February 26

Events

• Current events

• 1564 - "Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove," - Writer Christopher Marlowe was baptized in Canterbury, England on this date. So little is known about Marlowe's life, and so much has been written about him over the centuries to create a persona to match his work, he is now considered gay by default. What is known is that he was a firebrand as a youth, that he was a anti-clerical rebel, that he was in trouble with the law, and that he was dead of a stab wound at the age of 29. Many of his surviving works contain homoerotic references. His epigram reads "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Love boys? Well, maybe we need to revise that conventional view of him - just a touch.

• 1998 - How one small town cop can destroy the lives of hundreds of people - The Seattle Post published part a five part series about scandal of false accusations of sex abuse of children manufactured by the police and state social workers in Wenatchee, Washington. On this date, three reports comprising part four of the series were published. One of them was called " 'They robbed me of my childhood' " and featured the stories of the effects of the bogus investigation on children involved. "They robbed me of my childhood, and that's a terrible thing to do to any child," said 14 year old Kim Allbee, who was 10 when the investigation happened. She says she was interrogated for five hours, bullied and coerced by Detective Bob Perez as Tim Abbey, a supervisor in the Office of Child Protective Services, looked on. Eventually, she did as they asked and accused her mother of sexually abusing her. The detective "told me right off that Donna . . . and other girls said I had been molested. I laughed and said it was silly, that nobody touched me," she says. "He said it wasn't funny and I had 10 minutes to tell him the truth or he would arrest my mother." these interrogation techniques resulted in at least 60 adults being arrested on 29,726 charges of child-sex abuse involving 43 children. Dozens of children were stripped from their parents and forced into psychiatric institutions as well.

• 2000 - Technically, he's still a pedo, even if he didn't know... - An Ohio mother was sentenced on this date to 3 years probation. Her crime? She allowed her 13 year old daughter to spend the night in her home with the girl's 19 year old boyfriend, with whom the girl was having sex. The woman pleaded guilty to two felony counts of child endangering and at her sentencing said, "I know that what I did was wrong. I did not look out for my daughter." The daughter met the 19 year old over the Internet, and both the mother and daughter told him the girl was 16. The man was not charged because the offender must know the victim is younger than 16 to meet the elements of a crime.

• 2002 - The verdict is in. The teacher is out. - U.S. District Judge Frederic Block issued a ruling on this date rejecting Peter Melzer’s argument that the Board of Education violated his First Amendment rights when it discharged him from the Bronx High School of Science faculty because of his NAMBLA activities. Melzer began teaching in the public schools in 1963, and in 1968 joined the faculty at Bronx Science, where he earned tenure as a physics teacher. According to Block’s opinion, he "received numerous teaching commendations and all of his evaluations have been satisfactory." There is no evidence that he ever initiated sexual activity with any of his students or any other underage people, or violated any policies of the Board of Education in the course of his employment. "It is doubtful whether any degree of disruption to the internal affairs of the school could justify Melzer’s firing if he simply were a passive member of an expressive association espousing unpopular, indeed repulsive, notions of age-related parameters of homosexual relationships" [E]ven if such organization be deemed unlawful "'those who join an organization but do not share its unlawful purposes and who do not participate in its unlawful activities surely pose no threat, either as citizens or as public employees,'" wrote Block, quoting language from a 1966 Supreme Court opinion. "It is equally uncertain whether Melzer could be fired simply for external disruptions... since 'the reaction of a community cannot always dictate constitutional protections to employees.' However, the Court need not grapple with these issues since it has found that Melzer was discharged solely because of the likely disruption to the internal operations of the school as a consequence of the public exposure of the activities in which he participated during the course of his active, not passive, membership in NAMBLA... Given the limited First Amendment value that the Court ascribes to Melzer’s protected activities and the nature of his public employment, Melzer’s dismissal from the teaching ranks, under the facts and circumstances of this case, was warranted."