Wow.

I can’t remember a time I disagreed with Derb more (Ok, I might remember a time or two, but it’s been a while).

While I don’t suffer from the phobia some do about second-guessing juries, I can imagine that he “deserved” to be acquitted because the prosecution failed to make its case. But I most certainly believe — along with at least one of the jurors — that MJ has molested children. The charge that he “raped” kids is a bit of a straw man, in that penetration (ick, I know, sorry) was never alleged.

And the suggestion that Jackson is “harmless” — even if he’s innocent of molestation — baffles me. As someone who professes to believe in “hidden law” as much as Derb does, you would think the taboo-wrecking associated with Jackson’s behavior would be enough to offend Derb. The upshot of Derb’s position is that the taboo(s) which say that it’s wrong for men to select vulnerable young children who are not their own to sleep in their bed and travel with them is just an old chestnut and there’s no harm if its erased. I cannot buy that.

There are many other issues here too, of course. There’s the fact that Jackson had countless enablers who clung to plausible deniability even as they helped Jackson procure more children. Erring on the side that you’re not feeding kids to a pederast seems like the North star to the high road to me. Someone ordered and supervised the installation of an electronic early warning system which notified Jackson when even his own staff was walking near his bedroom — which was festooned with kids’ toys — while he had company. These people knew there was good reason to suspect molestation even if they couldn’t know for sure. Sending the signal that these people were right to hold out for another paycheck rather than say, “I don’t want to take the risk that I might be part of something like that” is grotesque to me. As is sending the signal to parents that shopping your kids out to a freak is okay, so long as your pretty sure they’re not pederasts.