The No Spin Zone (Paperback)

 Chapter One 
 "You Kidding Me?"    Issue 1: Sexual deviants who prey on children    The Opponent: Floyd Abrams, First Amendment attorney    O'Reilly: This doesn't have anything to do with free speech.    Abrams: But of course it does.    O'Reilly: No, this has to do with aiding and abetting, promoting a crime on a website.    If you are thirty-five or older, chances are good that your childhood in America was  pretty much like mine, no matter where you grew up. By age six I was out of the  house most of the time after school and all during the summer, playing with my tight  group of friends. There were limits. For example, if I was late for dinner at six  o'clock, there was hell to pay.    Otherwise I was on my own in the great outdoors. My parents seemingly had no fear  that I would be harmed by sinister outside forces marauding around my Long Island  neighbor
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 Chapter One 
 "You Kidding Me?"    Issue 1: Sexual deviants who prey on children    The Opponent: Floyd Abrams, First Amendment attorney    O'Reilly: This doesn't have anything to do with free speech.    Abrams: But of course it does.    O'Reilly: No, this has to do with aiding and abetting, promoting a crime on a website.    If you are thirty-five or older, chances are good that your childhood in America was  pretty much like mine, no matter where you grew up. By age six I was out of the  house most of the time after school and all during the summer, playing with my tight  group of friends. There were limits. For example, if I was late for dinner at six  o'clock, there was hell to pay.    Otherwise I was on my own in the great outdoors. My parents seemingly had no fear  that I would be harmed by sinister outside forces marauding around my Long Island  neighborhood. Sure, I might hurt myself roughhousing, but hey, those were the  breaks. My father didn't sound like football announcer John Madden, but he had  Madden's mind-set: "Play rough-take your chances."    With my dopey friends, whom you might have met in my last book, The O'Reilly  Factor, I made the most of the deep woods three blocks from my house. We climbed  thirty feet up into the thick leafy branches to build rickety tree houses. We tunneled  underground like moles. We threw rocks at each other. We rolled around in the dirt  completely unsupervised by annoying adults.    It never occurred to us that some older guy in an overcoat might drive up and try to  hurt us. Yes, my father once said something about never taking a ride with a  stranger. But he didn't say why, didn't make an issue out of it, and didn't seem  concerned that his eldest son might be taken hostage at some point.    How times have changed. And that's the terrifying subject of this chapter's debate  with a distinguished First Amendment lawyer and public figure, who I believe is  absolutely wrong in putting the rights of special (read perverted) interests ahead of  the safety of American children.    Parents today are rightfully worried about their children being abducted or abused,  even in their own neighborhoods. But why is that? Are there more child molesters in  the United States now than in my childhood years in the fifties and sixties? Are they  bolder for some reason? Is it possible they are being encouraged?    Statistically, it is impossible to know. Officials at the FBI and the Department of  Health and Human Services say they do not have accurate statistics for child abuse  and abduction before 1990. According to the federal government, more than  100,000 American kids were sexually molested in 1998, or one and a half children  per one thousand. In 1999 nearly 32,000 kids were kidnapped-most by relatives.  England does a better job of tracking the danger-to-kids trend. Scotland Yard says  the number of convictions for gross indecency with a child doubled between 1985  and 1995. So the data suggest that society has become more menacing to children  and that more adults are willing to risk imprisonment and social destruction to  molest kids. The question is why?    Some believe that widespread, often-hysterical TV coverage has possibly encouraged  deviant behavior toward children. Because of television news, crimes against children  have been magnified greatly. The heartbreak of any child damaged by an adult is  spread from coast to coast immediately and the experts start prattling, some of them  sympathetic to the "disease" or "condition" of the victimizer. No one can say for  sure, but the notoriety of the crimes may attract pedophiles who are risk takers. We  are obviously not talking about rational people here.    But there is also something else in play in this country that is much subtler: the  gradual contagion of nonjudgmental acceptance. The result of this contagion is that  behavior that would have been roundly condemned forty years ago is now  "understood" or in some cases even accepted.    Two college-student parents killed their newborn baby and left his body in a trash  can outside a cheap motel. The pair received hundreds of calls of sympathy and  support. After all, it was "understandable" that they panicked. In the end, a judge  sentenced them to less than three years in prison.    In Wisconsin an expectant mother tried to poison her fetus with alcohol one day  before the due date. She received no jail time, as supporters petitioned the press  and the court with tales about her life of woe.    Throughout the country drug-addicted babies are routinely returned to the mothers  who have already damaged them physically and perhaps limited their learning  potential for life. But remember: The mother has a disease. Can society deprive the  mother of raising her own children? Well, I damn well would. But I seem to be in the  minority these days, as my "understanding" threshold does not reflect the society in  which we live. In all the examples I've cited, the child's life is devalued in favor of  the adult's "situation." How did this happen in America?    Here's my answer, which is the lead-in to our first encounter in the No Spin Zone:  The welfare of a child means less today because of the promotion and acceptance of  certain so-called special interests. The most notorious example-and I am not  making this up-is an organization based in the United States called the North  American Man-Boy Love Association. It advocates the legalization of sex between  men and boys as young as eight years old. Read that sentence again and digest the  eight-years-old part. This vile NAMBLA group was formed in 1978 and calls for the  "empowerment" of youth in the sexual area. It says it does not engage in any  activities that violate the law.    Oh yeah? What about the fact that NAMBLA was involved in funding an orphanage in  Thailand that allowed grown men to rape and molest the children who lived there?  And what about the case of child rape in Ohio where NAMBLA was found guilty of  complicity in the crime? The Ohio Court of Appeals ruled that NAMBLA's literature,  found in the possession of the rapist, showed "preparation and purpose" in  encouraging the rape.    It gets much, much worse. A NAMBLA member recently raped and murdered a young  boy in Massachusetts. In October 1997 ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley was playing near  his home in Cambridge when two men tried to lure him into a car. When he resisted,  Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes got brutal. They wound up killing the boy and  then drove to Maine, where they dumped the boy's body in a river.    Both men were eventually arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Prosecutors at the trial produced as critical evidence a diary kept by Jaynes. In it he  flat out stated that he became obsessed with having sex with young boys after he  joined NAMBLA. How did the organization allegedly poison him with its ideas?  According to the diary, Jaynes received NAMBLA literature in the mail and visited the  group's website on computers at the Boston Public Library. Clearly, these NAMBLA  people wanted to get their message out. According to lawyers familiar with the  website, it actually posted techniques designed to lure boys into having sex with men  and also supplied information on what an adult should do if caught.    Jeffrey Curley's parents are suing NAMBLA in federal court for $200 million. And  guess who is defending NAMBLA in the case? Can you spell ACLU? That's right. The  most powerful free speech watchdog in the world is using its money and resources to  make sure that NAMBLA is not driven out of business. Is this an outrage or what?    The amazing truth is that the American Civil Liberties Union is spending membership  dues defending the lawsuit. In a statement it said, "Regardless of whether people  agree with or abhor NAMBLA's views, holding the organization responsible for crimes  committed by others who read their materials would gravely endanger our important  First Amendment rights."    Baloney! I respect the ACLU's goal of protecting the rights of all Americans. At their  best, this group is courageous in defending legitimate expressions of opinion, some  of which, like the Nazi marches, are pretty vile. But NAMBLA is a different matter  because the freedom to harm children is not built into our Constitution.    Attorney Floyd Abrams walked onto The O'Reilly Factor set confident and clear-eyed.  He had won many of these debates in the past. In my introduction to the segment, I  told the audience that I believed NAMBLA was guilty of promoting statutory rape and  was a seditious organization in the sense that it wanted to undercut the moral  foundation of the United States. Abrams opened his remarks by saying that "the  ACLU serves the public by serving even an awful bunch of creeps." Then we got  down to the heart of the matter and things got heated.    O'Reilly: This doesn't have anything to do with free speech.    Abrams: But of course it does.    O'Reilly: No, this has to do with aiding and abetting, promoting a crime on a website.    Abrams: If that's what they do, then the family will win the case. But until they show  that, there should be somebody brave enough-and the ACLU is-to show up.    O'Reilly: I think you're dead wrong because what the ACLU is doing is allowing an  organization to corrupt children. In doing so the ACLU becomes part of the crime if it  wins and allows NAMBLA to get away with it.    Abrams: So they shouldn't have a lawyer, right?    O'Reilly: They shouldn't have the ACLU.    Abrams: Throw them in jail.    O'Reilly: I'd put them in jail in a heartbeat.    Abrams: I know you would.    O'Reilly: Each lawyer has a responsibility to choose the case that promotes justice.    Abrams: These people need the ACLU.    Sure they need it, because they are a criminal enterprise that exists for only one  reason: to encourage statutory rape. The ACLU's representation is free, and NAMBLA  is staying alive because of it. When the ACLU chooses which cases to take, it has a  responsibility to the people who are paying dues to it. The thing is, no decent human  being should be helping NAMBLA, and I know many ACLU members who are  absolutely mortified that this organization has stained itself with this case.    It should be obvious that I am a big free speech supporter. The Factor would have  been shut down a long time ago if the First Amendment wasn't sacred. But we need  a clear-thinking ACLU to protect our freedom of expression, not some radical  organization that is lost in a fog of self-righteousness. I asked ACLU President Nadine  Strossen to address this NAMBLA issue, but she declined. That was interesting. Ms.  Strossen has talked with me before and is anything but camera shy.    And what about the authorities? Why isn't the Justice Department prosecuting  NAMBLA? If the Ohio court nailed them, what's wrong with the feds? The answer to  that one is that the feds don't care. We have become a nation held hostage to self- serving rationalizations of special interest groups. The Zone is sickened by the  cowardice of the Justice Department as well as by the ACLU's irresponsibility. Using  the First Amendment as a cover for the subversion of our laws violates the public  safety. Spinning the NAMBLA-ACLU deal as a "rights" issue is a disgrace.    "One thing [NAMBLA] didn't say was go out and kill anybody," Abrams said to me.  "One thing it didn't say was go out and rape anybody."    But as any good citizen knows, it's not what you don't say that counts, it's what you  do say. If the ACLU cannot acknowledge that it is a crime to conspire to have sex  with children-a hurtful and brutal act physically, emotionally, and morally-then the  American Civil Liberties Union does not deserve our respect or our support.    
 Chapter Two 
 Reading, Writing, and the Joy of Sex    Issue 2: Sex ed in your child's classroom    The Opponent: Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former surgeon general of the United States    O'Reilly: But you know how kids are. As soon as masturbation is brought up, they'll  run out and tell their friends ...    Elders: Poor children whom nobody has ever taught anything-are we to just throw  them away? I think not.    It's not just the shameless perverts we need to worry about. Our children can also be  assaulted by well-meaning public officials, teachers, and other adults in responsible  positions. And these intrusions on the young are far more powerful than the lurid  crimes that grab headlines because they are often very personal and delivered to the  child one-on-one by influential adults.    Take the supposedly enlightened movement toward sex education. Right now, in  many of the nation's public schools, there are sex education classes that get right to  the heart of the matter. You get the what, you get the how. You get the birth  control. You sometimes get nonverbal approval and, in rare cases, outright  encouragement to engage in sexual activity. Driver's ed leads to driving a car, right?  Sex ed has to be handled with the proper touch (pardon the pun) or, well, you get  the idea.    I taught high school in Opa-locka, Florida, considered at the time to be one of the  worst slums in South Florida. The kids at my school knew all about sex, drugs, and  rock and roll. They needed guidance, not instruction. They needed emotional  maturity and perspective. They listened very, very closely to everything an adult said  about sex and especially the way it was said.    Sex ed for me was "the talk" my father gave me when I turned thirteen. It was  awkward for both of us, as the Irish aren't exactly known for their Dr. Ruth-like  candor in these matters. "The talk" was also somewhat unnecessary. I already knew  the basics from seminars with my friends, using Playboy magazines as text. And my  father's words were highly theoretical because the reality was, I had about as much  chance of landing the great white whale as I did of having sex. Teenage girls want to  date smooth guys. I was a barbarian. But I gave my father points for trying.    As a young teacher I was more relaxed speaking about sex than my father ever was,  but I was careful. Students have a way of misquoting any provocative comments,  and that can lead to big trouble in a Catholic high school. Some of my students as  young as fifteen were having sex and almost everyone in the school knew about it. I  encouraged the use of contraceptives for any American who did not want to become  a parent. I spoke of this in a general sense, illuminating the lesson with specifics  about poverty, divorce, and child deprivation. Most of the kids got the message.  Some didn't. It is always that way.    Predictably, the school administration did not like my kind of direct approach. They  were determined to control the sexuality of the students by threatening them with  various punishments for risque behavior. This of course was insane. The more you  just say no, the more enticing certain kinds of behavior become. The issue came to a  boil over football, of all things. 


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