A brief history of NAMBLA and the Pedophilia lobby in Texas: Part I
How NAMBLA went underground to lobby for "pedophile rights" in the US and Texas.
***Trigger Warning for descriptions of ideology supporting pedophilia and child abuse. This author supports strong laws to protect people under the age 18 from adult predators***
About NAMBLA
NAMBLA was originally founded in the late, 1970s and is an organization that promotes legalizing sex with children, especially boys who are gay or queer. This idea has been rejected by the vast majority of the LQBTQ+ community for a very long time.
According to Wikipedia the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophilia advocacy organization in the United States with the goals of:
Abolishing the age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors.
Campaigning for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
Promoting the sexual assault of children through serial grooming, which has been investigated by the FBI since NAMBLA’s inception the late 70s
Promoting the concept of pederasty, the ancient Greek practice that claimed sexual relationship between grown men and young boys was a right of passage.
Abolishing the sex offender registry altogether.
Several news outlets have investigated NAMBLA including the following:
A 1996 article by the Boston Phoenix describes how Bill Andriette, a prominent NAMBLA member, was groomed from age 15 and later became the leader of the organization.
A 2006 article in Boston Magazine that describes a child sex trafficking ring run by NAMBLA members
NAMBLA’s own blog covered the 1982 arrest of cofounder Tom Reeves for the rape of a transgender minor.
Tom Reeve’s obituary on NAMBLA’s website requested donations be made in his name to an non-profit supporting an Haitian orphanage. The non-profit’s founder of was charged on multiple allegations of sexually abusing children earlier this year.
Perhaps the greatest indicator NAMBLA’s infamy – they were lampooned by South Park for their claims of being persecuted for their beliefs that sexual relationships with minors are ethical in the episode Cartman Joins NAMBLA in 2000.
NAMBLA Goes Underground
As more and more NAMBLA members began to be investigated and arrested by law enforcement (where there’s smoke there’s fire), they realized they needed to chose a different strategy to promote their ideology.
NAMBLA founders reorganize as NARSOL
In 1998, a bizarre petition titled A Call to Safeguard Our Children and Our Liberties appeared on the NAMBLA website, in which signers declared “Focusing on ‘saving’ children from sexual molestation by strangers distracts us from far more serious forms of violence against children and young people. Most child abuse has nothing to do with sex.”
This petition contains multiple other claims of victimhood by various “unfair” sex offender laws.
National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL)
The same petition resurfaced in 2007 as the founding statement of the newly formed National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL) with slightly different signers.
Multiple key signers remained the same including Paul Shannon, cofounder of NARSOL and NAMBLA and Bob Chatelle, attorney and founder of National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ) that has defended NAMBLA over the years.
Tom Reeves, cofounders of NAMBLA, was notably missing, but Alex Marbury appeared as cofounder of NARSOL.
Upon his death in 2012 was discovered that Marbury died the same day as Tom Reeves at the same age. Suspicions arose and ultimately NARSOL acknowledged that Marbury had been a pseudonym he used to disassociate himself from NAMBLA. In 2017, NARSOL acknowledged in a newsletter that Marbury was a cofounder of NAMBLA, but continued to deny his involvement after the inception NARSOL in spite of evidence to the contrary.
NARSOL, then called RSOL, was originally founded upon ideas found in a 1998 essay by cofounder and NAMBLA member Paul Shannon.
NARSOL expands to Texas
Mary Sue Molnar founded Texas Voices for Reason and Justice with support from NARSOL (then called RSOL) sometime around 2008.
Mary Sue Molnar has served on the board of directors for two organizations with close ties to NAMBLA – the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL) and the National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ).
The main goals of Texas Voices are:
to abolish the sex offender registry
work towards ending residency restrictions like keeping child predators away from schools and playgrounds through litigation. They’ve had a large degree of success in this avenue.
reducing penalties for all kinds of sexual offenses including possession of CSAM which can only be produced through the abuse and trafficking of children.
About Mary Sue Molnar
Mary Sue Molnar became interested in changing laws impacting sex offenders after her son Jason Molnar was convicted of having sex with a 16 year old girl just a month shy of turning 25 years old.
This means the victim was actually 8-9 years younger than him – well above the acceptable 3 year age range between a teen and a legal adult that is protected under the so called Romeo and Juliette laws in Texas. Mary Sue has previously misreported the age difference as being 6 years, not 8-9 to the Austin Chronicle and to Fox News Austin while promoting her activism.
Since his conviction, Mary Sue has sought to abolish the sex offender registry and has promoted the expansion of so-called “Romeo and Juliette” laws to as low as the age of 13. The average age of first period for girls is 12.4 years old.
Currently minors between 14 and 17 can legally consent to sex with someone within three years of their age, as long as the other party is also at least 14 and consents. 17 is the age at which any child can consent to sex with any adult in Texas under certain laws, but other statues specify they must be 18.
Sexual Citizenship and Human Rights conference
Molnar gave a talk at at the 2013 Sexual Citizenship and Human Rights conference that was hosted by a the University of Texas at Austin by tenured classics Professor Thomas K Hubbard who became the subject of controversy for his alleged ties to NAMBLA through a book published by their publishing house, Wallace Hamilton Press, called Greek Love Reconsidered in 2000.
Molnar gave a talk titled “Residency Restrictions and Child Safe Zones” claiming “Residency and proximity restrictions based on fear and hysteria have no empirical support.”
The conference included a talk titled “Child Pornography as Expression?” and a talk by self-professed NAMBLA member Bill Andriette. Another speaker was disgraced psychologist Fred S. Berlin. Several of the speakers are academics that were shunned by the
One speakers was Noel Busch-Armendariz, a UT professor, who still leading sexual assault researcher and professor of social work at UT and teaches Dell Medical school. Busch-Armendariz’s speech included the argument that victims of trafficking have agency and choose to be there, without discussing the nuance of coercion and circumstance.
Noel Busch-Armendariz has influenced multiple federal and state agencies with her research on how to approach sexual assault investigations.
The connection between Scott Henson and Mary Sue Molnar
Scott Henson has repeatedly given praise to Mary Sue Molnar, considers her a friend, and has repeatedly worked with her on lobbying efforts to reduce penalties for sex offenders at Texas Voices for Reason and Justice.
Kathy Mitchell, Henson’s wife and fellow board member at Just Liberty, has appeared on the floor of the Texas Legislature with Molnar multiple times to lobby for changes to laws that support sex offenders.[1][2]
Scott Henson also has also collaborated with these organizations in the past both as in his individual capacity with NARSOL and Texas Voices and as director of the Texas Innocence Project National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ).
Scott Henson is a campaign advisor for José Garza and works with Garza’s office through his position at the Innocence Project of Texas which has received $600k in Justice Department grants to work with the office on exonerations.