What Should We Make of the Arrest of a Former ACLU Official on Child-Porn Charges?
Free Lance-Star [Virginia]
March 4, 2007
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/032007/03042007/264511
But, oh God, who knowest the weakness and corruption of our nature, and the manifold temptations which we daily meet with; We humbly beseech thee to have compassion on our infirmities, and to give us the constant assistance of thy Holy Spirit.
--"Prayer for Grace," The Book of Common Prayer (1928)
 |
IN EACH OF US there is a seed. Sometimes we carry it unawares, living and dying ignorant of its potential for destruction. At other times, dreadfully sprouting, it bends toward a dark light, thrives in an inward soil foully fertilized, burgeons into a riot of evil that chokes out lives, relationships, futures. The modern age, so rich in freedom and technology, is, not coincidentally, also a jungle of flytraps hungry for something larger than flies--something the size of Charles Rust-Tierney.
Mr. Rust-Tierney, 51, president of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union from 2002 to 2005, is soon to be arraigned on charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. But that description of his alleged offense is overly antiseptic.
Police, who arrested him Feb. 23, say that Mr. Rust-Tierney subscribed to child-porn Web sites, downloading, among other diversions, a movie featuring three prepubescent girls--Wikipedia identifies them as Tibetan--who while bound and weeping are brutally raped by their adult co-stars. This fare is the flatmate of the "snuff" film, in which actual murder follows a victim's sexual degradation.
However vile his transgressions--and Mr. Rust-Tierney deserves a presumption of innocence--the accused is in one sense unlike the wayward Catholic priest or evangelical preacher who decries sexual sin in his hiatus between choirboys or call girls. Far from being a moralist, Mr. Rust-Tierney, as president of the Virginia ACLU, argued publicly during the late 1990s against installing smut filters in the computers of Loudoun County public libraries. Perhaps he might now agree that his policy foes had a deeper appreciation of the practical hazards of cyberspace than he then understood.
In any case, the mainstream media grossly underplayed the story. The Washington Post barely noted it--though Mr. Rust-Tierney lives in Arlington, and the U.S. Attorney's Office that targeted him operates out of Alexandria--making it an inside "county brief" of 80 words. The Associated Press, whose account ran in this newspaper, gave the scandal eight whole sentences. But the tale got out. Fox News populist Bill O'Reilly ballyhooed these journalistic derelictions (rightly) as evidence of ideological favoritism (possibly).
Had the cops busted a former leader of Virginia's Southern Baptists for acquiring child-rape porn, the state's coma patients would have known about it. Yet, just like a warped bishop or twisted televangelist, Mr. Rust-Tierney as accused sicko was newsworthy not only for his prominence but also for his hypocrisy.
Consider: The ACLU supposedly fights for the underdog. What's more, Mr. Rust-Tierney taught at the Benchmark Institute, whose motto is "Linking People, Learning and Performance for Social Justice." Yet he stimulated a market specializing in the sexual violation of defenseless Third World urchins--not exactly the going definition of social justice. By "C-13ing" that story, the conventional media flopped belly-up across Bill O'Reilly's sacrificial altar.
And there is an even more compelling angle. Reference "the manifold temptations which we daily meet with."
Not one of us--cleric, civil libertarian, cop, soldier, journalist--is wholly uncorrupt, and, as never before in history, the portals of temptation are manifold--and only a pushed button, a clicked mouse, away. These facts guarantee mass misery. And if the seed of our destruction isn't from a package marked Sexual Deviancy, there are many other seeds just as toxic.
"Constant assistance"? The ACLU has a different, even antagonistic, focus. But that is our need: a Gardener, ever weeding.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.