Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 978	15 April 2011

Tear Up Conviction of Evan Emory!

Michigan Bigots Hate YouTube, Sex, Children

(Young Spartacus pages)

On March 14, 21-year-old aspiring Michigan comedian, singer and songwriter Evan Emory pleaded no contest to charges of “unlawful posting of an Internet message with aggravating circumstances,” agreeing to serve 60 days in jail with two years on probation and to perform 200 hours of community service. He originally faced a felony charge of “manufacturing child pornography,” a charge that can carry 20 years in jail and 25 years more on the state sex offender registry. His “crime” was filming himself singing “Lunch Lady Land” to a group of first graders and, later, posting on YouTube an edited video that made it appear he was singing a song he wrote about sex to them. Even after Emory apologized repeatedly, removed the video from YouTube and expressed gratitude for his jail sentence, the witchhunt against him continued. One parent decried the plea bargain: “It was sexual and he should be put on the sex offender registry.”

In an interview following his conviction, Emory made clear that he accepted the plea bargain out of fear of facing the rest of his life as a convicted “sex offender” and being listed on Michigan’s sex offender registry. And with good reason. Signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, “Megan’s Law” requires “sex offenders” to maintain constant contact with local authorities, who notify the neighborhoods where they move, go to school and work. Emory would have been condemned to live as a social pariah, a criminal for life, like the roughly 40,000 people already on Michigan’s registry. Not only are those on sex offender registries subject to police harassment and public humiliation, sometimes driving them to suicide, but they are also prime targets for reactionary vigilante terror. In 2006, William Elliott, who spent time in jail in Maine for having a sexual relationship with his girlfriend when she was just days shy of 16 (Maine’s age of consent), was murdered at his home. Elliott’s name, address and photo had been listed publicly online.

The vindictive and obscene prosecution of Emory not only captures the rigidly conservative views of the small Michigan town he was charged in, but the overwhelming, puritanical anti-sex atmosphere of society today. “Sex crime” laws are increasingly being used to bolster state authority to intervene into the private lives of citizens and ensure that no deviation occurs from what bourgeois society says is “normal.” “Age of consent” laws, for example, conflate rape with innocent consensual sexual acts, criminalizing acts based on mutual understanding and agreement because of the age of the people involved.

Given the tangle of race, sex and class in this bigoted society, even consensual acts can often be emotionally exploitative and unequal—but to call them “crimes” is to bring in the government, which is the very guardian of oppression and inequality. It is utter hypocrisy for the bourgeoisie to posture as “defenders of children” while they cut funding for education, lock up juvenile offenders in hellhole reformatories and send their “kill teams” to murder youth in Afghanistan.

While it is easy to point out the absurdity of Emory’s case, the reality is that what happened to Emory is part of a broad campaign against even the most PG depictions of youth in sexual situations. For even joking about children and sex, Emory was railroaded to jail for “exploiting children.” Child pornography, like any kind of pornography, is simply images and words intended for entertainment, and we are against its criminalization. The law defines child pornography as any sexual depictions featuring at least one person who’s under 18, irrespective of whether they have consented to having sex—or whether they even had sex to begin with. The “child pornography” Emory was accused of making was about as pornographic as a Leno monologue.

Emory’s case reveals American capitalist society’s pathological fear of children learning about sex. What harm came to the class of first graders Emory filmed, even if they later watched it and began to wonder what Emory meant by “I’ll lick on your chewie”? According to the father of one of the students, his daughter came home crying after being teased for appearing in the video. While this is a rather typical example of the cruelty children display toward each other, there was nothing wrong with Emory’s video. The reality is that children learn about sex one way or another—whether seeing themselves in a humorous video or playing doctor. It is the social climate of religious backwardness and “family values” moralism that makes sex as scarring as possible and learning about it monumentally embarrassing. Further stigmatizing sex, the federal government funds “abstinence only” education that presents pregnancy or STDs as the punishment for teenagers who “disobey” the no-sex-before-marriage rule. Youth should be given a comprehensive, science-based sex education.

Along with the church and the state, the family is a key force for maintaining the capitalist order. The family is an ideological prison for youth and the source of women’s oppression. For the capitalist ruling class, the family is a means for passing on property. For everyone else, the capitalists rely on it as a means to rear the next generation of obedient, god-fearing, sexually regimented wage slaves who have been trained to obey status quo mores or the belt.

The family as an economic unit must be replaced as part of building a classless, egalitarian socialist society, where sexual expression will no longer be distorted by the bigotry and oppression of capitalist society. Our task as the youth of the revolutionary Spartacist League is to help build the vanguard party that will champion the rights of all the oppressed and lead the working class in building a new society through the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state and all its reactionary laws. Overturn his conviction! Free Evan Emory now!