This is an incredibly strained and quite silly attempt to draw an analogy between Michael Jackson's profound eccentricities involving other people's children and occasional but typical interaction between family members. Claiming that people who deduce that Jackson was a pedophile from the available information could just as easily have deduced pedophilia from an Eric Clapton album cover and the fact that someone once took a young family member to a movie theater almost seems like an attempt at insulting intelligence.
Perhaps then you can explain the fundamental differences between the arguments that have been presented against MJ and the examples I presented in my post? Owning a perfectly legal book with odd pictures of nude children in it within a huge library including much more adult oriented pornography? Admitting to sleeping with children, but not having sex with them? A joy in the friendship of children and in elements of childhood? And I already described how many wealthy people and institutions settle suits out of court to avoid the financial and public relations costs of a court case.
I have never argued that MJ's behavior toward children was not crossing a line that most people would be hesitate to even approach, and I posted many times that I believe that MJ's behavior toward children (and in general) was very odd, strange, and frequently creepy (even when compared to most other celebrities and very wealthy people, who often establish new standards in this regard). My entire point has never been to justify MJ's behavior as "normal" or as fitting fully within how most people behave. Instead my point has been to show how elements of even normal people's lives can be extracted out of context, distorted, and selectively cited through bad journalism and greedy people to try to justify a horrible accusation that is, ultimately, lacking true proof.
I'll simplify it further- I am not saying that MJ actions were no more odd than taking out a niece for a movie, sleeping with one's brother at age 10, or owning a copy of a photo of one's kid in a bath at age 1. Clearly MJ's behavior was fully in the weird, not normal, category. But did he actually molest children? No, according to the court case. Was he a pedophile in his head? The facts appear mainly to indicate that he had very unusual and strange ways of interacting with children, and I have no way of knowing if a sexualized interest in children was part of this. But I do I see the evidence that has come to light as not anywhere close to being convincing that such a sexual interest was involved.
Again my main point is that almost anyone's life has bits and pieces of "evidence" that can be extracted and used to smear them by innuendo if an accuser wishes to do so. Accused of killing your wife? Well, here are ten mystery novels from your book shelf in which the husband killed their wife. And didn't you take out life insurance on her 5 years ago? And didn't you just buy a new carving knife for your kitchen? And didn't you just read on the web a news article entitled "Victims body never found"?
Of course people who live socially odd lives and who are thought of as weird are inherently likely to have many more of these bits and pieces that can be used to support even an unjust accusation than do you or I- but at least some of these things exist in almost everyone's life and can be exploited for innuendo. In fact I even hope that they exist for everyone, because it would be much more disturbing to me if someone was so afraid of not being a fully cookie-cutter "accepted" member of society that they were afraid to read any questionable book, see any edgy movie, or lead their lives in any way different from Live It to Beaver. In essence I am arguing against holding people guilty of thought crimes- something that I expected, from your political posts, you would be against too.
Do you have a smoking gun fact that has convinced you that MJ was a pedophile and I missed it from my reading of this thread? Or is it that MJ appears to you to have exceeded the number of oddities that individually you might be wiling to accept as innocent in a more normal person?
MJ is dead and I never even liked his music. I am not really trying to defend
him. Instead I am defending the right of people to be
unconventional in their lives if they do not hurt anyone else, rather than allow societies to scapegoat these folks primarily because they seem odd to others. To make people realize that what has been stated here to be overwhelming evidence against MJ is really not, and that a similar assembly of suspicious "facts" could be generated for almost any accusation against almost anyone. MJ's life oddities made it easier to do so for him, but I have yet to see anything that was clear evidence of him being a pedophile, rather than an innuendo. And in my mind even many innuendos do not add up to enough to represent true evidence to damn someone as guilty of a horrible action.
To quote Edward R Murrow, "We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
