[lbo-talk] False accusations

[Jesse Lemisch]

My goodness, this is just awful. James quotes the notiorious amti-feminist
tract by Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett whose aim was to change state
laws to force a waiting/counseling period before divorce, to preserve the
family, etc. It's simply astonishing that somebody should be arguing on
feminist issues utterly uninformed by feminist views and the critiques of
this sad volume which I read when Barnes and Noble 82nd St. still had
comfortable chairs. (Yes, in this sense Cornel West is indeed a social
conservative, as is his pal Michael Lerner of Tikkun -- veteran of a
notorious rape case in Seattle --: see my "Sociat Conservatism on the Left:
The Abandonment of Radicalism and the Collapse of the Jewish Left into Faith
and Family, Tikkun 1989. Lerner went crazy when he saw this and published a
severely cut version as a letter to the editor. I will try to locate a
better citation.)

James proceeds to revive the hideous old myth that punishing sexual abusers
is an attack on working class families. Wow, this really belongs in MR. How
about it, Yoshie? Soon we'll be hearing, as we haven't in some years, that
we ought to sympathize with working class males who return from alienated
work and understandably beat their waves. Yes, indeed, let's save the
family, undermine divorce, and keep legal authorities out of the "private"
sphere.

Jesse Lemisch

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 3:38 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] False accusations


> Jesse, writes
>
> > My goodness, suppose I paraded a number of court decsions in the south
in
> > which blacks were convicted, their testimony disallowed, etc.
> > What would such cases prove?
>
> But I think you missed the point. In two of three of the cases I cited,
the
> person who was originally supposed to have been molested by parents was
> subsequently suing the therapist who persuaded her to make those charges
> (and there are many more such cases, follow the link). In your anaolgy the
> therapists and social workers are being persecuted by courts biassed in
> favour of women who feel that they have been duped. That is the kind of
bias
> I think we need.
>
> > The stuff we have been seeing here isn't social science, it's ideology.
>
> Well, as Terry Eagleton said, ideology is what you think, what I think is
> social science. Your weakness is that you do not understand the movement
to
> punish abusers has its own ideological biasses - against working class
> families, against parents, in favour of greater state intervention into
> domestic life, masking the exercise of state power by manufacturing an
> ideological figure of the victimised child.
>
> To quote Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett:
>
> 'Over the last 30 years, thousands of professionals associated with our
> burgeoning child welfare bureaucracy have developed what can only be
> described as a parent-bashing mentality'. Many professionals 'are now
firmly
> convinced that the American family is largely dysfunctional' and 'that a
> majority of parents have the potential to abuse children'. The War Against
> Parents
>
>
>
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