In such times it must be possible to have a serious discussion about our priorities. Do we rather put people on trial because they own some comics with drawings of scantly clad teenage characters than going after the people who actually rape real kids? Do we want to pass laws which are being abused to spy on everyone of us without helping a single child in the process?

Watching a video of yourself you made when you were 17 is illegal in many countries today

And now we might actually get to have this discussion thanks to an opinion piece published by Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. He is explaining how our current laws are written by religious fundamentalists, how many, many innocent people, both adults and teens, are caught in the process and why we might want to reconsider the laws concerning the possession of “child porn” – which was legal until 1999 in Sweden and many other countries. The Swedish Association of Journalists still is against the ban as the Destroyer blog is pointing out.

This article argues that our current laws on the topic are counterproductive, because they protect child molesters instead of bringing them to justice, they criminalize a generation of normally-behaving teenagers which diverts valuable police resources from the criminals we should be going after, and they lead to censorship and electronic book burning as well as unacceptable collateral damage to innocent families. Child abuse as such is not condoned by anybody, and this article argues that current laws are counterproductive in preventing and prosecuting it.

I urge you to actually read the whole essay before you leave any heated comments. Falkvinge is not arguing for the abuse of children to be made legal in any way. Please keep the discussion civilised, thanks.

But if you want to give kids positive role models and the certainty that your feelings and that part of your identity are normal well represented and accepted in our society you’ll need more than just Glee. From a kid’s point of view there’s actually a severe lack of queer characters in the shows and films they get to see. All the Disney princesses marry princes. Pixar movies have married people, moms and dads, all over the place. Even the robots are matched up in obviously opposite-gender pairs. All the preteen sitcoms have girls chasing after boys and vice versa. If there is a character who has stereotypically "gay" mannerisms, that character is used for a laugh and not a lot else.

Those cartoons that actually should have gay characters have been effectively "straight-washed." The popular comic X-Men has had gay characters for quite a while, but when it’s adapted to television, none of the characters is anything but heterosexual. When Mystique and Destiny are included, they are no longer long-term lovers but "best friends." Northstar isn’t portrayed as gay, even though he was one of the first out LGBT characters in American comics.

Even the cartoons brought over from Japan and marketed to children have been "straight-washed" for Western audiences. In Dragon Ball any mention of the orientation of the gay character, General Blue, is censored. And Sailor Moon, which has no less than seven queer characters in the original version, has none in Western version. Some characters’ genders have actually been changed, and the lesbian couples are now "cousins," an old classic. The only LGBT character you could find that made it through was a minor character in Dragon Ball Z.

Many queer adults know what it was like to grow up with no media representation. It created feelings of isolation. It reinforced the notion that they were "other." And many thought that because they weren’t mentioned, they must have been something secret, something bad. Nowadays kids are coming out younger and younger. It’s increasingly common for them to come out at 12 or 13 years old. And what does TV present them? Only Glee.

But maybe that’s about to change. ParaNorman  (trailer below) is making a first step at least. It’s a stop-action movie with witches and zombies — all things my kids love. The movie is about how no one is totally what they appear to be….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgwSpajMw3s

Spoiler ahead… the chubby, silly kid is the bravest and most courageous of the bunch; the zombies aren’t bad guys; and the big, muscled jock, Mitch, is gay. That character’s orientation is only mentioned at the end of the movie, almost in passing. One of the female characters asks Mitch if he’d like to go to the movies with her, and Mitch says, "Sure." He then adds that he thinks she’d love his boyfriend. The girl looks disappointed, and the movie moves on to other things.

To some people this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Here’s this character, who is basically the stereotypical jock, but in this movie, this kid’s movie, he’s also gay. It isn’t presented with a "very special episode" vibe. It isn’t something hidden. It isn’t something Mitch is in turmoil about. It just is.

While stories of coming out and dealing with bullying are important for kids to see, they are not the only stories for LGBT characters. ParaNorman is a movie about a group of kids, and one of those kids just happens to be gay. I would love to see youth-oriented television and movies follow this example and expand upon it. Imagine what it would have meant to gay adults (who were all once gay kids) to have had a gay character on Saved by the Bell, Facts of Life, or He-Man, a gay character who was just one of the gang and a regular part of the story. Why can’t iCarly or Drake & Josh have a gay kid in the mix? I think they should, because visibility matters.

And of course conservatives in America are already jumping on it because, as Towleroad put it, the makers of the film dared to make the gay character a normal guy, not a twisted, pathological villain or eccentric outsider.

(via Gay Voices)

When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary; no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt.

A father helps his son into his dress as he prepares for a fashion show

There have always been people who defy gender norms. Late-19th-century medical literature described female “inverts” as appallingly straightforward, with a “dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework” and “an inclination and taste for the sciences”; male inverts were “entirely averse to outdoor games.” By the mid-20th century, doctors were trying “corrective therapy” to extinguish atypical gender behaviors. The goal was preventing children from becoming gay or transgender, a term for those who feel they were born in the wrong body.

Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls — to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.

“It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities,” one North Carolina mother wrote last year on her blog, “but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality. More than that, you’re trying to ‘squish out’ my kid.”

Two boys at a camp for gender-variant kids

The impassioned author of that blog, Pink Is for Boys, is careful to conceal her son’s identity, as were the other parents interviewed for this article. As much as these parents want to nurture and defend what makes their children unique and happy, they also fear it will expose their sons to rejection. Some have switched schools, changed churches and even moved to try to shield their children. That tension between yielding to conformity or encouraging self-expression is felt by parents of any child who differs from the norm. But parents of so-called pink boys feel another layer of anxiety: given how central gender is to identity, they fear the wrong parenting decision could devastate their child’s social or emotional well-being. The fact that there is still substantial disagreement among prominent psychological professionals about whether to squelch unconventional behaviour or support it makes those decisions even more wrenching.

Many of the parents who allow their children to occupy that “middle space” were socially liberal even before they had a pink boy, quick to defend gay rights and women’s equality and to question the confines of traditional masculinity and femininity. But when their sons upend conventional norms, even they feel disoriented. How could my own child’s play — something ordinarily so joyous to watch — stir up such discomfort? And why does it bother me that he wants to wear a dress?

Despite the confident tone of the letter Alex’s parents wrote to the preschool parents, Susan was terrified. She feared Alex’s fascination with femininity would make him a target of bullying, even in the progressive New England town where they live. She felt tortured by statistics that indicated gay and transgender teenagers, either of which she figured Alex might become, were much more likely to take drugs and commit suicide. She began having panic attacks. “The whole thing was vertiginous,” she said. “It’s hard to put a finger on why gender identity makes such a difference to our sense of who a person is, but it does. As a parent, it’s really destabilizing when that’s pulled out from under you. And I worried that if I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around my kid, and I love him more than life itself, then how would the rest of the world react to him?” Read on…

Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face. Why? Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it "Worst-First" thinking: Gripped by paedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening." Now, a guy turned on by diaper changes has got to be even rarer than a guy turned on by Sponge Bob. But "Worst-First" thinking means suspecting the motives of any man who chooses to work around kids.

Maybe the daycare center felt it had to be extra cautious, to avoid lawsuits. But regular folk are suspicious, too. Last February, a woman followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of girls’ panties. "I can’t believe this! You’re disgusting. This is a public place, you pervert!" she said—until the guy, who posted about the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking the underwear department.

Given the level of distrust, is it any wonder that, as the London Telegraph reported last month, the British Musicians’ Union warned its members they are no longer to touch a child’s fingers, even to position them correctly on the keys? Or that a public pool in Sydney, Australia last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded this, fearing false accusations.)

What’s really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it’s making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.

This queasy climate is making men think twice about things they used to do unselfconsciously. A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says, "I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled down my window to ask, ‘Where is such-and-such road?’ They ran off screaming."

Another dad told me about taking his three-year-old to play football in the local park, where he’d help organize the slightly older kids into a game. Over time, one of the kids started to look up to him. "He wanted to stand close to me, wanted approval, Dad stuff, I guess. And because of this whole ‘stranger danger’ mentality, I could sense this sort of wary disapproval from the few other parents at the playground. So I just stopped going."

And that’s not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn’t stop to help for fear he’d be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.

We think we’re protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that’s not a society that’s safe. Just sick.

Related: The Myth of the Boogeyman – 90% of all child abuse is happening within the family

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVj598L8l5I

It’s 11-year-old Andrew’s turn to set the table for dinner, and he deals out 14 paper plates as if they were playing cards. Marcus, 5, climbs onto a bench and announces, "It smells like pancakes." His brother, 3-year-old Cooper, counters, "I think it smells like chicken." "It smells like Ambrose," says Logan, 7, climbing in between Cooper and their sister Ambrose, who’s 4. She glares at the laughing boys. Actually, it smells like spaghetti. A big pot of homemade sauce is bubbling on the stove.

The six littlest children fit on the 9-foot-long bench along one side of the table. Andrew and the four other big kids sit in chairs on the other side. Olivia, the baby of the family, is in a high chair. Daddy sits at one end, Papa at the other. Steven and Roger Ham are raising 12 children, all adopted from foster care, in Arizona, one of the most unlikely places for two gay men to piece together a family.

The Ham family. More photos.

In Arizona, two men can’t be married, nor adopt children together. In his 2008 run for U.S. president, Arizona Sen. John McCain, who with wife Cindy has an adopted daughter, said he opposed allowing gay people to adopt. "I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family, so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption," McCain said during an appearance in Wisconsin.

That same year, Arizonans approved a ban on gay marriage by 56 percent of the vote. Since 1997, conservative Arizona lawmakers have introduced a half-dozen bills that would keep single people, including gays and lesbians, from becoming foster parents or adopting children in the state’s care, or would move married couples to the top of the waiting list for adoptions. Those attempts -- one as recent as last year -- failed to muster enough votes. But this year was different. On April 18, Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill that gives preference to married couples in state and private adoptions, all other criteria being equal. Yet, in 2009, the governor gave Steven and Roger Ham an award for their efforts at keeping siblings in foster care together through adoption.

"As someone who was raised from the age of 10 by a widowed mother, I am well aware that single or unmarried individuals can make wonderful parents," Brewer says. "This legislation merely establishes marital status of adoptive parents among a host of factors to be considered when placing a child." Opponents, however, contend that marriage doesn’t guarantee a stable and loving family. Read on… (Yeah, it’s a pretty long article but it’s worth it)

And since bad ideas almost always have bad consequences the USA end up with cases like a bill in Michigan that guarantees private prisons a occupancy rate of 90% because less prisoners would be a drag on profits. Or the judges in Pennsylvania who were earning millions of dollars for jailing kids for minor offenses. And things like this are going on to this day, often with the help of American schools where cops are already part of the daily routine. For example in Mississippi were a county is running a school-to-prison pipeline:

An investigation launched last December revealed that “the agencies have helped to operate a school-to-prison pipeline whereby children arrested in local schools become entangled in a cycle of incarceration without substantive and procedural protections required by the U.S. Constitution. The department’s findings show that children in Lauderdale County have been routinely and repeatedly incarcerated for allegedly committing school disciplinary infractions and are punished disproportionately, without constitutionally required procedural safeguards. Children have also been arrested at school for offenses as minor as defiance.

And to make this clear, “defiance” can be anything, even laughable offenses like dress code violations. And hardly surprising, it’s mostly queer kids and those who happen to be anything but white who end up in this horrible system. And once they’re in, it’s almost impossible to get out:

In 2009 the Southern Poverty Law Center brought a class-action lawsuit against the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Facility, accusing it of keeping youths “crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with the arbitrary use of Mace as a punishment for even the most minor infractions — such as ‘talking too much’ or failing to sit in the ‘back of their cells.’”

Photos by Steve Liss for No Place for Kids

These high rates of involvement in the juvenile justice system are a result of gay and transgender youth abandonment by their families and communities, and victimization in their schools—sad realities that place this group of young people at a heightened risk of entering the school-to-prison pipeline.

Despite the disproportionately high rates of gay and transgender youth entering the juvenile justice system, America’s schools, law enforcement officers, district attorneys, judges, and juvenile defenders are not equipped to manage the unique experiences and challenges that these young people face. As a consequence, the system often does more harm by unfairly criminalizing these youth—imposing harsh school sanctions, labelling them as sex offenders, or detaining them for minor offenses—in addition to subjecting them to discriminatory and harmful treatment that deprives them of their basic civil rights.

Read on: Why gay and transgender youth end up in the juvenile justice system

We seem to be entering a period of exposure for extremist Christians with the latest being one Pastor Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, saying that gays should be killed:

Of course Knapp was later interviewed by CNN and of course he claimed that he was misunderstood. But, of course, his own words tripped him up as he said:

Such ideas are not fringe to those Christians who call themselves reconstructionists, meaning that they want the equivalent of Sharia law, a return to Old Testament law, and dominionists, who want to install a theocracy by stealth (again mirroring the much quoted idea by anti-Islamists from Islam that you can lie and deceive to achieve God’s purpose).

Someone like Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association has argued openly for America law to be “bible based” and has called for homosexuality to be recriminalized, though has been careful to avoid calling for execution. In a number of instances, the links between those explicitly calling for the death penalty for gays and very mainstream religious right figures have surfaced.

Last December, Ron Paul (who keeps trying to become the Republican nominee for the presidential election) was discovered to be touting the endorsement of “Eminent Pastor Rev. Phil Kayser, Ph.D.” Kayser is the pastor of Dominion Covenant Church in Omaha, Nebraska, and supports the death penalty for gays, delinquent children and adultery. Paul’s campaign later removed the endorsement from his website.

George Grant, a well-known reconstructionist, was the co-author for Mike Huckabee’s (who was another wanna-be presidential candidate) 1998 book, “Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence.” In the book, Huckabee and Grant lumped homosexuality with pedophilia, sadomasochism and necrophilia as “institutionally supported aberrations.” Grant has called for the execution of gays.

Right-wing TV superstar Glenn Beck’s “Black Robe Regiment” was an effort to get pastors and religious leaders to take a stand on political and cultural issues. It included another Pastor ‘out’ for killing of gays, Steven Anderson from Tempe, Arizona.

Then we have the ties between Michele Bachmann (who was also running to become America’s president) and a ‘hard rock ministry’ in Minnesota which broadcasts from the very mainstream conservative Heritage Foundation. It says that countries that execute gays are “more moral” than America. Bachmann has ignored calls to disassociate from that ministry.

The now viral video of a four-year-old boy at the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle in Greensburg, Indiana, singing “Ain’t no homo’s gonna make it to heaven,” where the congregation leap to its feet in shouts and applause, may have shocked some, but the point is this is not isolated.

Greensburg is where 14-year-old Billy Lucas killed himself because he was perceived as being gay and that community banded together for a massive cover-up. That led Box Turtle Bulletin to call Greensburg America’s Ugliest Town, but it is far from the only place where murderous hatred is the norm.

[Article via Care2]

“I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don’t destroy a population,” says Ross. “To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with.”

The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of colour. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention.

On top of the cost, in its recent report No Place for Kids, the AECF presents evidence to show that youth incarceration does not reduce recidivism rates, does not benefit public safety and exposes those imprisoned to further abuse and violence.

Ross thinks his images of juvenile lock-ups can, and should, be “ammunition” for the on-going policy and funding debates between reformers, staff, management and law-makers. “My images were used by a senate subcommittee as part of a discussion on Federal legislation to prevent pre-adjudicated, detained [pre-trial] juveniles from being housed with kids who’d committed hard crimes. You shouldn’t house these populations together,” says Ross. “That’s a great thing for me to know that my work is being used for advocacy rather than for the masturbatory art world I grew up in.” Read on and see more of the photos…

Anyway, Puppystuff has a nice analogy about this issue: “I keep seeing this argument from homophobic representatives that children should be sheltered from portrayals of gay romance because it’s ‘too complicated’ of a topic for them to understand. Every time I see it I’m reminded of a story.

When I was seventeen, I had a driving instructor who just went by “The Reverend” (I think this is because he used to be a reverend). He was a decent driving instructor; his advanced age hadn’t taken the same rasp to his perception and reaction time that it had taken to his voice and features. He told good stories about his time as a driving instructor, and his instruction was firm without being harsh. I never really had any awkward conversations with The Reverend.

Until we had a conversation about the Metric System.

The Reverend didn’t like the metric system. It was ‘too complicated’, with all its millimeters and centiliters, and it was all too much for him and he wanted to stick with what he knew, ‘cause it was simpler. This threw my high-school brain for a loop; were we talking about the same metric system? The kind with organized, powers-of-ten conversion, with clearly delineated systems for each method of measurement? It was completely beyond my ken that anyone could look at the hodge-podge mess of the Imperial Unit system, with its arbitrary methods of conversion, its frequently redundant and misleading labelling, and say “this is way simpler than that European goofiness.”

But the Reverend liked it. When pressed on why he thought the metric system was complicated, he muttered a few numbers, and one jumped out at me — two point two. The number of pounds in a kilogram.

The Reverend thought the metric system was complicated because he had to convert to it from Imperial. He couldn’t comprehend a remarkably simple system because he was approaching it from a complicated one that he knew by heart.

Homosexuality is not complicated. It does not confuse children at all. Over and over again we see instances of children asking questions about gay couples and, when the explanation is given to them, understanding perfectly. Children aren’t capable of the kinds of lust and love as adults are, so seeing two grown men or women in love is no more alien to them than seeing one of each in a relationship.

But to the homophobic parents of children, they find themselves halted and flummoxed by a concept for which their current system of measurement has no unit. The conversion to a simple idea about love is too complicated, coming from an archaic and narrow set of beliefs. They can’t imagine trying to explain homosexual love to their children even if they wanted to — they imagine it must be hard for the children because it’s hard for them.

Come on, you silly grown-ups. Homophobia is complicated. Homosexuality is not.”