'. [...]

The fundamental thing that was different in the Seventies was less the out-of-control sexual liberation stuff than the fact that civil liberties groups genuinely believed in civil liberty. It is the ditching of that core commitment to freedom in recent years, not least by Liberty itself, which means so many can now look back in horror at the fact that libertarians defended the right even of paedophiles to publish words and arguments. The coming back to life of the NCCL / PIE scandal really confirms how alarmingly illiberal, how disconnected from true freedom of thought and Voltairean ideals, modern Britain has become.

source: Article 'The NCCL was right to affiliate with PIE' by Brendan O'Neill; www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-nccl-was-right-to-affiliate-with-pie/14718#.Uw3boZi8k6I; spiked; 26 February 2014