When the State Makes Pedophiles Deserve Defense

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

January 26, 2007

H.L. Mencken once said that the problem with the government is that in order to defend ourselves against it, we frequently must defend those within society who are the least popular. They are those who it is easiest for the government to go after, such as drug dealers, drunks, gamblers, gays, perverts, pornographers, prostitutes, johns, and the like. But even rats deserve defending. And the government, in its malice and idiocy, can make the reprehensible defendable.  

In this case, police are doing so with pedophiles and grown men interested in sex with teenagers. The statist media is swept up with it. Dateline NBC has a show devoted to it. It’s “To Catch a Predator,” hosted by Chris Hansen.  

The show works with an organization called Perverted Justice (PJ), which employs undercover operatives who chat on instant messaging programs to get older men to solicit them for sex. According to their website, they wait for the men to initiate contact with them. And if the conversation turns to sex, only then are they supposed to entice him and verify his identity.  

The man will then show up at a decoy’s home that is rented out by Dateline with an actor pretending to be the kid the men thought they were talking to. The kid steps out of sight for a moment and tells the guest to wait when Chris Hansen comes out with the chat log that has the pervert red handed, asking for sex and all kinds of inappropriate things.  

Part of this circus is Hansen’s David Caruso-esque smugness. He embarrasses and humiliates the men with details from their chat log, and then tells them that they’re free to leave. This is right when the police come out, screaming at them to get down, with guns drawn, and arrest them.  

Other times it doesn’t work out this way. There are times when men will drive up to the house but not actually go in because he’s suspicious. They may see another man get arrested while driving by. In one case, a man walked up to the front door while talking to the decoy, was very suspicious, and walked away. The police arrested him anyway.  

The crime in each case is soliciting sex from a minor. Perverted Justice has on its website a list of illogical and condescending defenses for possible objections to its practices here, which often consist of telling the person who would ask such a forbidden person to stop being so stupid, slap himself, and to be smarter.  

For instance, against the accusation that they aren’t helping get innocent men arrested, since they aren’t even soliciting sex from a minor, they use the analogy of the police setting up a person trying to hire a hit-man (they also basically tell you that you’re too dumb to use their site if you raise this objection, and they really don’t like you). After all, if arresting people for hiring undercover cops as hitmen is illegal, so should be PJ’s practices.  

There’s no response to the question they then beg, however, which would be, “Is the law just? Should it be a statutory crime to solicit sex with a child in the first place?”  

No, their answer to the initial question merely amounts to basing their practices on a faulty premise--that if the police can arrest a would-be murderer, we can help arrest a would-be, or even a might-be, pedophile.  

It’s not that it necessarily should be lawful to have sex with a child. Libertarian law is based on the axiom of self-ownership, but of course, children aren’t self-owners, and I believe any libertarian judge should agree that they are incapable of consenting to sex. Where that age-of-consent is should be determined in individual cases brought to a judge by experts.  

This isn’t to concede any moral ground to the state, however. The police’s and PJ’s practices contain fatal conceits.  

In the first place, the supposed child the men talk to are looking for men to solicit them. Once talk of sex is initiated, they go with it.  If a child had actually done this, it would have been voluntary. Again, a child is not a self-owner. But this activity is best regulated by private property owners, whether parents, internet service providers, and even road and private community owners, who may rightfully regulate whatever they like as a function of contract.  

(PJ’s website claims that what they’re doing isn’t entrapment simply because they don’t initiate conversation with the men. They never tell us how we should go about concluding that because of this, they aren’t entrapping men.)  

And, this is a moral problem for any child who is troubled enough to have actually invited such a man into his or her home, and for the child’s parents. Such parents would rightfully be able to take the man to court, and would, at the very least, be able to get others to boycott such a man and shun him from society.  

But the police and PJ aren’t even concerned with getting a man who is either a child molester who would use violence in any form, or from a man who is actually talking to a child. A child can’t necessarily consent to sex, but an undercover adult can. You can’t violate a grown man or woman’s rights by merely asking for sex.  

As for the hit man scenario offered by PJ, the police are not within their rights, nor are their statutes on murder just since they positively proscribe murder and hiring hitmen. But even at that, murder is per se illegitimate. Maybe some 13 year olds can consent to sex, and maybe some can’t. And again, I hope no child can, and that any parent would have legal recourse against someone warped enough to do such a thing. Children should be protected from such people. People are just under the delusion that if we don’t want the government to do something, then we must not want it done at all.  

As I mentioned earlier, some men don’t even try to enter the house. None shown on “To Catch a Predator” use any violence to get in. Some leave without entering, making the police’s case more absurd: The would-be suspect then has merely solicited sex from an undercover PJ employee or volunteer and then decided not to take any further part in the sting on him, which brings me to another point: That of proportionality in legal penalties.  

Most people understand that the concept of proportionality is a good and proper one in giving punishment for crimes. Not every crime warrants a life imprisonment or death sentence, even if we can all agree that a crime was committed. But “To Catch a Predator” just begs the question: What possible proportionality is being used? Violence is being used on men who used no violence in the first place.  

It’s absurd to watch. A man comes out of the house after talking with the host, and the police pitifully charge out with bullet-proof vests on and guns drawn, screaming at the compliant and sometimes crying man to get on the ground. Proportionality has been thrown out the window, and we can think of no principle to on which to punish these men.  

There is no victim to force him to give compensation to, unlike in the case of a person trying to hire a hitman. As the guest of someone’s house--usually that of his parents’--a child is subject to their regulations, and they would be within their rights to shun such a man. But no child is involved.  

The police are simply aggressing against an innocent person (and the state has to go to some heights before I could have ever called a pedophile innocent!). So how long do they have a “right,” in these cases, to detain a person? A week? A year? Indefinitely? And in the meanwhile, they still force all of us to pay taxes for the apprehension, imprisonment and rehabilitation of these men, so that everyone else becomes a victim.  

Finally, I come to the absurdity that the police avail themselves to in their operations, which is one that all police stings avail themselves to. Suppose a competing law enforcement agency employed people in sting operations because they heard about the kidnapping taking place by the police and Perverted Justice, and they wanted to conduct a sting operation of their own to catch them in the act. It would be perfectly possible for them to employ undercover agents to pretend to solicit sex from agents of Perverted Justice, go to the house, and then seize the police for trying to kidnap him under false pretenses, and to seize Chris Hansen as an accomplice.  

So, if someone’s sense of justice were incensed and they tried to show what lousy police work is being done, they would still be wanted by the police for soliciting sex from a minor, despite only trying to bust the police themselves.  

The very theoretical possibility goes to demonstrate how badly and absurdly that monopoly on crime itself bungles what should be an honest job, that of exposing perverts for the sick people they are.  

It’s not as if the conduct of any of the men the police catch isn’t morally outrageous in the first place. These men deserve to be shunned from society and kept as far away from children as possible. They possibly deserve jail time if they have had sex with children. And Perverted Justice would be within their rights to merely embarrass and humiliate these richly deserving targets all over television if they didn’t get the police or anyone else to arrest these men, and contracted with internet service providers and road owners to have permission to entrap them without the threat of arrest. It merely means that, in your contract with your ISP, you wouldn’t be allowed to solicit children for sex. It would also specify that if you try to, you stand to come across someone posing as a child so they can expose you on their website and on TV.  

It’s unfortunate that I have to defend a class of people with whom I would surely get some unwanted help, just as if, in criticizing affirmative action, I might get some Klan members to agree with me, thus making the anti-state case seem that much more unpalatable. We can add this as one more perversion of how government operates. It turns justice on its head so that the very first people that need defending are often the reprehensible. Though we can often look upon opponents of the state as heroes, the government manages to screw that up by forcing us to damn them with faint praise since they belong, in a sense, to the same class of persecuted individuals as pedophiles.