Roy Moore: Acceptance of pedophilia in the South is a legacy of slavery

[Kind of Blue]

"While some people were surprised by the allegation that Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Judge Roy Moore attempted to date a 14 year old girl in 1979 when he was 32, many more were shocked by how many of his Alabama supporters seemed to be willing to defend, or even accept, what is essentially a charge of pedophilia, or child sexual assault, in the candidate they hope will represent them in the Senate. To understand why many Southern whites find acceptable, behaviour which would be considered deviant and criminal in most parts of the United States, one must understand the role that Antebellum slavery played in cultivating a culture of sexual abuse and pedophilia in the South.

Before the Civil War, forcing frequent and casual sex on young girl slaves was a prized white privilege of the Southern culture they built on the backs of their slaves. It's no accident that the age of consent is only 16 in all the former Confederate states but Louisiana, Florida, Virginia and Tennessee. Before the women's movement forced a change around 1920, it had been 12 or even 10 in the former Confederate states.

Slavery made sex with children easy for the masters of the old Dominion. There were no rules. A UK national archives report on the childhood of slaves states:
The trauma of sexual abuse is also a difficult subject to quantify. Sensibilities of the time and the fact that abolition was often associated with religious organisations means that sexual abuse of girls was often only alluded to in veiled terms and sexual abuse of boys was almost never mentioned. The dangers of sexual exploitation are only too obvious with slave children being seen as chattels with no legal protection. The fact that sexuality appears to have rarely discussed also left slave children ignorant and vulnerable to abuse. If the issue of forced marriage of slaves is included in this category along with coercion into sexual activity for preferential treatment, it is easy to see how sexual abuse could be seen as endemic in slave children’s lives.

When the struggle to raise the age of consent finally erupted in the 1920's, some whites argued that it should be lower for the South, saying African American women 'matured earlier.' This was a common myth about non-white people. Some even had the audacity to stretch the bunk science to the point where they claimed that white girls living in sub-tropical climates 'ripened' into women earlier."

http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/2017/11/acceptance-of-pedophilla-in-south-is.html

[yurbud]

1. I thought of this too, especially how guys got away with it:

"though well he knew that [his wife's] full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim."

[Kind of Blue]

2. Yeah, and about that wife, that brings up another point.

I heard in a lecture once and haven't had time to dig into the statement, a professor said that a lot of murder laws/statutes(?) n this country were written to protect white women who, in furious anger, were just murdering black children.

[yurbud]

32. no way. Were any ever prosecuted?

[Kind of Blue]

39. I'm still hunting this info down.

Sometimes, I wish I'd gone to law school. From my understanding the laws/statutes were created for black-child-murdering white women to avoid prosecution altogether.

[zipplewrath]

3. Technically it ain't pedophilia

It was mentioned on Meet The Press that technically, Moore wasn't guilty of pedophilia. That makes reference to prepubescent children. Apparently, this victim didn't qualify for that. This was sexual molestation of a minor. Strangely, to the point of the OP, that is probably more widely "tolerated" than actual pedophilia. Although, again to the larger point of the OP, slavery presented a horrible opportunity for sexual abuse of children for pedophiles down to an age that none of us even want to imagine.

[Cryptoad]

10. a Pervert by any other Name,,,,,,,,,

[Kind of Blue]

19. Yup!

[Kind of Blue]

18. Well, that's a distinction without a difference to me.

But thanks for acknowledging the larger points.

[LanternWaste]

35. When someone tells us an apple is rotten

When someone tells us an apple is rotten, and some else reponse with "technically, it's not rot, it's decay caused by the action of bacteria and fungi" I realize how little of substance or relevance so many people have offer.

Again, to the larger point, the apple is inedible.

[zipplewrath]

38. I understand

I'd be more concerned that someone would call a rotten apple "poisonous" when it was "merely" rotten. All three are inedible, but we are talking about 2 different things.

[LanternWaste]

45. Why? Would either make the apple more or less tasty and delicious?

"I'd be more concerned that someone would call a rotten apple "poisonous" when it was "merely" rotten"

Why? Would either make the apple more or less tasty and delicious?





(Tangent: divergent or digressive, as from a subject under consideration)

[CousinIT]

4. Denial of women's reproductive rights in the US is also a legacy of slavery

https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/

. . .

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “’If we could get a breed of gals that didn’t care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

. . .

Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment’s language is unadorned, so it was left to the political system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant in all particulars. In a series of successive legal cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its “badges and incidents,” and recognized Congress’s power “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all [of those] in the United States.”

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

[appal_jack]

5. Excellent point & reference. k&r, nt

[ehrnst]

6. Yep. (nt)

[Girard442]

8. Once one human being can treat another as property...

...all of this becomes inevitable. People who promote the idea that slavery somehow wasn’t all that bad are giving their stamp of approval to every bit of evil spawned by it.

[raccoon]

34. Yep. It boggles my mind the way some right wingers

It boggles my mind the way some right wingers act like the Europeans or Americans did the African-Americans a favor to bring them over and enslave them.

[Irish_Dem]

17. So raping slaves was a money making operation and not only accepted but encouraged. nt

[Kind of Blue]

21. Thanks for the link. These are the connections that have to made

because as one author put it and I've quoted a few times in this forum, "just about every single social ill can be traced directly to systemic racism."

[clayclai]

36. Thank you

Thank you for this addition. I will note it in my post.

[Aviation Pro]

7. Is it any wonder....

...that most southern, white men have an unreasonable fear of black men?

[DownriverDem]

13. Then

what is wrong with white southern women?

[yurbud]

33. if the man is the primary breadwinner, she may feel she has to just take it.

[Kind of Blue]

22. No wonder at all.

[cannabis_flower]

9. Texas was a Confederate state

but the age of consent here is 17.

[progree]

11. 16 years old in Minnesota n/t

[Kind of Blue]

24. And include "The age of consent is gender neutral and...

applies the same to both heterosexual and homosexual conduct. Like many other states, Texas does not enforce harsh penalties for individuals who has sex with someone under 17 as long as that person is not more than 3 years older than the minor.

https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/texas-age-of-consent-lawyers.html

[argyl]

27. Right you are.

[clayclai]

37. I corrected this already

Thanks

[SummerSnow]

12. It is a legacy of the south. I remember hearing stories about Jerry lee Lewis marrying

his 13 yo cousin, and Elvis Pressley marrying 14 yo Priscilla. Those were the public stuff I heard about. When I first saw the movie the Color Purple, I remember when one of the main characters (Mister) married a very young girl (Celie). My grandmother told me who grew up in Georgia at the turn of the century told me that this was common in the South and that she knew girls her age like 13 yo who were made to marry older men if their father agreed to it. She told me that there were times when a few men asked her father to marry her cause they were widowed and her father said no. It is bad that this practice still takes place today. Fortunately, my grandmother married when she was 18 to my 20 yo grandfather.

[Kind of Blue]

23. Gawd, I forgot about Presley and Lewis and the Color Purple.

I surprise myself thinking that this is a thing of the far off past. Yes, let's keep reminding each other and making the connections.

Thank you, SummerSnow!

[yardwork]

14. Slavery is an abomination and the source of a lot of evil in the U.S.

I believe that our history of slavery - notably the fact that our nation was literally built on slavery and genocide - is an original sin that drags our country down. Either we figure out a way to overcome our evil past and the many ways in which it lives on today - and that means complete repudiation of the institutions that supported slavery, including but not limited to the Confederacy - or this evil will destroy us.

I believe that.

[Kind of Blue]

25. Hear! Hear! yardwork.

As I replied to a post above, I think just about every single social ill in this country can be traced directly to the legacy of slavery.

[heaven05]

15. how do these

Last edited Mon Nov 13, 2017, 02:40 PM - Edit history (1)

types sleep at night? Oh sorry, I know how. No conscience to speak of and this moore character would have been out front just like d. trump in racing toward the slave quarters to sate their lust on slave children and adults, both sexes. All of the slave holders did it, why 'mulattoes, quadroons, octaroons'? I wish the media would get real. Every decent person in any country is laughing out loud at this circus ameriKKKa has become and so am I.

[Kind of Blue]

26. Yes, I was going to respond the lowest level of consciousness

but no conscience to speak of sums it up.

[Irish_Dem]

16. Women throughout history have been viewed as property.

First property of her father, then property of her husband.

[Kind of Blue]

28. I think you might like this article in reference to #MeToo because

the author really puts women and history in a historical context for what she believes, and I hope, is happening. Long but worth the read.

Allowing #MeToo To Go Viral Is The Biggest Mistake The Establishment Ever Made


"This is not a political or ideological revolution. This is a complete undoing of all that is sick in this world, coming not from our minds but from deep within our cells. A voice has finally been given to the heritage of pain which has been passed from mother to daughter from generation to generation as we taught one another how to survive in a world of sexual slavery since the dawn of civilization. It will not be pretty when it first comes out. It will not be sexy. It will not dance for male sexuality as it has been trained to do like a good little girl. It will roar, and it will destroy.
Change is coming.

What looks like women talking about their experiences with rape culture is actually a vast area of endarkened human unconsciousness suddenly becoming enlightened into consciousness. A whole section of our collective consciousness which we have never previously had access to is now suddenly becoming available to us. The old structures will not be able to stand on this new ground, as they were built upon the old ground.

Buckle up."

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/allowing-metoo-to-go-viral-is-the-biggest-mistake-the-establishment-ever-made-1c706d16783b

[Irish_Dem]

30. Omg it feels like she channeled my soul. Fabulous, thank you.

You quoted the passage that jumped out at me too:

This is not a political or ideological revolution. This is a complete undoing of all that is sick in this world, coming not from our minds but from deep within our cells. A voice has finally been given to the heritage of pain which has been passed from mother to daughter from generation to generation as we taught one another how to survive in a world of sexual slavery since the dawn of civilization. It will not be pretty when it first comes out. It will not be sexy. It will not dance for male sexuality as it has been trained to do like a good little girl. It will roar, and it will destroy.

From: https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/allowing-metoo-to-go-viral-is-the-biggest-mistake-the-establishment-ever-made-1c706d16783b

[GoneOffShore]

20. Thank you for this and the link.

I vaguely remember my grandfather (Petersburg, VA) making veiled references to this back in the 1950's.
He was a true son of the Confederacy.

[Kind of Blue]

29. You're very welcome. I'm just glad all of this ickiness

is finally full blown and no longer veiled, hopefully tackling racism and misogyny at once.

[Irish_Dem]

31. I agree. It all needs to come out. The patriarchal rule over women has to end. nt

[fleabiscuit]

40. Wow. I come to AA forum to read when I want to learn.

That gives me a perspective on this I wasn't woke about.

One must live with the facts.

I may have to suggest that the "General Discussion" be renamed "The Worry Stone."

[steve2470]

41. me too

I always come directly to our friends here when I want the real deal.

[Kind of Blue]

42. Thank you so much!

We must and do face reality for obvious reasons. And information, especially historical facts to me, is key.

[JHan]

43. yep. K&R

[Kind of Blue]

44. Thanks for the kick, JHan.