“Amazon.com is selling subscriptions to the North American Man/Boy Love Association’s official magazine… The publication figures prominently in a $200-million federal lawsuit alleging NAMBLA incites members to ‘rape male children’ and ’serves as a conduit for an underground network of pedophiles in the U.S.’ The group is being defended by the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit was filed by the parents of Jeffrey Curley of East Cambridge, Mass., who was lured into a van by two NAMBLA members in 1997. The men attempted to rape the boy but he resisted. Christopher Jaynes, 25, and his homosexual lover, Salvatore Sicari, then smothered Curley to death with a gasoline-soaked rag and raped his corpse. The NAMBLA Bulletin was mentioned in Jaynes’ diary, discovered by police. Finding NAMBLA, Jaynes wrote, ‘was a turning point in discovery of myself. NAMBLA’s Bulletin helped me to become aware of my own sexuality and acceptance of it.’” — WorldNetDaily (US)

So far as Amazon is concerned, certainly it was not doing anything illegal by offering NAMBLA publications on its web site. If it’s legal to print, it’s legal to sell. If NAMBLA can make it, Amazon can sell it. However, there is a difference between can and should: should Amazon sell NAMBLA publications? Obviously it’s a moral, not a legal, decision — but do you want Amazon making moral decisions for you? When you put the question that way, you naturally object and say, “No! I’m an adult. I have a brain of my own. Show me what you’ve got and leave the moral decisions to me!” But then again, a thousand corporations already make moral decisions about what to offer you, and that doesn’t stop you from patronizing those businesses. Wal-Mart refuses to carry skin mags — does that stop you from going there to buy baby shampoo or motor oil? Of course not. You just go somewhere else for the skin mags. So why should it be objectionable if Amazon censors out a few publications — particularly when the publications are how-to guides such as “Rape and Escape,” a NAMBLA manual giving advice on how to molest young boys and get away with it?

Obviously the free-speech issues are thorny ones, and it will be interesting to see how the courts sort it all out. That being said, though, you have to wonder about the gullibility of anyone willing to buy pedophilia from Amazon. After all, Amazon stores a lot of information about its consumers. All that stands between that information and the legal system is a subpeona. Do you really want law enforcement to know that you’re an avid reader of the NAMBLA bulletin? Do you really want law enforcement to know you were the first guy on your block to buy “Rape and Escape?” It doesn’t take much data mining to put together certain consumer habits with other personal information, so that anyone who works at an elementary school and shops for NAMBLA on Amazon is bound for a visit from the authorities. If you’re a pedophile who doesn’t pay cash, you’re a pedophile asking for serious trouble.

Perhaps “Rape and Escape” ought also to offer advice on how to buy on the sly — because if you get pedophilia in the mail, you will go directly to jail.

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