So the biggest news in the blogosphere tonight is what LJ has done. Also check out The CEO’s statement to the LJ community. Let me be clear that I disdain pedophilia as much as — and given my work/research perhaps much more than — most people who are not pedophiles. Indeed, I once used the lyrics to this Cure song as the opening for an undergrad paper I wrote on child sexual abuse. However, I disdain respect for rights, people, and proper procedure as much. Rather than having some police unit sweep in, identify the real pedophiles, and have them arrested, LJ chose to “permanently suspend” perhaps more than 500 accounts (communities and personal journals).

These communities/journals include fandom communities, ficition writing communities, a community which was reading the book Lolita, personal/community LJs of survivors of rape/incest/pedophila/abuse (nothing like a little victim blaming LJ).

There is a corner of LJ well beyond the academic corner in which jumpinjulia thrives, which uses LJ as a space to receive and to give victims of different crimes support. Is this therapeutic space, not to mention the many other ways in which people use LJ to create community, to learn and to support one another, not something to be proud of? Apparently not.

Pedophiles need to be brought to justice, not simply banned. Victims need space to feel and to be safe. And the rest of us need space to learn, from fiction & from autobiography, what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.

I have used LJ in the past as a teaching space, but I really think that if I were to run another class, I’d try something like greatestjournal. I want to teach in a space I can trust; a space which supports learning and personal development; a space which believes in freedom of speech.

Isn’t it ironic that in the end it is actually LJ which out dramas all other forms of LJ drama?!