As to whether I tell lies about Benkof… my words stand for themselves.

I submit that I have shown that you misrepresented what the ACLU meant by “consent”, and that this was grotesquely unfair. (I allow that it was probably reckless indifference to the truth in the first instance, but that it got to be willfull quite some time ago.) I think you owe all concerned a retraction and an apology.

Ask me to respond to your fair criticisms after the first week in November and I will gladly do so.

Mark-

I certainly did not bring it up. I mentioned NAMBLA because calling me ex-gay is precisely parallel to my calling a lesbian activist a NAMBLA supporter. Then, someone at the TruthWinsOut (LiesWinOut?) Web site made the preposterous claim that the gay community never tried to associate with NAMBLA – which as a gay historian I know is simply false. When I said so, Wayne Besen ridiculously said I was “comparing” gays to child molesters (if I say that some gays have been associated with socialism does that mean I am comparing gays to socialists?) and I responded at our Web site to show I wasn’t just making this up. I have much, much more information (interesting how nobody disputed my point about Egale in Canada) that I really don’t want to share, because the main result will be giving ammunition to vicious people who really DO want to compare gays to child molesters. For now, I am willing to share two more pieces of relevant data with Mark and anyone else who is interested – offlist. If you guys want to encourage me to post those two points onlist, I will reluctantly do so. I think that’s fair.

As for a retraction, I have publicly stated I was wrong to twice say, incorrectly, that the ACLU said “agrees” instead of “agree.” It was my unintentional mistake, but that doesn’t make it OK. I beg the ACLU’s forgiveness.

Nobody has shown me anything else I said that was false or unfair.

Yes, I remember that case.

To bring up that case in the context of some sort of “a subset of gay people accept pedophilia” argument is to severely misunderstand the point of the Limon case- which was whether the punishment for criminal sexual contact should be more severe for same-sex contact than for opposite-sex contact.

Ha, bloody, ha. No.

‘I have direct responses to all the questions and comments above, but I think it’s smart for me to focus my attentions on this blog on issues that directly relate to marriage, rather than anything and everything gay.’

Too bad. You brought it up, you made dishonest and insulting misrepresentations of the ACLU, you slurred many other gay organizations as complicit, and you defended the misrepresentations long after they were indefensible. You don’t now get to walk away and hope nobody remembers come December. You owe the world a retraction of the misinformation and the gay community an apology for the slander, and you owe these things _now_.

This doesn’t mean the ACLU has an official position that all 14-year-old retarded people can or should be able to legally consent to sex with adults (that of course depends on the law in any particular jurisdiction). Benkof desperately wants this to be the case but he has yet to show any real evidence beyond his deliberately obtuse misreading of a single sentence in a 3 year old list of bullet points which accurately summarized the facts about a case at that time.

Once again: the issue in Limon v. Kansas was that the law punished same-sex crimes much more severely than identical opposite-sex crimes. Either way the sexual contact was criminal, the only question was whether it was constitutional to have different standards based on the sex of the perpetrator and victim. As it turns out, it wasn’t.

But because I don’t want Timothy Kincaid to get away lying about me once again, I want to point out that my piece on Limon v. Kansas said “At their home for developmentally disabled youths, 18-year-old Matthew Limon persuaded a mildly retarded 14-year-old boy to engage in an act of oral sex” and “Limon’s own mental limitations do not excuse his actions” and “Limon was more functional than his victim.” Anyone who did not pick up that Limon was developmentally disabled wasn’t reading carefully.

I think this fiercely heterosexual group may be even more organized than NAMBLA.

My point here is show that subsets of all kinds of people see no problem with adult-child sex. What I find reprehensible is how people use this horrible fact to promote various (usually anti-gay) agendas.

“I know of no gay or lesbian individual or organization who has objected to the stated position of the gay arm of the ACLU that “everyone agrees” that a mentally retarded 14-year-old can consent to sex with an adult.”

This statement strikes me as an appeal to ignorance. That is, just because you know of no gay or lesbian individual or organization who has objected to the “gay arm of the ACLU’s” position, you seem to think that it is a fact that no gay/lesbian individual or organization objects to that position. Is that what you are, in fact, implying?

I certainly hope not. I mean, I don’t know that many gay/lesbians individuals and organizations know of the ACLU’s position. I certainly don’t agree that a mentally retarded 14-year-old is capable of legally consenting to sex with an adult.

1. Matthew Limon is also mentally retarded.

2. The Supreme Court of the United States of America vacated the appellate court judgement and that when that court did not respond according, the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously voided the portion of the Romeo and Juliet law that provided to disparate treatment based on orientation. Neither the SCOTUS or the Kansas Supreme Court are bastions of liberal judicial activism.

One could argue that eliminating critical information is by its very nature an indication of dishonesty.