February 22

Events

• Current events

• 1857 - The father of the ultimate grooming organization - Robert Baden-Powell was born on this date. As a soldier, he achieved fame for his accomplishments as a leader during the Boer War. He formed the Boy Scouts in 1908 and, with his sister Agnes Baden-Powell, the Girl Guides 1909. Baden-Powell devoted the rest of his life to the scouting movement, writing many books on scouting, of which the best known is "Scouting For Boys." Baden-Powell loved hanging out with naked boys and encouraged them to swim naked. he also had a passion for pictures of naked boys. He recorded his dreams, which were often about young men. In one, he recalled, a young soldier snatched a whip away from him and asked whether he had ever been "disciplined." His attraction for boys took a stranger form as well. He had his wife dress in a manner to flatten her chest and had her cut her hair short like a boy's. He was mesmerized by the play Peter Pan, which he saw twice during its first month. Baden-Powell might have grown up, but he never left his not-so-lost boys behind.

• 1882 - A renaissance man is born - Eric Gill, an English engraver, sculptor, typographer, and writer who lived and worked in and near London died on this date. To designers, Gill is primarily known for his popular type face designs. Eric Gill designed Gill Sans in 1927, Perpetua and the companion italic Felicity in 1925, and Joanna in 1930. To sculptors, Gill is known for his many sculptures and memorials. Gill's professional early career began by carving letterforms in stone for numerous tombstones and memorials within and around London. This work led to a series of stone sculptures exhibited in galleries as well as many architectural sculptures on the BBC Headquarters, London Underground, and other locations. To theologians, Gill is known for his writings and lectures on workers' rights and community living. Gill and his associates banded together to not only work together on creative projects, but to live together as a community of faith. To pedos, Gill is known as a man who had an erotic interest in pubescent girls and sexual relationships with two of his daughters. Half a century after Gill's death, one of his daughters told a reporter, "I don't think it harmed me at all.... We were all very fond of my father.... We were old enough to say if we didn't want to go along with him."

• 1993 - "A witch, a communist, and a pedo walk into a bar..." - The Wall Street Journal published an article on this date called "Modern Witch Hunt - Child Abuse Charges." The article criticized the plethora of false charges of child sexual abuse in the aftermath of the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The article said that this act "strengthened the 'child abuse establishment' - a network of social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists and law enforcement officials - that through its very existence frequently validates an individual's charges. In other words, this establishment, unintentionally or intentionally, encourages charges of child abuse whether they are reasonable or not." The article went on to present details of several cases of injustices created in this manner. It went on to compare the sex abuse hysteria to both the Salem trials and McCarthyism. Around the time of the publication of this article its author, Dr. Richard A. Gardner, a clinical professor of child psychology at Columbia University and an expert on child sexual abuse, testified in front of the US Congressional Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. he recommended several changes to the 1974 act to help remedy the problems he identified.

• 2001 - Green politicians like green fruit - A prominent pro-European and leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, defended on this date his publication in 1976 of an article in which he wrote of his sexual experiences with children in a Kindergarten he used to run in Frankfurt in the 1970s. "I really felt that the little girls, from the age of five, had already learned how to lead me on, to flirt. It was incredible. Most of the time I was disarmed by it," he wrote. "Several times certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me. I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances... But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them." Responding to the republication of these passages of the article in The Observer, Cohn-Bendit said that his article was part of the sexual revolution which, together with the political revolution, he was then fomenting. He declared furiously: "I will not allow myself to be assassinated in public. I am not a pedophile, and I never have been." He claimed that the experiences recounted in the article were in fact fantasies. There is, needless to say, no suggestion of this in the original article itself. Cohn-Bendit added that some 20 parents of children in his care at the day center, and many of the children themselves - now in their 30s - had written an open letter in his support.