How did we get in this mess?? O_O?

How have we gotten to the point where sex has been successfully legislated with draconian sentences, and our rights of Free Speech and Privacy, Due Process and Assumption of Innocence effectively negated? What happened? What did I miss?

The truth is, if you keep the people happy, generally, you can do as you please in government. Good times lead to complacency. If the economy and basic services die, and people suffer ... and here is the sad point ... in the upper middle class and wealthy, then everything starts to go bad. The government loses control and we fall into turmoil and violence.

Man and his societies have been around for approximately 10,000 years (I mean basic urban societies) and this is the pattern. We give up complete freedom to live and survive as best we can, to get a relatively secure environment with security, basic necessities of life and the ability to utilize any free time as we choose. People forget that there is no real bond beyond that. Religion is part of this social control mechanism, and now particularly materialism. People cannot imagine life without society. "How would we live? It is impossible!" Nonsense. This is part and parcel of the indoctrination society uses to maintain the basic foundation. So it is not surprising that the current trend over the last 500 years to move towards an increasingly secular society that governments are looking to issues that resonate with people generally to increase the strength of their control over the population.
People are blind when it comes to children. One only has to look at the child abuse cases from the 1970s when innocent people were accused and charged in wild claims by children and their parents were demonized. After long investigations on all of these cases found that the children basically lied due to the psychologists involved leading them on. I doubt all of these professionals were trying to build these cases for their own profiles. But it showed that children are incapable of distinguishing truth from fantasy. And adults are perfectly willing to use this to push agendas that otherwise would not be acceptable by the majority.

This is true of most high profile issues like the 'war on drugs'. When the government and private parties, like the American Ultra-conservative Evangelical groups, cannot push agendas like removing all sexual images or violating citizens' rights to privacy, free speech or a fair trial, they find an issue that cannot be denied. Terrorism is one. Child abuse and porn is another. Both have successfully removed or damaged American civil rights which in turn effects everyone. This hits to the center of the populations fears : security to live as we have come to expect, and protection of our offspring which is a primal fear.

Porn is seen as the cause of pedophilia, whether or not it is true... and it is not.
Professionals have engineered studies based on their biases to support these claims even though the data has long been recorded that porn is not responsible for people doing something against women or children. But it is something these groups can point to that scares people. So the knee jerk reaction especially in the US, is to ban it, legislate against it, and create laws to punish the people who produce, and enjoy it as an outlet. Same is true with drugs. And the main thrust of our laws is to attack the user to punish the pushers. Terrorism has provided them with the means to monitor American's private calls, email, mail and to invade our homes without oversight because of the threat. In any other case, the population would scream bloody murder, but in the case of terrorism, because it is so generic, they accept this violation of our basic rights. Same is true with the so called 'Sex Crime' legislation in the US. It is a broad general law unprecedented outside of Prohibition to punish any crime involving nudity, sex or images of such in the same manner as those crimes of kidnapping, rape and murder. In fact, the punishments are so severe as to be clearly unconstitutional but allowed because the people have accepted the idea that this 'threat' effects all Americans and therefore is the one case that overwhelms our individual rights. So now, if you own or produce anything that can be considered child porn, your punishment on the whole is the same as someone who rapes a child. The sentence may be put off due to a first time offense, but under the fear of recidivism (which is in the 95 percentile on violent crime or anything involving sex) that person is required by law to sign in with the local police, government and schools for public disclosure of their crime, where they live and what they do so the population can determine if they want them in their midst. The perpetrator cannot live in a certain distance from schools or anywhere children congregate. Not to mention most businesses will not hire someone accused of a sex crime for obvious reasons. This basically negates their civil rights. So they are lumped in the same boat with murderers, kidnappers and the small percentage of those monsters who are predators and are dangerous to our kids.

This is a trend that is successfully overturning the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights in favour of the authorities control of our lives. Most Americans understand this and see it as a basic evil that is the only answer to problems that terrorize them. The answer to these problems is education, calm analysis and open mindedness none of which is big on the agenda in America. While Americans believe in education, it is primarily to make us more economically viable in the world and to support the more conservative trends in society.

This trend has come up before, once a century generally, but each time it is different due to availability of information. Today it is instantaneous so there is no time to respond to an issue, just react after the fact. That heightens the fear and therefore reduces the ability of most to analyze coolly what is going on.

Basically society is set for another massive change like that following the turn of the last millinium. Feudalism changes to Urbanism and Merchantilism; education gradually opens to the masses and individualism rises through the processes of Protestantism. But now, we are swinging into Authoritarianism. The All over the One and more control on thought because as we go global, the institutions that control feel they have to do so strongly, much as Machiavelli described in maintaining control of the City State in 15th Century Italy. Change threatens the status quo and that results on a tightening down of the government on control. Our current change is so big, the population in the billions world wide, that the authorities world wide are turning to Draconian methods to quell fear they engineer in the People, and therefore control them.

Nothing in the laws against drugs or sexual based crimes has ever been proven to work. They do not. Just as the Death Penalty does nothing more than give the victims a sense of peace and justification for their own anger and righteousness.

Basically I feel that we, as artists, as those who cross the line willingly as the clowns in indigenous societies like the Puebloans, (to purposely balance the societal controls with our real nature in the world) are going to bear the brunt of this. Homosexuals primarily are seen as a threat by conservative Americans in spite of the reality of it. Anyone who enjoys Yaoi or Shounen-Ai, Furries and Yiffy, are seen generally as deviant, and therefore dangerous. The occasional violation of an artist's rights is becoming the standard quietly, if you can believe it, because no one is willing to stand against this trend and call it what it is.... prejudice, hatred, religiously motivated discrimination. Basically we are in for what the neo-pagan and Wiccan community has warned was coming since the early 1990s as the Burning Times. Witch Hunts as seen in the 17th century in America and the Inquisition in Europe from the 14th century to the present (the current Pope is/was the official Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic See).

The future is not one of advancement of Humanity and Humanism, but of Authoritarianism. It is not inevitable. It is a choice, and We, the People, have made it.