Amazingly, you touch on a subject that once again, comples me to copy/paste an excerpt. I wrote this in February 1997, just over a month after the murder of JonBenet. Revulsed at the positioning of a little girls as a white, beauty-queen, which somehow made her rape and murder that much worse. It proved horribly prophetic, and I'm sad to say, holds just as true today. Ten years later and we've learnt absolutely nothing.

The issue of child abuse is perhaps the darkest of human conscience. The inherent intelligence of humans enables the intellectualization of behavior, within the inevitable paradigms of morality and guilt. In this context, it is far easier for our collective psyche to create a diversion - the beauty queen angle - that facilitates avoidance of the bigger question underlying what is really happening.

The commercialization of JonBenet leaves us numb enough to avoid examining the possibility that the taut and unyielding strictures of our Judeo Christian nucleus are erupting in pus-like rage, causing us to kill and fuck our petrified and abused children. But we don't want to go there. We'd rather hear that JonBenet was a Beauty Queen. A bizarre world to exploit and explore. Should little girls wear lipstick and make-up? How do we avoid the desperately necessary exploration of the remaining vestiges of patriarchic misogyny at it's most blatant and disturbing - the assigning of value to the empty objectification of sexuality - paraded around like cattle before the slaughter? The subconscious provocation of child sexuality. The stuff that Jesse Helms and Dan Coats soil their pristine sheets over in their Internet wet dreams. Oh the wonderful lessons our children are learning.

The Gruesome Marketing of JonBenet,

eloquently and boldly said, amigo. and i agree. the JonBenet thing is tragic to the uglyth degree. and you'd hope that having such a martyr for our stupidity, hate, and lust would have taught us something...but it seems in vain.

In regards to trying to hypocritically force a kind of public morality on others I totally agree with Nezua.

There is however the question of private morality. People who set for themselves high standards of conduct and fail to meet them are to be forgiven for several reasons. The first being that it's generally not a good idea to judge other people's private behavior. The second is that discouraging those who try and fail to meet a higher standard (whether we agree with it or not) has the effect of lowering standards. The third is that coming down on people for these private moral failings tends to lead to self-pity or guilt which in turn leads to a very dangerous moral paralysis.