WhatFinger


In Seattle politics, being conservative is worse than molesting children

Seattle's pedophile mayor resigns under pressure



Seven months ago, openly gay Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D), who resigned his office last week, angrily asserted that charges of child molestation against him were untrue. Channeling Bill and Hillary Clinton, he called his alleged sexual victims liars and claimed he was the victim of a right-wing witch-hunt because he was gay:
Murray -- who has championed gay rights over his career in the Legislature and now as mayor -- has claimed the accusations against him are false and part of an anti-gay political conspiracy against him.
Setting aside the laughable idea that anti-gay forces wield political power in Seattle--where even the uber-progressive Murray is still deemed not progressive enough--Murray's go-to response to scapegoat conservatives is painfully instructive of the late-stage identity politics age we live in. Accused of raping young men? Blame social conservatives, even though they are more endangered than marbled murrelets in the Emerald City. Now that Murray's cousin has joined four other men in accusing him, Murray has stepped down as mayor. But even before he was elected, there was an unusually strong paper trail documenting sex crime allegations against him. What did the media in Seattle know about these allegations, and why didn't they pursue the story? What did the Democratic Party know about their candidate, when did they know it, and why didn't they publicize their knowledge? In Seattle, is molesting children considered a lesser sin than being conservative? Sure it is. But most importantly, what did gay and lesbian activist groups and feminist "anti-rape" groups in Seattle know about Murray's dark past, and why didn't they act to protect gay youths from rape? According to Murray's cousin, who says hizzoner molested him repeatedly, Murray had to leave Medford, New York, in the mid-1970s "amid accusations that he molested a boy at a Catholic group home."

Support Canada Free Press


Despite the existence of this accusation, which was obviously known to members of Murray's family, a few years later the mayor was permitted to become a foster parent to a troubled teenaged boy in Portland, Oregon. Why? In 1980, when Murray met the boy, he was 25 and the child was 13. The agency caring for the boy let Murray take him home for weekends; the boy later reported that the molestation began during those weekends. Two years later, a family court let the then-27 year old, single man become the 15-year old boy's foster parent:
[Jeff] Simpson said the abuse began in 1980, when he was 13 and spending a weekend with Murray. The abuse continued after Murray became his foster father and lasted until he left Murray's care at age 16, Simpson said. At times, Murray paid Simpson $10 or gave him drugs for sex. "Jeff stared at the floor and appeared to be very depressed," [a social worker] wrote. "At times his voice would shake as he described his disappointment when Ed Murray, whom he had trusted and seen as the only consistent adult figure in his life, began a process of sexual abuse."

So after being forced to leave New York State in the mid-1970s over allegations of child sex abuse, Ed Murray moved across the country to Portland, sought out work with troubled foster children, was permitted to adopt a teenager just 12 years younger than himself, then was investigated, recommended for prosecution, and banned from being a foster parent--then he moved to Seattle, where he won multiple elections to the legislature and eventually became the city's mayor.. It defies belief that nobody in Seattle knew about the criminal charges filed against Murray in Portland. More likely, his identity as a gay rights activist shielded him from criticism--leaving him free to molest boys and even assume legal custody over his victims. His job in a public defender's office probably helped, too, because what says "safe with children" more than having a job where you get criminals acquitted of the crimes they commit? Despite complaints by liberals and libertarians who argue shrilly that we "over-prosecute" criminals and "over-incarcerate" offenders, even if Murray had been found guilty of molesting a child he had fostered, the punishment he would have faced--for repeated child rape, in 1984--may have been as minor as court-mandated counseling:
Simpson, who state foster reports show was prone to lying, stealing, using drugs and running away, presented problems for the district attorney in proving the case. About a month after the allegations emerged, the prosecutor's office withdrew the case against Murray and the other accused foster parent from the grand jury. But in her CPS assessment, [social worker investigator] Butler found Simpson believable. She noted he'd expressed concern that his claims would ruin Murray's career, and had "no motive to make something like this up" because Simpson knew he'd likely be placed in an institution and never allowed to live with Murray again. "It is unfortunate that the criminal justice system chose not to act in this case simply because a conviction of ... Mr. Murray would probably be the only way of mandating (him) in to treatment for ... sexual deviancy," Butler added.


My guess is that social workers aren't allowed to use terms like "sexual deviancy" anymore, not even when describing child molesters. But even convicted child molesters still routinely get off with nothing more than probation and court-assigned counseling. Oddly, the campus rape activist cabal and other leftist pseudo-anti-rape harpies have apparently never heard of such injustices against real victims of real sexual crimes. Although Murray was not prosecuted in 1984, both the social worker and the district attorney assigned to investigate the case believed strongly that he had molested Jeff Simpson. The district attorney was moved to write: "We could not be sure of meeting the high burden of proof in a criminal case--of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. However, this is no way means that the District Attorney's Office has decided that Jeff [Simpson's] allegations are not true." Murray was banned from fostering children in Portland and soon moved to Seattle, from whence he rose up through the political power structure to mayor and worked vigorously to restrict the ability of police to investigate and respond to crimes. In light of the recent disclosure of his own escape from justice, Murray's anti-police crusade should be seriously reevaluated. Murray now joins other gay elected officials who invented (or had invented for them) fake stories of anti-gay persecution in order to excuse horrifying personal conduct. For example, according to pull-no-punches gay journalist Randy Shilts (recounted here by City Journal writer Daniel J. Flynn), famed San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk even staged a bombing of his own property and blamed Anita Bryant for the faked hate crime:
During his successful run for city supervisor ... Milk's camera store was the object of a glass-shattering attack by low-grade explosives. Milk blamed singer Anita Bryant, the outspoken opponent of gay-friendly legislation. "Years later friends hinted broadly that Harvey had more than a little foreknowledge that the explosions would happen," biographer Randy Shilts noted. One friend explained to Shilts: "You gotta realize the campaign was sort of going slow, and, well . . ."

This is the essence of lynching culture

Milk should never have been permitted to serve in office after staging a fake bombing attack hate crime, let alone have a hagiographic film made about him. But that was far from the worst of his sins. For years, Milk colluded with mass murderer Jim Jones, using his status as an elected official to help Jones procure victims (mostly poor minorities) for his concentration camp in the Guyanese jungle. One of them was a six-year old boy whom Milk helped ship to the death camp for his close friend Jones:
Before the congregants of the Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones's deadly Kool-Aid, Harvey Milk and much of San Francisco's ruling class had already figuratively imbibed. Milk occasionally spoke at Jones's San Francisco-based headquarters, promoted Jones through his newspaper columns, and defended the Peoples Temple from its growing legion of critics. Jones provided conscripted "volunteers" for Milk's campaigns to distribute leaflets by the tens of thousands. Milk returned the favor by abusing his position of public trust on behalf of Jones's criminal endeavors. "Rev. Jones is widely known in the minority communities here and elsewhere as a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness," Supervisor Milk wrote President Jimmy Carter seven months before the Jonestown carnage. The purpose of Milk's letter was to aid and abet his powerful supporter's abduction of a six-year-old boy.
The child died in Jonestown after Harvey Milk helped send him there. Neither this little detail--nor Milk's role in abetting Jones' other 900 suicide-murders--is mentioned in Sean Penn's Academy Award-winning "biography" of Milk. We are living in the age of late-stage identity politics. Privileged classes of people such as gays are given the power to commit crimes large and small with no consequences to their careers or lives, while innocent people with the wrong types of identities are persecuted for crimes and sins they did not commit and even for crimes and sins that do not even exist. This is the essence of lynching culture.

View Comments

Tina Trent -- BombThrowers -- Bio and Archives

Tina Trent writes about crime and policing, political radicals, social service programs, and academia. She has published several reports for America’s Survival and helped the late Larry Grathwohl release a new edition of his 1976 memoir, “Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen,” an account of his time infiltrating the Weather Underground.

Dr. Trent received a doctorate from the Institute for Women’s Studies of Emory University, where she wrote about the devastating impact of social justice movements on criminal law under the tutelage of conservative, pro-life scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Dr. Trent spent more than a decade working in Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods, providing social services to refugees, troubled families, and crime victims. There, she witnessed the destruction of families by the poverty industry, an experience she describes as: “the reason I’m now a practicing Catholic and social conservative.”

Tina lives with her husband on a farm in North Georgia. She blogs about crime and politics at tinatrent.com.


Sponsored