| | At the risk of defending a man whom I have been credited (accused?) of exposing, let me offer the following for consideration.
First, I am no fan of Jim Peron. The man is an unconscionable liar, all the more so, because he accuses others of the very acts that he himself engages in: defamation and character assassination. Secondly, of all the defamations that he is guilty of, perhaps the worst is the defamation of libertarianism - associating it with the idea that children have the same rights as adults and the capacity to make the same decisions as adults. Peron is not alone in this view, by the way. It is more common among libertarians than you might think.
The question, though is: Should he be denied citizenship in New Zealand. The argument that he should has been advanced by several posters, who claim that the advocacy of a crime - child molestation - is itself a crime. Let me say that I don't think this view is consistent with the right to freedom of speech. It is interesting to find some New Zealand libertarians claiming that it is, because I doubt that you will find any libertarians in the U.S. maintaining that position. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has had an especially strong influence on us, which is not to say that our government feels the same way!
We make a distinction between mere advocacy and what is called "clear and present danger." For example, a person who supports violent crime in principle, but is not plotting a specific act of violence, is permitted to express his views. If, however, he is directly involved in the financing and/or material support of criminal activity, then he becomes an accessory to specific crimes and is no longer protected by the First Amendment.
The problem with criminalizing the advocacy of crime is that people can disagree about what should be considered a crime. Take the issue of abortion. Suppose a law were passed making partial-birth abortion illegal, and suppose that Objectivists who did not think it should be illegal were to advocate it as a right. Since it is illegal, they would be advocating criminal activity or what some consider to be the murder of an innocent child. If the advocacy of a crime were itself a crime, Objectivists would be denied freedom of speech - the freedom to express their views on this issue.
Now, it will no doubt be argued that partial-birth abortion is not in fact a crime and should not be made illegal. But the point here is that it is easy to disagree about such issues, and that well-meaning people do in fact disagree about them. To criminalize the advocacy of a crime is to close off all debate about what should and should not be made illegal. It is to silent dissent and obliterate all intellectual discussion of controversial issues.
The issue of child pornography is relevant here. Should it be protected by the First Amendment? In order for a crime to be committed, there must be a victim. Now if the child is subjected to sexual abuse in the process of producing the pornography, then we can agree that there is a victim, the child himself. But what about cases in which there is no sexual abuse? Some time ago, a mother was arrested on charges of child pornography, after she had taken pictures of her kids in the bathtube and sent the negatives to a Kodak developer. After seeing the pictures, the developer notified the police, who arrested her. While at university, I visited one of my professors in her office and noticed a naked picture of her son posted on her wall. Is this child pornography? Should the police have been notified and the professor arrested? You see the problem. For some people, these pictures would be considered pornographic; for others, they would not; obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. But in neither case were the children victims of sexual abuse. In the absence of such abuse, the pictures are protected under the First Amendment.
The appropriate response to someone like Jim Peron is for decent people to ostracize him, not for the state to expropriate his property and to deny him the right to live where he chooses. What Peron has done to the cause of libertarianism is disgraceful; what libertarians who want him deported are doing to it is even more disgraceful!
- Bill
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