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Warren v. Virginia: a court case that zoos lost

If a community lets itself get driven too far underground, then it gets pretty deadly:


Almost no LGBT in Russia are out because they are afraid of running afoul of the "gay propaganda" law. Instead of fighting against it, they ran into the shadows, leaving their few remaining outspoken activists without any support whatsoever. The LGBT community in Russia actually live in constant danger, and their situation, right now, is a lot worse than that of zoos.

The reasons behind this failure come down to the same problems that led to the zooey community getting into trouble in the west. Members of the gay community there started spreading the idea, "shush, keep it a secret because you don't want to bring down your family with you. You don't want to attract attention to the rest of us." They went deep into the closet, and now, being found out to be gay can result in you being fatally stabbed in the night.

The situation for LGBT has gotten pretty grim in Russia, and I am betting that the reasons why are exactly the problems that were endemic to the Beast Forum generation of zoos. It comes down to mass cowardice. It comes down to a community undermining and dragging down its activists and treating them as a scapegoat instead of rallying to them as heroes.

The conditions of LGBT in Russia are significantly more dangerous than zoos in the United States, and those of you, among us zoos, that are treating heroes as scapegoats for your self-created problems are the western doppelgangers of those that put them into the dangerous situation that they are currently in.

Our situation can get significantly worse and considerably more dangerous.

Keeping our heads buried in the sand is the very thing that is putting us in this kind of danger. You will not improve our situation by commiting the same errors as Russian LGBT and expecting a different result.
 
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Those that assume that LGBT are better off, in the United States, only because LGBT are uniquely different from zoos are blindly oblivious to the situation of LGBT in countries where there has not been a widespread and vigorous activist movement.

In Russia, LGBT organizations let themselves fold throughout the 1990's because the leadership were not willing to stand up against the concomitant social and legal harassment against them. Instead of putting up a fight and standing up for themselves and getting smarter about what they were doing, they cucked-out and went home. The entire LGBT community, in Russia, collapsed due a lack of support from LGBT. Anything they tried to get off the ground folded, often due to a lack of funding.

LGBT activists are in the same situation as zoos. Whenever they attempt to start something in a place where there has never been any organized advocacy before, they inevitably face harassment and threats.

When Germany's zooey organization ZETA came out in protest against Germany's anti-zoo legislation, there were neonazi thugs attacking and beating them in the streets, from what I remember. I can't find the article that referred to that, right now, but it was not easy for them to make a stand. It was not safe for them to make a stand.

However, because they did make a stand, they have become the only zooey community in the world that has fought against anti-zoo hate and won. They did what was pronounced, by zoos in the United States, to be preposterous and impossible.

If you want to organize and put up a fight, then as a matter of fact, you will have to brave mobs of scolding masses and large, violent men that are actually capable of hurting you, but if enough of us emerge at one time and put up a fight, then we can win.

If you run and hide, then you will find yourselves in the same situation as Russian LGBT:


Stop pretending that what LGBT in the United States did was easy or just a given. It was not. It was not inevitable. It was not something that happened because we are so much different from zoos. We had to engage in full-blown asymmetric cultural warfare and we had to get smart about it. We had to operate through both subversive and mass-oriented routes of resistance. It took organizational muscle and the cooperation and unity of the LGBT community at large. It was not given to us for free.

In countries where would-be activists were led to believe it would come for free, LGBT are getting killed or put into situations that will most likely get them killed.


Stop assuming that LGBT won in the United States because we are made out of different stuff from zoos. We are just like zoos in every respect that is important. We are people that can prosper if a few of us will stand up and be heroes and the rest of us unite around them, and we are people that can suffer horrifying violence if our leadership cucks out and the community at large fails to support those that are left.

Us zoos are not aliens from outer space, but we are still humans, perfectly ordinary humans, and the means for us to succeed are the same that have been used by other organized communities to succeed. The rules are the same.
 
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The Apostles of Cowardice are telling you that, if we just stick our heads in the sand and obediently stay in our little pigeonhole, then the meanies will eventually forget about us and find something that better fits their fancy.

I am telling you, as a zoo that is also a survivor of the LGBT community's struggle, that it does not work that way. It will never work that way.

The Apostles of Cowardice are going to keep on preaching to you that us LGBT are somehow a totally different thing and nothing like zoos, and they are going to keep on beating the drums of cravenness and chicken-heartedness for as long as they live because they have committed themselves to becoming the Taliban of cowardice. They have committed themselves to becoming the mujahideen of cowardice. They will keep on preaching and bleating that cowardice and cravenness is the one and only panacea.

The Apostles of Cowardice were definitive of the Beast Forum generation of zoos. Would-be activists were gas lighted and used as a scapegoat, and when would-be leaders kept emerging, they got called "sock-puppets" as their very identities were erased. The leftovers from the Beast Forum era are still talking about how supposed madmen would create almost believable personalities for his sock-puppets, yet how many of those personalities were really unique human beings that really and truly wanted to exercise leadership?

The zooey community went out of its way to take a hot dump on people that otherwise would have been its leaders, during the Beast Forum generation of zoos, and the leftovers from that sick generation that put us into our current situation are still obsessed with running their campaign of spreading fear and hate within our own community. They are still beating the same drums by which they marched us into our current situation.

All zoos must learn how to stand up against the Apostles of Cowardice. We must learn to tell the Apostle of Cowardice that we will not stand for being bullied by them. We will not stand for being used by them as a scapegoat. We must emerge united and strong against the Apostle of Cowardice, and we must hit them with everything we have got. Those sick thugs must never again define our community.

Stand up against the Apostles of Cowardice! Tell them that they cannot abuse and shame us into silence, anymore!

The Mujahideen of Hopelessness got us into this mess, and they will always spread their ignorance because their contemptible chicken-heartedness is all that they can comprehend.
 
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Do not be fooled into the belief that lying silent will lead to zoos being left alone. It does not work. It never works. During the Beast Forum generation, that was what defined the entire zooey community. Such contemptible cowardice and backwardness will lead to people getting killed.
 
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So, @SigmatoZeta, when are you going to get out there and start shaking things up for a positive change instead of just preaching about it here?

I mean, after all to get things to change one has to actually *do something*, no? You seem to want to be a cheerleader and want someone else to pick up a torch you don't seem willing to take up yourself, why is that?
 
So, @SigmatoZeta, when are you going to get out there and start shaking things up for a positive change instead of just preaching about it here?

I mean, after all to get things to change one has to actually *do something*, no? You seem to want to be a cheerleader and want someone else to pick up a torch you don't seem willing to take up yourself, why is that?
I actually AM trying to help get my local zooey community organized, and it is very difficult. Those that have animals cuck out at the drop of a hat, and those that do not are often young people that are hard to reach if you do not have an animal to share with them. This is a difficult community to organise. We that give a damn, if we want things to get any better within our lifetimes, have to give it everything we have got!

I could use some help from someone that has more brains for this kind of thing than I have got.
 
I actually AM trying to help get my local zooey community organized, and it is very difficult. Those that have animals cuck out at the drop of a hat, and those that do not are often young people that are hard to reach if you do not have an animal to share with them. This is a difficult community to organise. We that give a damn, if we want things to get any better within our lifetimes, iave to give it everything we have got! I could use some help from someone that has more brains for this kind of thing than I have got.

Talk is cheap. It sure is easy to spout opinions, and to just pontificate about it all day. But actions speak louder than words. But you do nothing, because there is nothing you, or anyone else, can do.

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

"Discretion is the better part of valor"

Most zoo active people understand the above quotes, clearly you don't
 
I actually AM trying to help get my local zooey community organized, and it is very difficult. Those that have animals cuck out at the drop of a hat, and those that do not are often young people that are hard to reach if you do not have an animal to share with them. This is a difficult community to organise. We that give a damn, if we want things to get any better within our lifetimes, have to give it everything we have got!

Ah, so you can't do anything without the help of others? So again, it seems like you aren't taking your own advice, just trying to get others to do it without taking the risks yourself. If this feels like I'm being an asshole and attacking you, it's because you have been pushing your agenda for how long now? Telling others that they should take risks and not be so stupid and selfish. When I read your screeds, they aren't discussion, they're preaching and what appears to me as thinly veiled attempts to get others to take risks for you. Maybe if you weren't so holier than thou about it it might not seem that way.

I could use some help from someone that has more brains for this kind of thing than I have got.

You wouldn't take their advice, you would tell them how foolish they are and that you know better.
 
The two most promising youth in the area are presently working long hours. These two have a lot better brains than I do, and I am certain that, as they grow more established, they could rise to positions of leadership in the zooey community.

I have only really started in the past month and a half. I am hopeful that more talent will arrive on the scene over the next couple of years.

I am intent on trying to help spearhead the development of the local zooey community over the next 20 years. I do not expect any major adventures during the intervening time. My focus right now is raw organisation.
 
The two most promising youth in the area are presently working long hours. These two have a lot better brains than I do, and I am certain that, as they grow more established, they could rise to positions of leadership in the zooey community.

I have only really started in the past month and a half. I am hopeful that more talent will arrive on the scene over the next couple of years.

I am intent on trying to help spearhead the development of the local zooey community over the next 20 years. I do not expect any major adventures during the intervening time. My focus right now is raw organisation.

If you "Talk The Talk, Walk The Walk" - Supporting what you say, not just with words, but also through action or evidence
 
Wait, make that three youth in my area. I forgot to count the one that just became active again, today.

There are a couple of men in their 30's that live farther away, at least one of which I know is an agricultural laborer. They seem pretty bright, but I am not sure if they will ever be close enough to our area to get very much involved.

This has happened only within the last couple of months. I am committed to operating within a 20 year timeline. I know that rushed progress is worse than no progress at all. These people are still getting to know each other and they are still figuring out each other.
 
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@egoldstein, discussion ended when I was being verbally abused for not signing on with a self-righteous coward's contemptible head-in-the-sand outlook.

I will not stand for being verbally abused by self-righteous mealy-mouthed scum that thinks that being a worthless craven piece of washed-up garbage makes him a wise man.

Cowardice is ignorance. We should all have contempt for it.

Darn right, I am going to preach that. The Apostles of Cowardice have bullied and harassed the zooey community for too long. Their cowardice does not equate to wisdom, but their cowardice equates to entrenched ignorance compounded by cognitive decline.

Grow a spine, you generation of eunuchs!

I have been through a worse Hell from being a gay man from a Southern Baptist family background than most of you eunuchs have probably endured. Uncouth young men hunted you like a pack of mongrel dogs in some areas of the United States. I was subjected to actual violence over this, and I actually spent part of my life homeless over this, over being gay in an intensely conservative world.

What I have learned from my experiences with that cowardice gets you into a lot more trouble than it keeps you out of, in the long-run. My life was a lot easier when I began having open conversations with allies in my existence and started letting them know what was going on and why.
 
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The two most promising youth in the area are presently working long hours. These two have a lot better brains than I do, and I am certain that, as they grow more established, they could rise to positions of leadership in the zooey community.
What do you think this is? Some sort of club with a hierarchy? I will not look to any zoophile as a leader, or in some way above me.

Those youth are not leaders. Foolish, maybe.
 
A few ideas:

Learn from these rulings. Prepare. There will always be a next case and the chances to win are better, when you are well prepared. Take the disease argument for example—get scientific data about from which animals diseases were transmitted to humans, how diseases have been transmitted to humans, and where in the world they were transmitted to humans.

Do this for each argument against bestiality you find. Check whether it is founded on facts. Try hard and serious and do not dismiss what you find too quickly. In case you find facts that these arguments are based on, check how relevant they are for your case. For example, even if a disease would have been transmitted through sexual contact of ape and human somewhere in the African bush, that may not be relevant for well-groomed dogs in Northern America who see a vet regularly and get their yearly vaccinations.

You may also want to think about alternative solutions for actual problems that have been identified. For example, instead of just saying that many people who engage in bestiality do not injure their animals, you could think about how a law could look that is effective against injuring animals. I do not know about the U.S., but some legal systems require that prohibitions must not be broader than necessary to reach their legitimate goal.

Don't concentrate on one legal principle (due process?) alone. See whether you can find additional points.
 
A few ideas:

Learn from these rulings. Prepare. There will always be a next case and the chances to win are better, when you are well prepared. Take the disease argument for example—get scientific data about from which animals diseases were transmitted to humans, how diseases have been transmitted to humans, and where in the world they were transmitted to humans.

I think the "disease" argument (against sex with animals) is an argument that could be easily overcome with a good lawyer. (For example, there is the fact that few diseases are able to travel cross-species, making sex with animals safer than sex with humans from a health perspective).
 
If a community lets itself get driven too far underground, then it gets pretty deadly:


Almost no LGBT in Russia are out because they are afraid of running afoul of the "gay propaganda" law. Instead of fighting against it, they ran into the shadows, leaving their few remaining outspoken activists without any support whatsoever. The LGBT community in Russia actually live in constant danger, and their situation, right now, is a lot worse than that of zoos.

The reasons behind this failure come down to the same problems that led to the zooey community getting into trouble in the west. Members of the gay community there started spreading the idea, "shush, keep it a secret because you don't want to bring down your family with you. You don't want to attract attention to the rest of us." They went deep into the closet, and now, being found out to be gay can result in you being fatally stabbed in the night.

The situation for LGBT has gotten pretty grim in Russia, and I am betting that the reasons why are exactly the problems that were endemic to the Beast Forum generation of zoos. It comes down to mass cowardice. It comes down to a community undermining and dragging down its activists and treating them as a scapegoat instead of rallying to them as heroes.

The conditions of LGBT in Russia are significantly more dangerous than zoos in the United States, and those of you, among us zoos, that are treating heroes as scapegoats for your self-created problems are the western doppelgangers of those that put them into the dangerous situation that they are currently in.

Our situation can get significantly worse and considerably more dangerous.

Keeping our heads buried in the sand is the very thing that is putting us in this kind of danger. You will not improve our situation by commiting the same errors as Russian LGBT and expecting a different result.
Learn to fight, stay armed, and keep your eyes open. Keep to yourself, don’t ask for conflict and be kind to your lover. Remember it’s the deaths of people that commit zoo activity and the abuse or injuries some people inflict on animals when they take part in zoo. There are a lot of cases like that end up in the news and spark the powder keg.
when it gets that far, well then it’s just FUBAR.
 
The gay community in Russia let itself get driven completely underground, and it did nothing to protect them. They are still being hunted and murdered. They are still being attacked by thugs. Their invisibility has only been used as a weakness by those that prey upon the weak.

In the United States, the LGBT community came out in force and highly organized. We had a huge public advocacy campaign. It took generations of very hard work to build it up, but it was magnificent, once we got it off the ground.

The gay community in Russia made the same types of mistakes as the zooey community in the US. They failed to organize. They failed to back up their advocates and even threw some of them under the bus.

The LGBT community in Russia is in the terrifying position that they are in because they did not organize.

The current conditions of the Russian LGBT community is proof of what I keep on saying, which is that if you keep on making the same stupid mistakes, the same stupid things will keep on happening.
 
Well, you keep comparing gays to zoos, and I'll keep my distance from this whole thing.

Good luck.
 
It is really kind of ethnocentric to assume that the conditions of LGBT in English-speaking countries are shared universally. In countries like Russia, where LGBT are considered to be deeply taboo to even talk about, they get the same treatment as zoos in the United States. They get howls of outrage and gasps of shock and lots of pearl-clutching just because someone dares to stand up for LGBT. It is the same shit in a different culture.

When you make serious errors in how you choose to organize your community, it can get pretty bad. The situation for us zoos, if we make too many mistakes, could ultimately get worse. It's not enough just to say we have to speak out. We have to get good at it.
 
We need an organization like Lambda Legal, and we need to figure out how to get zoos to actually put money into it.
 
Lambda Legal did not have an easy time getting off the ground. When Lambda Legal's founder William J. Thom Esq. originally submitted the incorporation papers for Lambda Legal in 1971, his application was denied on the grounds that it would be "contrary to public advocacy." He only succeeded at appealing that decision two years later in 1973.

At the time that Lambda Legal was founded, the majority of the lawyers that worked for the organization were non-LGBT that were sympathetic toward the cause. Allies were therefore important from very early on.

Lawrence v. Texas did not happen until 30 years after Lambda Legal was officially formed.

If your organization has just gotten formed, assuming that you already have enough sympathetic lawyers in New York City in order to staff it with, then if you are lucky, you might get a truly stunning Supreme Court victory before you are dead.

But wait, there's more! There is always more. It took generations of advocacy, prior to 1973, for LGBT in New York City to have enough lawyers in the city that were sympathetic with the cause of LGBT rights. You can't just start an organization like Lambda Legal today and expect a lot of lawyers to be willing to put their necks on the line for you, while working for piddling salaries that can be paid by a non-profit organization, in order to staff it. You have to build up that wave of public sentiment, first!

I talk about generational change because it takes generations of working your ass off. It takes a lifetime of working your ass off to get anything on this order of magnitude to actually happen and to achieve permanent results.

As @ZTHorse said, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second-best time to plant a tree is today.

Before we could even get an organization like Lambda Legal up and running, we need a preexisting public advocacy machine that is capable of reaching out to ordinary upper and middle-class Americans, especially ones that are highly educated.

Only when you have a substantial pro-zooey movement going among non-zoos can you ever feel comfortable filing the articles of incorporation for an organization like Lambda Legal with the hope of being able to attract talented staff, and then you spend another generation working your asses off to get a strong case into the Supreme Court.

Historical precedent states that LGBT rights was possible not because LGBT are so much different from zoos, but historical precedent states that LGBT rights was possible because the leadership of the gay community spent their entire lifetimes eating, sleeping, and breathing this cause from their youth until their graves. They labored and slaved and sacrificed.

You don't get a massive civil rights movement if you don't have the balls and the intestinal fortitude to invest that kind of labor in it, and that is what makes the LGBT community in the United States different from the zooey community in the United States.

We can change that difference about ourselves if we choose to. We can make up our minds, starting right now, that we are not going to be like the LGBT in Russia, who folded up with an apologetic squeak and begged for forgiveness only to become victims of predatory thugs for doing so, but we are going to be like the LGBT in the United States, who never backed down, who never apologized, who never gave in.

That is the difference between a community that succeeds and a community that fails.

I realize that I am a hard person to fathom through my meandering weird intellectual tirades and my impassioned rants, but I am right. Please pardon my personal imperfections, and try to comprehend the truth of what I am saying and why it is important. The LGBT community's progress in western society was not born out of an inherent difference between LGBT and zoos, but it was never inevitable or a given. It was not a deterministic consequence of some innate difference in them. It was the passion of generations of individuals, who were really just ordinary people, who believed in a cause and stood up for that cause. They worked their asses off for it. They devoted their entire lifetimes to it.

Your rights are not guaranteed to you by nature, but you labor for them. You fight for them. You sacrifice for them. When you talk about rights, you are talking in the language of deontology, and the language of deontology is the language of warriors. You have rights because you stood up and beat your chest and said that you have rights and that you are willing to make a stand for them and labor for them. That's what rights are. That's where rights come from. Rights do not come to those that wait on divine intervention. They come to people that are certain that they are the agents of divine intervention. That is what changes the world.
 
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I think the "disease" argument (against sex with animals) is an argument that could be easily overcome with a good lawyer. (For example, there is the fact that few diseases are able to travel cross-species, making sex with animals safer than sex with humans from a health perspective).

I think you may have misunderstood the disease argument. They are not so much concerned over your personal health, e.g. that you could get an STD from a dog, like you could from a human. They are concerned that viruses or germs that have only affected non-human animals so far could adapt to the human body inside you and then spread from human to human. They know that this is unlikely to happen, but when it happens, it could be dangerous for a huge number of people. Influenza viruses are typical candidates. There are influenza viruses that affect humans and others that affect pigs and others that effect chicken ... many variants. The idea is that when both types of influenza come together, there could be a gene transfer. The pigs-only influenza could "learn" from the human influenza how to penetrate the human defense mechanism—and suddenly we have a new monstrous disease. That's the fear.
 
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I think you may have misunderstood the disease argument. They are not so much concerned over your personal health, e.g. that you could get an STD from a dog, like you could from a human. They are concerned that viruses or germs that have only affected non-human animals so far could adapt to the human body inside you and then spread from human to human. They know that this is unlikely to happen, but when it happens, it could be dangerous for a huge number of people. Influenza viruses are typical candidates. There are influenza viruses that affect humans and others that affect pigs and others that effect chicken ... many variants. The idea is that when both types of influenza come together, there could be a gene transfer. The pigs-only influenza could "learn" from the human influenza how to penetrate the human defense mechanism—and suddenly we have a new monstrous disease. That's the fear.
That constitutes an interesting discussion. I suspect that, within several decades, something like this will affect the zooey community.

I think that a good means of getting around that is to encourage young zoos on the idea of sticking to oral if they can help it. A phenomenon that I have seen in the zooey community is that taking a dog's knot is getting to be seen as a rite of passage, and it doesn't have to be. If it happens spontaneously due to regular play, I can understand that, but the truth is that you can get away with suckling on a dog's cock like a calf on a cow without getting into too much trouble. It is a much more romantic means of having fun with your partner in my opinion.

The gay community has had success with the AIDS epidemic by making relatively safe behaviors come across as fun and romantic. A person in New York City became a legend by turning the AIDS prevention methods in that city from being a dry PSA style warning into a far superior system that was based on marketing wisdom, which made protected sex just a part of having some naughty fun.


He even dressed in drag.

Well, maybe oral sex ought to be treated as the go-to sexual behavior for zoos, so less blood-to-blood transmission of material can occur. Taking a dog-knot will always be a source of glamour, but a good advocacy campaign could make the less perilous methods more attractive for regular everyday sex.
 
I think you may have misunderstood the disease argument. They are not so much concerned over your personal health, e.g. that you could get an STD from a dog, like you could from a human. They are concerned that viruses or germs that have only affected non-human animals so far could adapt to the human body inside you and then spread from human to human. They know that this is unlikely to happen, but when it happens, it could be dangerous for a huge number of people. Influenza viruses are typical candidates. There are influenza viruses that affect humans and others that affect pigs and others that effect chicken ... many variants. The idea is that when both types of influenza come together, there could be a gene transfer. The pigs-only influenza could "learn" from the human influenza how to penetrate the human defense mechanism—and suddenly we have a new monstrous disease. That's the fear.

While it is true that some diseases can spread from non-human animals to humans, I still don't think it is a strong argument -- on Beast Forum, members who had been having sex with dogs and horses for decades said they never had any health problems. Also, diseases can spread from non-human animals to humans when humans eat animals -- yet people aren't trying to make laws banning meat-eating.

Also, safe sex practices when having sex with animals (such as condom use) could prevent the spread of diseases -- yet the new anti-zoo laws ban ALL sex with animals (with or without a condom).
 
I think you may have misunderstood the disease argument. They are not so much concerned over your personal health, e.g. that you could get an STD from a dog, like you could from a human. They are concerned that viruses or germs that have only affected non-human animals so far could adapt to the human body inside you and then spread from human to human. They know that this is unlikely to happen, but when it happens, it could be dangerous for a huge number of people. Influenza viruses are typical candidates. There are influenza viruses that affect humans and others that affect pigs and others that effect chicken ... many variants. The idea is that when both types of influenza come together, there could be a gene transfer. The pigs-only influenza could "learn" from the human influenza how to penetrate the human defense mechanism—and suddenly we have a new monstrous disease. That's the fear.
And you may have misunderstood the actual science. It is true that diseases move between species and sometimes adapt, yes, but sex isn't how they do it. Humans got AIDS from monkeys by eating the monkeys. Insects are by far the most common means of transmission. So the "sex spreads disease" meme is just recycled fundie scare tactics.
 
I agree, @Zoo50, that the epidemic risk of having sex with a dog I know well and who is healthy is negligible, and I also agree that other activities are clearly more risky. It's not the goal to convince ourselves that their arguments are wrong though, but to convince them that our opinion happens to be what's right. Scientific data would help with that.

@caikgoch, I find it unfortunate that you missed my point. I did not misunderstand the science. I suggested to gather scientific data to convince the courts of the truth where they err.
 
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