On Anti-Sex Witchhunts

(Letters)

28 September 2013

Dear Comrades,

I have just come across your excellent article in Workers’ Vanguard [“Britain: Teacher Jailed in Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” WV No. 1028, 9 August] reprinted from Workers’ Hammer on the jailing of Jeremy Forrest, and I just want to send my applause and congratulations to your organization for being the only left group I know of nowadays that stands up for teenage and ‘childhood’ sexuality and also unconditionally speaks up for Julian Assange.

 I have spent my life as a Reichian therapist fighting for people to free themselves sexually, and admire tremendously pioneers such as Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey who risked everything to try and bring some sense and honesty into the open about what everyone intrinsically knows: that from a very early age we all experience sexual curiosity and desires.

I left England in 1974 and don’t know what the hell happened to turn the clock back so radically on all the development towards sexual freedom that was going on in the 60s and 70s, and I have been totally shocked at just how deeply the cancer of the new sexual puritanism has re-entrenched itself.

So it is with the utmost relief that I read your article and many others on similar issues such as ‘Obama’s Reactionary Crusade Against Teen Birth Control’ in Workers’ Vanguard of 31 May.

I admire the way you stick your neck out and take such a strong stand in these oppressive times.

I can’t join you in toto as although brought up in a communist family, I removed myself from Western society many decades ago and live as a ‘bourgeois peasant’ running up a small commune and working the land on an organic farm in the Colombian Andes ...and using alternative medicine, which I see for some strange reason you are violently opposed to!

However, this doesn’t stop me appreciating enormously your radical stance on so many issues.

Wishing you well,
Jenny J.

WV replies:

We appreciate Jenny’s letter. For those interested in reading about our opposition to alternative medicine, please see “On Quacks and Their Defenders,” WV No. 962, 30 July 2010.

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5 October 2013

Dear Spartacist League,

Thanks for your excellent article on the new pariahs of the American police state: sex offenders [“State-Branded ‘Sex Offenders’: Pariahs for Life,” WV No. 1030, 20 September]. It is to your credit that among all left groups, you have been consistently superior in your coverage of the antisex witch hunt and sex panic that has branded so many with the scarlet letter for life. No other group comes close to your incisive and comprehensive coverage. Virtually all left groups instead run after the ruling class’s phony “equality” campaigns (gay marriage, militarism, hate crimes laws...) that have served not only to co-opt gay liberation, but also contributed to the demise of the radical sexual freedom movement altogether. Too many who consider themselves radicals embrace the liberal “equality” mantra and, insofar as they even believe in sexual liberation, relegate it to the Wobbly pie in the sky by and by when you die.

The same criticism could be made of most “lgbt” groups, who, to their shame, have not made a peep to protest the government’s inhuman mistreatment of those it brands as “sex offenders,” some of them teenagers.

Kudos! Your work is appreciated.

David Thorstad