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While the object of an attack is portrayed as a wild-eyed radical, the critics are described as reasonable, and legion. «In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, its author, Judith Levine, says parents should recognize their children as sexual beings and that in some instances, sex between adults and minors may actually be a good thing,» Greta Van Susteren introduced me on her show, misrepresenting the book. She added: «As you may expect this has parents around the country in a uproar.»

The «critics» also appear to be politically unaffiliated. In the New York Times , Knight was identified as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, not as «the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank,» its own self-description. Only rarely in the scores of articles mentioning Concerned Women for America was the organization identified as it identifies itself: one that «seeks to instill Biblical principles in public policy at all levels.» During the time I was featured on CWA's home page, so was a campaign to halt the teaching of «the lie of evolution» in public schools and an indictment of the Bush Administration's «homosexual agenda,» evidenced by its hiring of a few members of the gay Log Cabin Republicans. Without such details, Concerned Women for America sounds moderate and matronly, another League of Women Voters.

The point of pushing someone to the margins is not only to discredit her in others' eyes, but to mobilize her own shame, even fear. And it works. Feeling despised as an outsider, one grasps at mainstream status.

Not married? I've been in a relationship for eleven years!

Have suspiciously short hair and don't wear skirts? My partner is a man!

No children? Wait, wait! I'm a doting aunt!

Sexual McCarthyism works with marginalization to discourage solidarity among the accused. In order to secure the credentials of normalcy, to remain in the safe precincts of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes as the «systems of sexual stigma,» the targeted person distances herself from those who are even further out on the edges. The sex education community, already reeling from the Right's pummeling, declined to come to my aid. Thus divided and conquered, it's not unusual for victims of an attack to blame each other, rather than the real source of their pain. One prominent sex educator wrote me, «You should think about the harm you've done to sexuality education by dragging us into your pedophile thing.»

But when called a pervert, one often goes further than not helping others accused of perversion. Ashamed, one wins respectability by expressing disgust for the «real» perverts. «What do you think of NAMBLA?» I was often asked. That's the North American Man Boy Love Association, an advocacy/support group for men with intergenerational sexual desires. «I think they're creeps,» I replied to one interviewer. But I am angry at myself for doing that. NAMBLA is a tiny, ineffectual group, exercising its right to free speech; it doesn't advocate criminal activity. Already utterly despised, NAMBLA's members don't need me trashing them, too.