I have mentioned Hemant Mehta in one of my previous articles. He goes by the user name of Friendly Atheist on YouTube. I admire that he's not afraid to stand up to all the bullies in the religious establishment. At the same time, I do have some concerns about a video he posted on his YouTube channel recently regarding a notorious Bible thumper who got arrested in an online sex-sting operation. Here is the video below.
Ultraconservative Advice Columnist Joseph Brent Walker Gets Caught With His Pants Down With A Fictitious Teenage Girl
Now, all of you who have followed me know that I am not going to defend anything that a clergyman, a preacher man, a televangelist, or any kind of religious influencer does to get himself into trouble with the law. These jerks are extremely arrogant and judgmental.
Of course, I would have liked it better if Mr. Mehta had done a video about a police officer, a judge, or, better yet, a psychiatrist getting caught in an online sex-sting operation. It always makes me feel good whenever one of those idiots gets a taste of their own bitter medicine.
Nevertheless, Joseph Brent Walker may be in his seventies, but he is not a pedophile. Instead, he is a hypocrite. He contacted a decoy who was posing online as a 14-year-old girl, and he proposed having sexual intercourse with this make-believe teenage girl. If it had been a real 14-year-old girl, she would have had the prerogative of walking away from the situation any time that she wanted to do so.
In a more direct fashion, it doesn't do justice to take a scenario in which an older man attempts to hook up with a sexually active teenage girl and equate it to a scenario of an adult man kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old girl. The two scenarios have no connection with each other regardless of what any conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed child advocates, self-appointed psychiatrists, and the likes have to say about it.
1. The Price Of Collective Stupidity
If you follow me regularly, you know better than to believe that I am here to defend or stand up for Joseph Brent Walker. His kind seldom ever practice what they preach. At the same time, I get so sick and tired of all these conspiracy theories about grooming and pedophilia that carry no validity in a discussion about Mr. Walker.
Although Hemant Mehta never called Mr. Walker a pedophile or a child molester directly in his video, his viewing audience in the comments section to his video posted comments that bore no resemblance to the actual facts of the matter.
Therein YouTube @rjsimpkins2911 posted:
Walker is apparently a pedophile who will be convicted of a felony, as he should be. Perhaps his good side, that used his media megaphone to warn others not to engage in shady online behavior actually discouraged numerous individuals to choose well instead of being a piece of crap. I would also say 1) that there are several hundred thousand present and past Mormon bishops alive today and statistically a handful are Walkers, who fell prey to their Jungian dark shadow self, and 2) the other 99.9999% of them are not Walkers and 3) that 100% of all of them never ever told congregants this kind of deviant behavior was ever acceptable.
A well known Mormon doctrine is that it would have been better for them to have a millstone tied around their neck and dropped into the sea than to harm a child.
YouTuber @rjsimpkins2911? What statistics are you referring to? It seems to me that you're pulling numbers out of your backside instead of quoting actual data.
No, YouTuber @rjsimpkins2911! Mr. Walker is not a pedophile. According to the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ("DSM-5"), a pedophile is someone 16 years of age or older who is sexually attracted to a prepubescent child under 13 years old (under 11 years old under certain circumstances) that is 5 or more years their junior.
Mr. Walker thought that he was contacting a 14-year-old girl online. A 14-year-old girl is not a prepubescent child. Therefore, Mr. Walker is not a pedophile, period. Duhhh!!!!
YouTuber @rjsimpkins2911? If you're reading my article, I do not disagree with you that "it would have been better for them to have a millstone tied around their neck and dropped into the sea than to harm a child." That is, if there is an actual child victim involved. In Mr. Walker's particular case, there was none involved.
Furthermore, YouTuber @rjsimpkins2911, you need to get your facts straight about the definition of a child. According to many English-language dictionaries, a child is a boy or girl before puberty. It has nothing to do with the legal age of majority or the statutory age of consent.
I don't believe that Mr. Mehta posted his YouTube video to present a story about pedophilia or child molestation in the church but rather to expose a Bible thumper for his hypocrisy. If Mr. Mehta wanted to post a video about pedophilia and child molestation in the church, he would have likely sought out a story about a clergyman targeting a small child under 11 years old.
Then again, Mr. Mehta does use the word "prey" in his video. Pardon the expression, because anyone could easily confuse the word for "pray." That is, if Mr. Walker were to claim that he was merely looking to provide the make-believe 14-year-old girl with Bible lessons, which the chat logs would not support.
I do not need to use any more examples of stupid posts from the comments section to Mr. Mehta's video. Most of these people are absolutely clueless about what the real issues are regarding Mr. Walker's arrest.
2. My Personal Viewpoints Regarding Joseph Brent Walker's Arrest
I am no major fan of American statutory-rape laws, and I do nothing to hide that fact in any of my articles here on my PEAKD channel. Then again, if you follow me regularly, you already knew that.
Also, I am not someone who defends Christianity or any kind of religion. I resent how Christian nationalists force their agendas down everyone's throat here in the United States. Therefore, as you can see, I am someone who has a great amount of respect for Hemant Mehta.
When you set aside all the conspiracy theories floating around here in the land of milk and honey about grooming, child trafficking, and pedophilia, Joseph Brent Walker's recent brush with the law all comes down to one thing. The man undoubtedly lives by double standards.
In his role as an ultraconservative, ultra-religious advice columnist, I would not put it past Mr. Walker to have flapped his jaws about how sex education should never be taught in the public schools and that abstinence-only education should be a part of their curriculum instead. Like most of his kind, he likely preached about teenage abstinence.
The problem is that nobody gets to snipe at teenage sex if they want to participate in sexual activities with teenager minors, especially a 70-year-old Bible thumper. No man Mr. Walker's age gets to slut-shame a pregnant 14-year-old girl, if her baby comes out looking exactly like him for obvious reasons.
While I will never accuse Mr. Walker of being a pedophile, a child molester, or a child groomer, I will also never accuse him of being true to his core beliefs. The minute he decided to contact online what he believed to be a 14-year-old girl for sexual intercourse, he sent all those core beliefs of his flying straight out the window.
Do I feel that Mr. Walker should go to prison for a long time? Absolutely! People like him are to blame for our nation having unreasonably punitive statutory-rape laws and ridiculously high statutory ages of consent in each state jurisdiction. Therefore, people like him need to be raked over the coals with the very same laws that they fight so hard to get enacted.
The state of Utah now has marriage laws that restrict how much of an age gap there can be between both spouses whenever a teenage minor gets married, which is hardly fair in my opinion. Utah now has an age floor for marriage that disallows most teenagers to get married. I wouldn't doubt that Mr. Walker was all in favor of such legislation when elected officials were deciding its fate in Salt Lake City so many years ago.
I wouldn't doubt that Mr. Walker likely ran his mouth about how he believed that all 14-year-old girls who were no longer virgins and particularly ones that were pregnant were going to Hell once they died. Then he turns around and attempts to hook up with a girl that young on the Internet for sexual purposes. He's the worst offender of his own so-called principles.
At the same time, I contend that Mr. Mehta would have been better off in making his point about religious hypocrisy by using examples of church ministers sexually molesting small children under the age of eleven and then making it a point how the Catholic Church no longer has any moral high ground to accuse doctors and scientists who perform embryonic stem cell research of being child murderers and baby killers.
I would like for Mr. Mehta to post a video in which he attacks Judie Brown of the American Life League in that same regard. It bewilders me why he hasn't done so. He has nothing to fear if he were to go down that same road.
Although I agree that Mr. Walker is another Joey Buttafuoco with a more religious edge to him, I would never go as far as equating him to some child-raping, child-murdering maniac like Donald James Smith. Mr. Walker tried to have sex with a teenage girl, but he never would have raped and killed a little girl under 11 years old. The only thing that Mr. Buttafuoco and Mr. Smith have in common is that they were both born in 1956.
3. Final Thoughts
Self-proclaimed child advocates, pedophile-panic fanatics, and the likes are fear-mongering troublemakers at best. They don't care about the facts. They only wish to rile up the public at large.
Having a 14-year-old wife did not make Joseph Smith a pedophile. He was a polygamist at worst. Similarly, Joseph Brent Walker is not a pedophile for wanting to have sex with a 14-year-old girl. He's a hypocrite at worst. He was a married man and a father who should have known better than to cross the very same line that he strived so hard to shove in other people's faces.
Whenever you read or hear stories about people like Mr. Walker, don't let your emotions get the best of you. He did not victimize an actual child. Even if he had engaged in sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old girl, it would not have made him a child molester any more than if he had been a 15-year-old boy doing so.
One can never know what goes through the mind of a teenage girl whenever she is getting ready to have sex with anyone of any age. It brings to mind when I was watching a televised Fourth-of-July celebration from the nation's capital and this one 15-year-old girl walked up to Barry Manilow while he was singing to the audience after he had walked into the audience. She was smiling at him and singing with him as though she wanted to have his baby.
Barry Manilow was in his seventies back when that incident took place. Probably that same 15-year-old girl would have verbally pervert-shamed a 40-something-year-old man for offering her a ride as she was walking to school.
Another point I would like to make is that what I cannot understand about American society is that if I were to accuse the late Aubreigh Wyatt's underage rapist of being a child predator or a child rapist, people would accuse me of being politically incorrect for doing so inasmuch as this boy was 12 or 13 years old when he committed his crime. It doesn't matter to them that he ruined that young girl's life and drove her to suicide. It doesn't even matter to them that he forced her into something that she didn't want to do.
Because the late Aubreigh Wyatt's rapist was the same age as her, somehow it makes him a better person than Mr. Walker who did nothing more than try to contact a non-existent 14-year-old girl to seek a consensual sexual relationship with her. This school of thought makes absolutely no sense to me. Most unfortunately, way too Americans think this way, and it's a dangerous way to view the world.
If Mr. Walker ends up in prison, then the late Aubreigh Wyatt's rapist should also be incarcerated. This punk has never been arrested for what he did to the late Ms. Wyatt back when she was 12 years old. Whenever it comes to crimes against teenage and pre-teenage girls, the criminal justice system needs to place less emphasis on the age of the perpetrator and more emphasis on the actions of the perpetrator.
At the same time, I would rather Mr. Walker have been a police officer, a psychiatrist, a predator catcher, or even Chris Hansen himself, because then he would have occupied an even higher position on the totem pole of hypocrisy. Online sex-sting operations are clearly entrapment, but I will not be giving Mr. Walker any pity parties.
While I don't believe for one minute that Mr. Walker intended to seduce a 14-year-old girl if he had successfully met one offline, he still unjustly judged many people throughout his life whom he didn't even know. Now it's his turn to sit in the hot seat.
At the same time, the public at large should be less concerned about Mr. Walker's obvious desire to relive his youth and more concerned about the fact that a football player at Bringham Young University has been accused of sexually molesting a girl from the time she was 7 years old over the course of five years. Of course, this football player was only 14 years old when he first sexually victimized her, so I suppose the court system there will give him a free pass for that.
Don't you just hate our criminal justice system and court system here in the United States? It's as though everything is a knee-jerk reaction with both of them and nobody in them cares about the facts anymore.
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