Wes, I would be ecstatic if nobody in Denver breathed a word about "anarchism" or "sex with children". Unfortunately, there will be people in Denver proposing to restore the 2004 platform language advocating "individual secession" (i.e. anarchism), and in the last two days multiple Ruwart supporters have proposed restoring the 2004 platform language advocating the right of children to "engage in voluntary exchanges of goods, services or information regarding human sexuality". Many of us delegates will not sit silently by and let these positions be re-introduced into the LP Platform. You can claim all you want that reformers are manufacturing these issues of "anarchism" and "sex with children", but my quotes here are straight out of the 2004 platform. That's the same platform that the LNC member named in this thread's title petitioned us on the Platform Committee to restore. Maybe she's never read it; I suspect most of the petitioners haven't.
I again agree with nearly everything Woolsey says above, except for the idea that this issue of legalized sex and sexual commerce among "consenting" children is going to marginalize the LP any more than our quasi-anarchism has already done. Child sex is just the tip of the iceberg. The Ruwarchist positions on personal secession and private WMD are technically even more extremist. Indeed, personal secession *includes* the idea of pedophiles exempting themselves from state protections for minors, and (as far as I can tell) condemns every 5-year-old to use only their market savvy to rally defense against any predatory whims of their guardians.
This is not just a hypothetical issue. Here in my county we have a perennial LP candidate who served time after pleading no contest in 1990 to two charges of attempted child pandering -- i.e. "offer[ing] to give, transport, provide, or make available to another person, a child under the age of 16 for the purpose of any lewd or lascivious act as defined in Section 288". To defend himself from what he calls "entrapment" for talking about organizing a sexual encounters between an undercover female cop and his 14-year-old son (and allegedly the 10-year-old boy living with him), he explains:
JW) Why I am a Politically Incorrect Parent: I had my first pleasant sexual experience at the age of five -- a kind of group orgy/sexual-discovery/fondle get together of about four or five kids of various ages and both sexes. I had long since decided that if at all possible that I would like to arrange a similar pleasant sexual experience for my own children. [...]The details of three incidents where some could claim that I had been inappropriately affectionate with a child: a minor incident in 1969 (it was inappropriate since the child was not my own and I didn't have the parents okay), and two in 1982 with my own daughter. All incidents were intended by me as affection, and most importantly were received as affection by the child. (JW
In 2004 we had to run a normaltarian against this guy in a state senate primary and we kept him off the general ballot only by two votes. Unlike this guy's conviction, I don't think Ruwart's position on sexual commerce by children disqualifies her from being an LP candidate. I just don't think that such extremist positions of Ruwart should be in the Platform.
If Ruwart's supporters are correct in saying that she merely opposes bright lines in rules about the age-related ability to give various kinds of consent, then she might be able to put this whole issue to bed by endorsing language like this:
Communities may choose the age, between 14 and 18 years, at which a person is no longer rebuttably presumed to be a child, and instead is rebuttably presumed to be an adult, with any such determination being ultimately the judgment of a jury in any particular case.
