Michael Jackson had civil rights...just like you

I was very impressed by Duane Booth's sobering article on the death of Michael Jackson. With a title like "A most important civil right died with Michael Jackson" it was hard not to look beyond the cover. Click on the excerpt below to read Mr Booth's entire article:

Among the tributes, accolades and genuine love shown for Jackson in memorium, there were choruses of people who absolutely refused to view him as anything but a monster or a freak show. It struck me as terribly sad that at one moment where we mark the start of a civil rights movement and in a year when another such movement marked its most crowning achievement with Barack Obama’s inauguration one of the most fundamental civil rights to which we are all entitled as citizens of democracies has all but vanished [italics added].

Any remaining threads of presumption of innocence died on June 25, 2009 at 2:25 p.m. [italics added]

Many people remarked about how it was inappropriate to mourn a man who “molested children” and destroyed the lives of so many young boys through his predatory ways. The trouble is, never once has it ever been proven that Jackson ever molested a child. Only two 13-year-old boys ever took Jackson to court - once in a civil trial in 1993 and once in a criminal trial a decade later. The civil trial was settled without any finding of wrongdoing and begged the question that if the case not about money, why would it not have been pursued criminally? Simple. Not enough evidence. You don’t have to prove guilt in a civil trial. The parents of the first child were well known to have financial troubles and there was mounting evidence that this lawsuit was nothing more than a way to tap a very naive man who clearly had difficulties functioning as an adult for large sums of money.