The perfect storm: Bernie Baran

Here is the trailer from the film Freeing Bernie Baran along with a short excerpt. I recommend seeing this film if you are able to do so.

Baran was just a teenager when he started working at a day care center in Massachusetts. When a set of very low-class parents, with dubious parental skills themselves, discovered Baran was gay they started making accusations against the boy. It was the era of the day care witchhunts where the media, government agencies, and feminist-oriented therapists, created a hysteria that swept the nation. People became convinced that organized rings of Satanic pedophiles had infilitrated hundreds of day care centers. Police and prosecuters had a field day.

Literally hundreds of innocent people were rounded up across America, thousands of children were psychologically tortured by the child abuse industry and taken from their parents. To this day many of the victims of the hysteria still sit in jail. It was 25 years before Baran finally had justice and was released.

For those with short memories, or who are too young to remember, it was this bogus hysteria that inspired short-sighted politicians—as if they are any other kind—to pass hundreds of new laws to "protect" young people from sex. The result of that hysteria is that today teens are routinely arrested and charged as child molesters for normal adolescent sexuality. A teen, exploring their sexuality, takes a photo of themself standing naked in front of a mirror, discovers they are a child pornographer. Two young people have sex when their parents aren't around only to find they are now guilty of mutual molestation. Personally I'm surprised that some moronic politician hasn't introduced legislation to define masturbation as self-molestation. Worse yet the politically-induce "sex offender" panic, the resulting legislation, means these kids will be legally tormented for the rest of their natural life.

Bernie Baran was the victim of the perfect hysteria. He was gay and accused of child molestation. Combine anti-gay bigotry with a sexual panic of this kind and you know something ugly will happen. It is the kind of campaign that only the most despicable amoral scum would knowingly initiate, but many of the instigators were just terrified parents believing the breathless stories fed them by the media.

When fear inspires "urgent" political action you can bet the farm that the action taken will almost always be the wrong action. Political campaigns that rely on fear, something that Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of, are attempts to stampede the public into supporting precisely the wrong sort of legislation. Be it child abuse, drugs, the war on terror, gay marriage, illegal immigration, global warming or whatever the panic d'jour may be, fear campaigns intentionally shut down the critical reasoning faculties of the human mind. The results are always wrong, always ugly and victims are created.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

HL Mencken.