1980's satanic panics

When I was a child in North Platte, I would often hear stories of various rural nooks being used for Satanic services, invaribly involving baby sacrifice and orgies. These sacrifice stations always coincided with places where teenagers would go to drink/drug/fuck, etc. I always wondered why Satan worshippers went through to such out of the way places to hold their ceremonies, didn't any of them have a basement for his/her own, why wern't the police aware of this if everybody else was, why wasn't anyone noticing the dissapearing babies?

Which brings me to my main point, such as it is. Does anybody remember the "satanic child abuse" scandals of the 1980's? These involved children (usually after being coerced by adults with axes to grind and police out to win public adulation) would make absurd claims, such as being forced to let animals eat out of their vaginas, or being blindfolded, taken to a plane, flown to some undisclosed location, forced to felate girafes, and taken back to day care before their parents got off work. Satan was present at many of these incidents, many officials, in the act of manfully defending the public, used the phrase "ritualistic satanic abuse."

So who would possibly believe a child making such claims? Are you serious? What kind of cold-blooded, child-hating atheist wouldn't believe them? Don't you love your kids? Don't you even have kids? If you had kids that you really loved, you would understand that children never lie.

Well, they do of course. In fact kids lie more often than adults do. We can see this with our own eyes whenever we choose to look. But the notion of the innocent child physically incapible of lying refuses to go away. What manner of self loathing is it that makes us think that gaining experience at being human is somehow "corrupting" while ignorance of the world is "innocent". I don't know.

At any rate, we needed a scapegoat of some sort or another back than. These were the days when working mothers first became the norm. The was also the age of Reaganism, a great crusade to return to tradition. So women were supposed to feel guilty about dropping their children off at daycare and than going to work. Yet they certainly wern't supposed to quit their jobs and stay at home. This would require welfare, which would make them whores.

So in order to defend tradition, parents and officials were forced to create an enemy. Communism was on the wane, Islam was not yet quite so scary, so what was left? Why not go to that old medieval standby, satan/sex? This would have the bonus effect of confirming our belief that society was getting overpermissive. Yes sir, allowing adults to have wild, non-reproductive sex always leads to beastiality and pedophalia. Here was our proof, we created it out of thin air.

There was a small window of time at the beginning of all of these incidents when reasonable people might have had a chance to put an end to this nonsense. But the window was always too small.

This was a moral panic you see. Police chiefs, district attorneys, and other "authorities" gave legitimacy to the claims. Believing the charges was a sign of moral responsibility, while disbeliving them was a sign that one had the audacity to believe that society was not overpermissive, that there are no slippery slopes, that maybe they were having too mush fun on their own time, and how much time do you spend around kids anyway?

Speaking of authorities, have you ever noticed that when people complain about lawywers, they never seem to be talking about state prosecutors? It's always defense attorneys and tort lawyers who suffer the wrath. It seems that there are many believe that everyone accused of a crime, everyone who the screaming man on TV tells you is guilty, is indeed guilty. Surely our fine men in uniform would have exterminated all criminals by now, if only it wern't for the defense lawyers sweet-talking weak and gullible juries into releasing the obviously guilty.

The fact of the matter is that a lawyers job is to win. Our system is built on the idea that the truth is rarely self-evident, and that the best way to ascertain the closest thing to the truth is to have both sides tell their stories before an disinterested panal. Do lawyers sometimes defend the obviously guilty? On rare occasions, yes. But this is hardly ever the case. It is possible, if one is educated and does not have to rely on their imaginary "intuition" to deal with a client without speculating on their guilt or innocence.

I think that District Attorneys should give us far more to worry about. They are elected by the public, after all, so they must convince us that they are protecting our sons and daughters from boogeymen. Do you think that if a prosecutor is presented with a case where he is on the obviously incorrect side, he would be any more likely to refuse the case out of the goodness of his heart than a defense attorney would?

Of course not. He will show his outrage at press confrences. He will raise his voice before the jury so as to impress them with his level of belief that he is right. Since children never lie, he will gain the conviction, and he will win re-election.

This is exactly what happened in the satanic abuse incidents. Innocent people were sent to prison (we know what happens to child molestors there, don't we?) Even if they were acquited, so what? Do you think that the good Christian townspeople would believe things like "science" or "evidence" over the children? No. Death threats were given anyway, the accused were run out of town anyway, and the accusations followed them wherever they went. Their lives were ruined anyway.

But never mind all that. We're better than that now. Smarter, not so damned silly. Just like we were smarter in the 1980's than those yokels in Salem. Just like we're smarter now than those paranoid McCarthyites in the 1950's.

Did you hear they banned the pledge of allegiance at some college in California? The same place they did those awful things to those kids a few years back.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sexual_abuse_hysteria