You might think polyester bell-bottoms, disco music and shag haircuts were the worst thing about the 1970s. WRONG!

The links that left Harriet Harman being forced to deny support for paedophiles date back nearly four decades when the Labour deputy leader was an official in the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Miss Harman, along with her husband Jack Dromey — now a frontbench Labour MP — and Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, all worked for the council in the 1970s.

In 1975, the campaign group — which lives on today as human rights watchdog Liberty — controversially granted official “affiliate” status to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a body which lobbied openly for child sex.

Tom O’Carroll, PIE’s founder and described as a “sexually predatory” paedophile, was put one of the Council’s working groups, and in spring 1977 he was allowed to make a speech at the Council’s spring conference.

During this period, the Council stepped in to defend paedophiles against “hysterical and inaccurate” newspaper attacks.

One leaflet sent by PIE to MPs claimed: “Paedophiles are ordinary, decent, sensible human beings, no more sexually depraved than yourself, and with a capacity for loving and helping children which is at present being repressed.”

The organisation also submitted a report to MPs claiming that “girls as young as four months can achieve orgasm”, and that four-year-old children can “communicate verbally their consent to sex”. . . .

You can read the whole thing at the Daily Telegraph.

Harman has expressed “regret,” which isn’t exactly an apology — the Daily Mail has been all over this story — nor has the deputy Labour leader bothered to explain how it was that pedophile “liberation” became the sort of cause sophisticated left-wingers were expected to support (or, at least, not condemn) in the 1970s.

Having written about this subject before (see for example, “She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science,” June 8, 2013), what is obvious is this: After the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s, after the success of “Women’s Liberation” and “Gay Rights,” at a time when pornographic movies like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were the subject of controversy, and when magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler were widely available, it was rather unsurprising that the search for the next taboo to transgress brought the Cultural Left to arguing for legalized “consensual” sex with children. So widespread was this idea that, during discussions of the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark, George Lucas suggested a back story in which Indiana Jones first had sex with his love interest Marian when she was only 11. As I said of that revelation:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The best explanation I can think of: It was 1978, the same year that Brooke Shields starred in Pretty Baby, and so this theme might have been considered “edgy” in Hollywood at the time. Also, maybe they were snorting up lots of coke and just got crazy.

Drugs can make people crazy, and back in the 1970s, there were lots of people getting high and indulging in trendy radical talk about the need to overcome sexual “repression.” Quite naturally, some of those people turned out to be creepy perverts.

The Creepy Perverts Rights Movement was a logical extension of the same arguments made for other “liberation” movements. The 1970s were a time when praising Ho Chi Minh and quoting Chairman Mao were commonplace among leftists. Are we supposed to be surprised that common sense and basic moral decency did not restrain young radical Harriet Harman? No more than we are surprised by her refusal to apologize now:

‘I’m not going to apologise because I’ve got nothing to apologise for. I very much regret that this vile organisation, PIE, ever existed and that it ever had anything to do with NCCL, but it did not affect my work at NCCL,’ she said today.

Except, of course, Harriet Harman is lying about that:

Miss Harman — the Council’s legal officer in 1978 until 1982 — wrote a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill, which sought to ban child pornography.

Miss Harman had claimed such a law would “increase censorship” and argued that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered.

So, the Council’s official affiliation with a pro-pedophile group “did not affect” Harman’s work at the Council when she was arguing against a law to ban child pornography? It’s just a coincidence that Harman’s Council gave “predatory” pedophile Tom O’Carroll a speaking gig at their 1977 conference? The same Tom O’Carroll who pleaded guilty to child pornography charges in 2006?

Nothing to see here. Move along . . .

By the way, one of the oft-heard claims of the Creepy Perverts Rights Movement is that children having sex — consensually, of course! — suffer no psychological harm as a result.

The other day, I saw a TV documentary about serial killer Aileen Wuornos: She started having incestuous sex with her brother when she was 9 and he was 10. By age 11, Aileen was selling sex to neighborhood boys for pocket change and cigarettes. She got pregnant at 13 and gave the baby up for adoption.

At 15, Aileen’s behavior was so out of control that her grandparents kicked her out of their home and thereafter she supported herself as a prostitute, while also accumulating a criminal rap sheet that included charges like DUI, disorderly conduct, car theft, assault, forgery, armed robbery and resisting arrest. Somewhere along the way, she also became a lesbian and by 1987 she was living with her lover, Tyria Moore.

By then in her early 30s, Wuornos supported the couple by prostitution. In 1989, Wuornos and Moore went on a murder spree, killing seven Florida men in less than a year. Moore agreed to testify against Wuornos in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

So, yeah, if pedophiles want to argue that “consensual” child sex is harmless, maybe they should ask Aileen Wuornos about that. Except she’s been dead for nearly a dozen years. She was 46 in October 2002, when the state of Florida put her down like a dog.

Nothing to see here. Move along . . .

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