I was falsely accused of committing sexual crimes against my former students. These accusations started with my principal who was bent on ruining my career after I stood up to him. I had put in my resignation, but he hadn’t wanted me to resign. He took my resignation personally, and set out on a crusade to destroy my life.

Things got really bad. I wasn’t going to accept a plea bargain, because I knew I was innocent. As long as I was out on bond awaiting trial, I was confident that my day in court would set me free. That day never came due to some manipulation on the part of my court-appointed attorney who kept trying to push a plea bargain off on me. Well, at this point my bond had been revoked. I’d made every appearance, but the courts sent a letter to my grandmother’s address instead of the address my attorney had for me. After letting me sit in jail for a while, the attorney returned with the same plea agreement. I didn’t not accept, but asked him to get my bond reinstated. I was whisked into court on December 3, 1996, thinking my bond was being reinstated only to find out my attorney had arranged a plea hearing. I was to get out that day, if I accepted. I did and was sentenced to 10 months in a detention center, 10 years probation, and sex offender counseling. No one told me that I would have to pay for some crime I never committed for the rest of my life.

I left Georgia in 2007 when the sex-offender laws forced me out–I had nowhere to go, and I was devastated. I moved here to New York, but this cloud is still hanging over my head. I wanted to die. However, I knew I had to live, because someday I am going to be vindicated. I have to hold on to that belief. If not, I will certainly die. I chronicled my ordeal in a self-published book entitled, Surviving Darkness. It’s available at http://www.amazon.com. There are sex offenders in the world. And, yes, they need to be punished. I don’t think sex offenders should be punished for the rest of their lives. There are also many who are falsely accuse, such as the case with me. This life is indeed unpredictable. I never in a million years thought I’d be mislabeled a sex offender. I’ve been fighting for my life ever since. It’s no fun.

A libertarian is not an amoral idiot relying on unsound principles. He differentiates between the immoral and the illegal. All you have to do is look at history and you will know that every act of mass discrimination has occurred with state sanction. The discrimination against blacks, gays, people of Japanese descent…the list is endless, was only possible because the state enforced certain laws.

To take a simple example, fifty years ago, a mildly religious libertarian might have considered homosexuality immoral, but he would have maintained that the state has no business peeping into bedrooms. Today, he might have changed his position and have said, sorry, I was wrong about the immoral part. But his position on law would remain unchanged. This would apply in every case without exception. But the statist, someone whose only solution for every problem is state action, would have definitely supported laws that criminalized homosexuals then, and would have demanded their elimination now. The same principle would apply to blacks and other minorities as well. (It was the labor unions and the people in general, not libertarians or businessmen, who had segregation laws passed and enforced. Read this and this.)

About laws banning white-only restaurants. Would you also ban restaurants that only serve Indians, or gays, or Christians, or some other such denomination? If a white male doesn’t have non-white friends, will the state force him to make friends among minorities? What is the “principle” that makes it okay for the state to throw someone in prison for their beliefs? Let me say that discrimination based on group identity is a sign of low self esteem and morally reprehensible. But if you declare everything that is immoral to be illegal, you give the state absolute power over its citizens. Those who run white-only restaurants are free to do so. But sooner or later they will come to know that it not socially acceptable. Those who still don’t get it will definitely not get it in any case.

I would like to think that morality is objective in nature, but all evidence suggests otherwise. What is moral and immoral changes with time. If you restrict the government only to illegal acts, acts of actual or imminent coercive violence, only then can society function peacefully. Otherwise, you will end up with a perpetual war of all against all.

(I am bowing out of this discussion. This appears to be one of those amazingly pathological points of view libertarians appear capable of thanks to blind application of neat sounding but not so sound principles.)

The proper way to combat discrimination is by social means. Publicize these actions, shame the company, boycott their products. When you strip someone of his liberty to deal with his own company and hire and fire people in any goddamn way he wants, you commit a far greater wrong, for it violates the rights of the person who owns the company.

Soliciting to help vulnerable individuals, but putting them under a hypnotic suggestive state without prior explicit consent is a fraud. Acquiring personal information through such means is a fraud. Selling stuff to people under such a state is fraud. A company (and thankfully, at least in France a cult) is allowed none of these.

2. Threatening people with legal pressure/suits is not illegal even for companies. And in any case here the real fault lies with the absurd copyright laws that has allowed scientology to win some legal battles against critics.

3. If there is a advertisement for one thing and the thing sold is completely different, I agree it is a case of fraud. That should be dealt on a case by case basis. I dont think the specific French case I mentioned had anything to do with false advertisements.