Editing Satanic Panic (section)

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Amazingly, during the 1980s, the tabletop gaming community seemed to actually just ''take'' this shit. For a significant portion of the '80s, the prevailing attitude was one of apologetic self-censorship, striving to prove that they were moral people by passive resistance. However, behind the scenes, angry players were going on the attack; writers began publishing investigations into the seedier side of many anti-D&D big names in [[Dragon Magazine]]. The academic credentials of Thomas Radecki and Patricia Pulling were debunked. Numerous links were forged with academics and government agencies studying youth suicide and academic publications on gaming were collated and made available to gamers wanting to investigate and/or debunk anti-RPG claims.

Gamers began to coordinate lobbying campaigns by phone, letters, public forums, the burgeoning internet and word of mouth as a means of informing the media, law enforcement, educators and local government about RPGs and their role in youth culture. Links were forged with the Skeptics' Society and other secularist organizations who had been independently questioning the existence of "Satanic ritual abuse". Articles were written in Skeptics Society journals and psychology journals, and law enforcement officers and criminologists, such as Robert Hicks, began to debunk and expose the religious origins of anti-gaming claims and question their relevance in law enforcement initiatives. Perhaps the greatest blow to the credibility of B.A.D.D, Patricia Pulling and Thomas Radecki was the publication of Michael Stackpole’s “Pulling Report” in 1989. This report severely criticized the ethics and methodology of anti-RPG campaigners, provided conclusive evidence that the suicide rate was '''lower''' amongst roleplayers, and was widely distributed amongst law enforcement, educational bodies, game manufacturers, gamers, and government agencies.

Outside of the gaming sphere, the larger "moral majority" movement grossly overreached by trying to go after glam rock, with Tipper Gore (VP Al Gore's wife) famously dragging Dee Snider into congressional hearings about obscene music, only for the likes of John Denver and Frank Zappa to criticize the movement for its brazen disregard for artistic and civil liberty.  

The cultural zeitgeist changed.  No longer was it a movement defending culture and children.  It was unmasked as a bunch of heckling protestant busybodies who hate fun. 

Thanks to years of work by D&D's defenders and other skeptics, the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" phenomenon being exposed as equal parts mass hysteria and con artistry, and the recurring failure of its attackers to actually win any legal battles or fail to avoid being debunked, the public grew out of it. Some people tried to keep the fire of it going - in 1988, authorities chose to focus on Chris Pritchard's being a D&D player as the "reason" for his murdering his stepfather, rather than his long history of mutual antagonism and his heavy drug and alcohol use. But years of moral hysteria with no actual payoff had robbed BADD and its fellow shitheads of any significant standing from anyone beyond the fundamentalists and the paranoid. The steady stream of actual intelligence revealed that most of the witnesses giving "testimony" to the abuse were remembering things that never happened and were also logically impossible, such as mass human sacrifices in an area where such activity could not possibly have gone unnoticed. In other words, they were coerced into giving false evidence by overzealous prosecutors at best and at worst were outright lying about the abuse they supposedly witnessed in order to get their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. In 1989, an absolute fuck by the name of William Schnoebelen published a pair of articles that claimed D&D was a New Age Satanist front to steal people away from Christianity; by then, most people looked at Schnoebelen's claims that D&D could actually summon demons and work real magic (and the fact he was being bankrolled by Jack Chick), and dismissed him for the crank that he was.