02/28/2013
Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Stephen Harper, expressed support for the freedom to watch child pornography during a talk at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta on Wednesday night.
Flanagan, who most recently made headlines for wearing a bizarre bison-fur coat on CBC, made the comments while answering a question from an audience member about a 2009 statement that child pornography is "just pictures."
"I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures," Flanagan said. "I don't look at these pictures."
After saying that he has long been on the mailing list of the Man Boy Love Association, Flanagan made the statement that triggered the loudest jeers from the audience.
"It is a real issue of personal liberty, to what extent we put people in jail for doing something in which they do not harm another person."
Flanagan made it clear that his position differs from that of the Conservative government. He served as an adviser to Harper for many years and managed the Conservative election campaign in 2004. In 2006, he was a senior communications advisor on the campaign that brought the Tories to power.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/02/28 ... 80550.html
"I call him Don Tomaso. He is the master strategist, the godfather—even of Harper." - Ezra Levant
Flanagan’s work remains an explosive topic, but few of his colleagues are willing to criticize him—at least on the record. After an introductory political-science textbook he co -authored was dropped from Ontario’s approved list of high-school texts because of its “racial, religious, and sex bias” against women and Jews, he became active in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, an aggressive lobby of professors fighting political correctness, on whose board he now sits.
The Man Behind Stephen Harper