Former Adviser to the PMO trying to Normalize Child Porn with his New Book

Calgary Herald
“Tom Flanagan received some specific advice when it came to writing his newest book, Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age.

Specifically, it was that he not write it.

After all, why would he want to reopen such a painful moment in his life? In the book, he refers to it as “The Incident.” The conservative strategist, former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and longtime professor at the University of Calgary became an instant pariah when comments he made about child pornography during a raucous and confused University of Lethbridge talk in February of 2013 were made public in a YouTube posting by a First Nations activist.

“If I just wanted to deal with it on an emotional level, the easiest thing to do would have been to just forget it,” says Flanagan, in an interview from his home in Calgary. “Some people said that to me. One good friend said ‘Don’t write this book, you’re just going to bring it all back.’ But because I didn’t understand what had happened at the time, I think I got a better understanding by writing the book. So it was therapeutic, but not in sense of just getting it off your chest. It was therapeutic in the sense of coming to understand what had happened.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Flanagan, who many say should take at least some credit and/or blame for the ruthless, take-no-prisoners approach of our current Conservative government, is not about to get all touchy-feely about his emotional state when writing the book.

But he said he quickly recognized that it was a chance not only to tell his side of the story but to shine a light on what he saw as a troubling tendency toward “virtual mobbing” in the Internet age, where controversial comments are pounced upon and individuals are condemned without the benefit of further explaining themselves. Flanagan has long maintained that he was in no way condoning child pornography but merely questioning how useful it is to jail an offender for simple possession.

His experiences alone would have no doubt made a fascinating book. But Flanagan. who describes himself as a “contrarian,” decided to swim even deeper into dangerous waters, using the book as an opportunity to expand his investigation into Canadian laws and penalties surrounding child pornography.

“Basically I touched a third rail of politics without even giving it much thought,” he said. “This had never been an area of research for me and I wasn’t down in Lethbridge to talk about child pornography. In my whole career I had made exactly one comment about it and that was an offhand comment in a different context. So I wanted to find out why this was such an emotional thing, because it wasn’t an area that I had really worked on or area I had a particularly interest in. I have a general concern about jailing people who have not directly harmed other people — harm in the sense of John Stuart Mill’s actual assignable, detectable harm. And when I made the original comment that was about all that was driving it, a general orientation toward offences. But then I realized I had to learn a lot more about it. And that’s where I found how much our current legislation is the result of a moral panic of the 1980s.”

This moral panic involved, among other factors, stories about ritual satanic abuse at daycare centres in the U.S. and Canada in the 1980s. They took hold and conservative politicians were keen to cast themselves as defenders of children. Flanagan’s conclusion is that Canadian laws have become excessive, particularly in how they relate to possession cases. He also thinks using child pornography legislation to deal with the relatively new phenomenon of teenage “sexting” is wrong-headed. It may be problematic, but it’s “not really child pornography when teenagers start flashing selfies around the Internet,” he says.”
Continue Reading…

Flanagan is trying to normalize child porn by making statements like “what’s so bad about possession?”

Getting sexual gratification from looking at pictures of a ‘crime scene’ is unlawful.

True law stems from spiritual beliefs, morality and intuition.
- Do not harm anyone
- Do not steal from anyone
- Do not vandalize property
- Honor contracts you sign

Everything else that is criminal basically stems from those 4 points. Do not harm anyone can include murder, also include mental or physical harm.

Looking at adult pornography is not necessarily a crime because adults with mature minds made the decision and consented to do sexual acts in front of a camera.

To take pics of naked kids for sexual gratification would involve deception and persuasion to convince the child to pose naked or to do a sexual act. This is a form of sexual abuse!

Child sexual abuse or child molestation is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation.[1][2] Forms of child sexual abuse include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities (regardless of the outcome), indecent exposure (of the genitals, female nipples, etc.) to a child with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to intimidate or groom the child, physical sexual contact with a child, or using a child to produce child pornography.
~ Wikipedia

As for the statement about teenagers taking selfies and putting them on the internet doesn’t mean they are pornographic selfies. Any right minded teen would not want their naked pictures on the net in most cases they are probably stolen digitally property uploaded by a second or third party.