Preface to Castration: Advantages and Disadvantages

[Dok (imported)]

Dear Fellow Eunuchs,

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding concerning my methods, motives, and goals in my castration research. So I am going to post the Preface to Castration: Advantages and Disadvantages. Hopefully this will help shed some light on who I am, why I started my research, my history in this field, and why I am writing on this subject. I believe more knowldege leads to understanding.

Cordially,

Vic Cheney

Preface

I can recall the discussion that went on in my head November 30, 1977, which led me to a decision to become an advocate of the castration treatment for sex offenders. It began that day during a classroom lecture on the biological theories of crime by the eminent Dr. C. R. Jeffery, criminology professor at Florida State University and former president of the American Society of Criminology. He told us that he thought castration would become one of the primary treatments for sex offenders at some point in the future. When I questioned him after class, he replied with some nervousness, that it is very effective, but is unpopular because of the way the Nazis had used it in Germany.

“I can understand castration being unpopular,” I told myself, “but if it is really effective, we should use it to prevent recidivism. Nothing else that I have learned about in 5 years of college study has seemed to work very well.”

I felt elated. At last there was something that I could really go to work on, something that works. The thought came to me. “Perhaps I am one who is well-suited to be an advocate of this forsaken process for the good of society.” I know that I am in an ideally protected position in life. I am relatively invulnerable to the slings and arrows that defending an unpopular subject like this might bring in my direction. I am retired on a comfortable military pension. Uncle Sam will not desert me or fire me from my job. He’ll continue to send me my paycheck each month regardless of my unpopularity.

My children are grown and on their own now. They will not have to suffer the ridicule from their classmates that their dad’s odd belief might bring. I do not appear to be vulnerable through my family. The ACLU, NAACP, Catholic officials, and other likely opponents cannot hurt me too badly. I thought about my fellow students, the faculty, and others. Many of them were far brighter, better educated, and more eloquent that I; but they were all struggling to keep their heads above the waters of disapproval in one way of another. I was different – older, more secure.

Perhaps I’ll learn something about castration that makes it absolutely prohibitive as a treatment, something that I may have overlooked. I can drop my defense of the operation if I find some reason that it is manifestly impractical. I’ll check it out.

Florida State University (FSU) was the foremost university in the U.S. for the study of criminology, and right next to the criminology building was the great, five-story Strozier Library. Within its yellow brick walls are the most extensive and best organized collections of publications for the study of crime in the South. Sure enough, I was able to find a few books on the castration treatment. I made copies of them, took them home, and studied them. They were very truthful, listing the bad effects of the operation, as well as the good effects. However, there was nothing to make the procedure very prohibitive. Something clicked, my resolve knitted together more firmly.

Alexander Pope had said, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” and I was still fearful that I might be horribly wrong. This thought struck against the flashes of hope and intuition. Obloquy and ridicule are so often the result of being sharply different in on’s thought from the prevailing streams of beliefs or being slightly ahead. I am thin-skinned. Criticism is very depressing to me. Yet, in other respects, I am as ideally situated to advocate an unpopular subject as a man can be. I was reminded of a simpler statement, “If it, is to be it, is up to me” (ten 2-letter words).

Suddenly, the midst of my musings, the trauma of the Chi Omega murders struck the FSU campus, right there on the tree-lined streets. Within half a mile of the criminology building a man had entered the rear door of the sorority house about 2:30 a.m., Sunday morning, January 15, 1978. He had gone from room to room bashing five coeds with a heavy stick as they lay sleeping. He strangled one of them, in addition to the clubbing and savagely bit her right breast nipple off and ate it and bit her buttocks. One had a hair spray can shoved up her vagina. Two of them died and three eventually recovered. Here was one of the worst types of sex offenders that I had studied, the lust murderer. He gets his kicks from paroxysmal, violent aggression.

The local Montgomery Ward outlet sold $5,000 worth of handguns in 3 days that week. Gun shops sold out of .25 caliber pistols and Mace. FSU was no longer an ivory tower, a haven from the outside world. It was just a place where fear and panic jostled aside calmness and introspection. Dr. Bassin organized a public seminar on “Why Violence” featuring his “Beast in Our Midst” lecture on the psychological theories of aggression. Four of the advanced graduate students helped him out with their talks on “Socio-biology,” “Media Contribution to Mass Murder,” “Violence Has been Prevalent in American History,” and “ Psychosomatic Ailments.” None of them were able to give the public an understanding of why these Chi Omega students had been so violently attacked, but they tried.

In a seemingly unrelated case, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach disappeared from Lake City (Florida) Junior High School on February 9th. On February 15th, a man was arrested in Pensacola for driving a stolen vehicle. By a stroke of luck, his identity as Theodore Bundy was established. Bundy was wanted by the FBI for the murders of 20 women in 4 states. He was returned to Tallahassee and questioned in connection with the Chi Omega and Kimberly Leach murders. Everything fit. He became the prime suspect. For a week, February 20 to 27, I questioned my criminology professors about what they thought about Ted Bundy and recorded their comments on my little pocket tape recorder.

I had expected to receive a great amount of insight and enlightenment into why a man, like Bundy, could do such horrendous acts from these learned people, but I was disappointed. None of my professors had an adequate explanation. Some of them generalized, and some were outright evasive. Either they did not know the sexual etiology or, if they did know, they were unwilling to tell what they knew for some reason. I wondered about this for many years, and I still do. Bundy was tried in the courts at great length and clearly found guilty. Many books, articles, movies, and TV shows have been made about him, and we are still unsure of why he did it. There is no consensus.

Fate had thrust a burning question, a red-hot coal, a ticking time bomb into my hands at a time when I was not prepared, but then, one is never really prepared for such an incident. It was my time of decision, I knew that the event had a purpose in my life. It helped me to make my decision. I would, I must, move forward and become an advocate of the strongest of the curative measures for the most heinous of mankind’s crimes. I would chance it. General Jimmy Doolittle said it so very well when he reported to President Truman with the recommendations of the Air Safety Study Commission: “The ‘calculated risk’ is an American concept which gives mobility to the whole social structure. The phrase simply means a willingness to embark deliberately on a course of action which offers prospective rewards outweighing its estimated dangers.”

Down through the years, several events after the Bundy murders and trials have served to maintain my interest in the sex offenses and the castration treatment. I will briefly describe some of these. I wrote a term paper on the subject and handed out several copies of it at the March 14, 1979, annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), along with a brief talk in Cleveland, Ohio.

In March, 1981, State Representative Frank Shurden of Oklahoma put in a bill for the castration of rapists, and it was commented on in the newspaper, The Oklahoma Observer, April 10, 1981, page 8. The law passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives, but was defeated in the Senate. This received national attention in the press. Israel Siev, publisher of Crucial Concepts, wrote to Representative Shurden and Shurden sent him a copy of my castration paper on July 7, 1981. Siev had been interested in population control and had published some of Laura Sabin’s information on castration. Sabin was the founder and director of the National Association for the Prevention of Rape by Castration. Siev later published four of my booklets and 17 of my articles from 1986 to 2002.

In November 1984, Judge C. Victor Pyle of Anderson, South Carolina, offered three rapists the choice between 30 years in prison or a suspended sentence if they would be castrated. This case received nation-wide publicity, and the men eventually demurred and were sent to prison. On December 19, 1989, Washington State Senator Gerald A. Saling announced a bill for castration of convicted rapists. This also received considerable media attention.

On June 5, 1989, I appeared on the nationwide Sally Jessy Raphael television broadcast, titled “Should Sex Offenders be Castrated?” With Israel Siev, Indiana State Representative Richard Worden, therapist Robert Freeman-Longo, a sex offender and a victim. Worden had tried to get a castration law passed and Freeman-Longo was a sex offender therapist who was against the use of the castration treatment. I appeared on the San Diego, California, television show, Inside San Diego on April 21, 1992, with a psychiatrist, Dr. Melvin Goldzbard, who had written an article debunking the castration treatment. I was also on the local Panama City, Florida, TV news program December 14, 1999, since I had appeared as an expert witness for Carl Roberts’ trial. Roberts was a sex offender who had himself castrated.

Beginning about July 1991, Dr. Alan H. Peterson, Director of the National Clearinghouse and Crime Commission (USCCCN) in Edison, New Jersey, became interested in the castration treatment, and I sent him some of my material. We exchanged information over the years, and he was able to sell a considerable number of my books. Dr. Peterson established a Web page on the subject of castration and re-published some of my writings. He has done much to spread good information on the use of this treatment, right up to the present day. Two or three later authors, who referenced my writings in their books, probably received their copies from Dr. Peterson’s distribution network – on the World-Wide Web.

The New York Times published an article March 10, 1991 (page A24L) about a repeat rapist, Stephen Allen Butler of Houston, Texas, asking for castration rather than a life sentence; Judge Michael McSpadden okayed the idea. On March 14, 1992, I gave a talk to the ACJS annual meeting at Pittsburgh, and handed out copies of my Is Castration Effective? paper. While searching the Rare Book room at the Library of Congress I discovered the report of a speech that Doctor William A. Hammond, retired Surgeon General of the Army, had given on March 14, 1892: Exactly 100 years to the day before my speech. Dr. Hammond said, “Castration is a powerful factor, probably the most powerful agent at our command, in so altering the mental organization of the wrongdoer as to remove him from the category of the criminal class. . . .” Hammond’s speech was written up in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), April 16, 1892, and again 100 years later in the June 17, 1992, JAMA, on page 3227. Hammond had closed his speech with the prophetic observation that castration was not likely to be adopted in his lifetime, but he was quite sure that it “. . . being as a step in the direction of humanity and efficiency will eventually be brought about.”

Other happenings in March of 1992, were widespread TV and newspaper coverage of the Butler case, and a doctor, Louis J. Girard of Houston, updated his article advocating castration in a book on Medical Specialties, dated March 17, 1992. Dr. Girard was also on some of the same TV shows as Judge McSpadden. Widespread publicity at the very time that I was being criticized for my talk on castration. Houston was a prophetic place for Judge McSpadden and Dr. Girard to advocate the castration treatment because it is also the home of the 4,517-year-old statute of Eannatum, a eunuch priest of Inanna, in the deMenil gallery.

In November 1993,my urologist discovered that I had a stage B2 prostate cancer, and since I had learned that orchiectomy was the cheapest, quickest, and most reliable treatment for this life-threatening disease, I told him to “nip ‘m off, doc.” I had made a survey of men castrated for prostate cancer by a notice published in the October 1991 Newsletter of the Patient Advocates for Advanced Cancer Treatment (PAACT) organization; the results showed satisfaction with the orchiectomy and only minor side effects. The orchiectomy was performed on me December 8, 1993, and I was pleased with the results. It saved my life. My PSA (cancer indicator) went down from 10.5 to 0.1 in a month’s time. I reported the fine results in a letter to the editors of The Lancet, a World-wide medical journal, and received inquiries from eight different countries.

On March 15, 1996, I gave my talk to the ACJS in Las Vegas, Nevada, and handed out 15 copies of my History of Castration book. About 20 states began consideration of the use of the castration treatment in 1996, and 5 of them enacted legislation for its use in 1997.

In March of 1997, 39 of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in an effort to join creatures they thought were riding on the spectacular Hale-Bopp comet which was closest to earth at that time. Eight of the men, including their leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, had been castrated. Comets are believed to be important givers and takers of life on earth: they provided the early volatiles of life (water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc.) and early impacts pruned down some of the ancient life forms. I was rewriting my chapter on “asceticism” at the same time. The coincidences of all the happenings in March become particularly mind boggling when we learn that for thousands of years the priests of the Great Mother religions castrated themselves during the annual Spring Festival from March 14 to March 27.

[Hash (imported)]

I think the specifics of this thread need to be reviewed again. Vic Cheney was trying to show the world the benefits of castration, but was rejected repeatedly. Who will take up his crusade? Hash

[Robby (imported)]

I think the specifics of this thread need to be reviewed again. Vic Cheney was trying to show the world the benefits of castration, but was rejected repeatedly. Who will take up his crusade? Hash

How about you Hash?

You thought the post was important enough to reply to the thread, how about you step up to the plate and volunteer your time, answer your own question.

Hope you see your efforts...

[Patient (imported)]

. .

. Vic Cheney was trying to show the world the benefits of castration, but was rejected repeatedly. .

.

It appears to me that Cheney was rejected at least partly because his logic is at best murky. While I don't doubt that castration can be beneficial, I don't believe that Cheney has made a persuasive argument for it. The Dok post is neither persuasive nor even coherent.

.

[kristoff]

It appears to me that Cheney was rejected at least partly because his logic is at best murky. While I don't doubt that castration can be beneficial, I don't believe that Cheney has made a persuasive argument for it. The Dok post is neither persuasive nor even coherent.

.

Most of his writings were incoherent, to say little of highly suspect in terms of research.

[SplitDik (imported)]

There are three reasons why castration as a cure for sexual predators is not well accepted.

1) In general people don't like to admit that they are biologically-driven organisms. We are really just animals with a thin veneer of rationality. But instead we want to believe we some sort of higher being that is capable of fully using Free Will to make decisions.

2) The legal system gets murky if we admit that certain people can't or unliley to be able to control themselves due to a biological condition. For centuries most sex crimes were considered fairly natural (boys will be boys), but our society has taken the other approach where now we are held responsible even for things we do while under the influence of drugs, drink or health problems. That may not be a bad approach, but does not allow for the cure then to be biologically based.

3) Women, especially feminists, have fairly successfully ingrained in people that "sex crimes" are really about power. Now they did that mostly because of #2, where historically sex crimes were not prosecuted very seriously, so they needed to do something to change society's treatment of such crimes. However, what they are ignoring is that violence, agression, and dominance are also all fueled by testosterone. Castration would probably reduce things like gang violence! So yes, rape IS about power, but power IS about testosterone.

The reason Victor Cheney isn't personally well received is that he gives off the impression of being insane. Despite the good post he gives above, most of his writings are rambling, repetitive and give off the feeling that he is obsessed with his subject matter.

[Uncle Flo (imported)]

I have read Cheney's books and that has convinced me that he is not to be taken seriously. At best his writings sound like a confused adolescent's ramblings. --FLO--