Lest we forget, it was far back as '72 that a number of uh, "diverse," McGovernite CA. delegates were pushing for lowering the age of consent.
An excerpt from "Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered - The taboo against sex with children continues to erode By Mary Eberstadt:
"...For elsewhere in the public square, the defense of adult-child sex—more accurately, man-boy sex—is now out in the open. Moreover, it is on parade in a number of places—therapeutic, literary, and academic circles; mainstream publishing houses and journals and magazines and bookstores—where the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently have been not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to prosecution...
...Plainly, as the record even then showed, a surprising number of voices were willing to rise up on behalf of what advocates refer to as "man-boy love," or what most people call sexual abuse..."
For one thing, no sustained public challenges have arisen over other primal taboos. Even more telling, if nihilism and nihilism alone were the explanation for public attempts to legitimize sex with boy children, then we would expect the appearance of related attempts to legitimize sex with girl children; and these we manifestly do not see. Nobody, but nobody, has been allowed to make the case for girl pedophilia with the backing of any reputable institution. Publishing houses are not putting out acclaimed anthologies and works of fiction that include excerpts of men having sex with young girls. Psychologists and psychiatrists are not competing with each other to publish studies demonstrating that the sexual abuse of girls is inconsequential; or, indeed, that it ought not even be defined as "abuse."
Two examples from the last few weeks will suffice to show the double standard here. In the November 12 New York Times Book Review, a writer found it unremarkable to observe of his subject, biographer Gavin Lambert, that when "Lambert was a schoolboy of 11, a teacher initiated him [into homosexuality], and he 'felt no shame or fear, only gratitude.'" It is unimaginable that New York Times editors would allow a reviewer to describe an 11-year-old girl being sexually "initiated" by any adult (in that case, "initiation" would be called "sexual abuse"). Similarly, in mid-December the New York Times Magazine delivered a cover piece about gay teenagers in cyberspace which was so blasé about the older men who seek out boys in chat rooms that it dismissed those potential predators as mere "oldies." Again, one can only imagine the public outcry had the same magazine published a story taking the same so-what approach to online solicitation, off-line trysts, and pornography "sharing" between anonymous men and underage girls.
No: As was true four years ago, contemporary efforts to rationalize, legitimize, and justify pedophilia are about boys. Forget about abstractions like nihilism; what the record shows is something more prosaic. The reason why the public is being urged to reconsider boy pedophilia is that this "question," settled though it may be in the opinions and laws of the rest of the country, is demonstrably not yet settled within certain parts of the gay rights movement...
"...For shocking though it may have been to the general public, "Meta-Analytic" was in fact only the latest in a very long series of professional attempts to revise therapeutic conceptions of boy pedophilia, attempts of which most lay readers remain quite ignorant.
Professionals in the field know better. Fifteen years ago, for example, in his careful research volume Child Sexual Abuse, noted authority David Finkelhor was already drawing attention to the "body of opinion and research [that] has emerged in recent years which is trying hard to vindicate homosexual pedophilia."
One book only recently available in the "gay studies" section of a Borders in downtown D.C., for example, is a peculiar classic of a sort entitled Male Inter-Generational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological, and Legal Perspectives, edited by the aforementioned pedophile icon Edward Brongersma and two colleagues. This book, according to one of its jacket endorsements, "shed[s] critical light on the broad spectrum of man-boy love and its place in ancient and contemporary societies." In other words, it is a series of briefs using scientistic polemics in an effort to rationalize the sexual molestation of boy children.
...What gives XY its unprecedented niche is that here, for the first time, is a mass-market magazine "officially targeted toward 12-29 year old young gay men," every issue of which, as one admiring journalist puts it, "features scantily clad young men in several photo spreads and on the cover." Then there is the non-photo content. The first issue was stamped "Underage." Another issue included a sympathetic pro-and-con interview with a prominent member of NAMBLA. An article in another issue was titled "F— the Age of Consent." There is also a smattering of self-help that can only make minors easier to find—for example, advice about what kids should do if their parents install a filtering system that prevents them from reaching gay cyberspace (answer: get around it).
...A few proclaim boys to be sexual fair game. Influential others disavow pedophilia per se, but tolerate its advocacy on grounds of political solidarity with persecuted groups. Still others, in the relatively new development noted earlier, appear to have opted for a kind of anti-anti-pedophilia, according to which the "real" problems for the movement are somehow Dr. Laura and the religious right, rather than the facts to which such critics draw attention: e.g., that efforts are being made to destigmatize the sexual exploitation of boy children; or that positive portrayals of "inter-generational sex," which are extremely rare in the rest of the culture, are not rare in gay literature and journalism...