New Link

I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to my link to the website about Bernard Baran. Baran is one of the (relatively) few victims of the '80s daycare sex-abuse hysteria who remain in prison today. While most of the falsely accused daycare workers were either never convicted or were exonerated at some point in the past ten years, Baran has languished in prison since 1984. There are two key differences between his case and most others like it: abuse really did occur in the case of one of the children on his watch (probably at the hands of the boy's stepfather or foster father; no evidence at all points to Baran himself), and Baran is gay.

He was convicted more or less entirely because of that second point. Indeed, his only real crime was being gay and liking children in a small town in the '80s. (The prosecutor at his trial called him a "fag" in the courtroom, among other things.) As you can see on that link, the accusations against him stemmed entirely from his efforts to help the son of a drug-addicted, abusive couple who was, not surprisingly, a troublemaker at school. This couple responded by complaining to anyone who would listen about the "dangers" of an openly gay man working at a daycare center. The boy contracted gonorrhea, and Baran immediately became the prime suspect despite conclusive proof that he'd never had the disease and a complete lack of evidence of abuse. Within five months he'd been convicted and thrown in jail for life - and immediately afterward, it emerged that the victim's mother had accused at least one boyfriend of molesting the boy. The prosecuting county's Department of Social Services was aware of this, but didn't report it to the DA's office until - conveniently enough - a few days after Baran was convicted.

Bernard Baran has been incarcerated since October 1984. He's been beaten and raped innumerable times, attempted suicide at least twice, and his case was pretty much forgotten for a long time. Gay-rights groups have tended to shy away from helping him, lest they perpetuate the stereotype of gay men as predators. The good news (relatively speaking, of course) is that a new trial motion was finally filed in June, and it looks like he'll probably get his day in court before too much longer.

There is reason to be hopeful: two other victims of the same witch hunt, Gerald Amirault and John Stoll, finally won their freedom in April. But there is a lot left to be done, and that link has plenty of information on what we can all do to help.

By the way, if you do any further Internet searches on your own about this topic, you're likely to make an unfortunate discovery. A number of right-wing "men's rights" groups have seized upon this issue as a bludgeon against feminists in particular and liberals in general, using the rather twisted logic that the disaster only happened because so many people bought into feminism's "vilification" of men and the "culture of victimhood". (This is less true in the Baran case than in most others, since people who hate feminists also tend to hate gays.) While it is true that a few prominent feminists, notably Gloria Steinem and Anna Quindlen, were indeed on the wrong side of this issue, the mouth-breathers are ignoring their own culpability, since their homophobia and opposition to daycare ("a woman's place is in the home") had as much to do with creating the hysteria as anything else did. Don't let the unfortunate association scare you off.