Posted on 04/16/2002 12:29:02 PM PDT by FormerLib
Back in 1981, an astute writer at Time magazine (that would be me) noticed that pro-pedophilia arguments were catching on among some sex researchers and counselors. Larry Constantine, a Massachusetts family therapist and sex-book writer, said children "have the right to express themselves sexually, which means that they may or may not have contact with people older than themselves." Wardell Pomeroy, coauthor of the original Kinsey reports, said incest "can sometimes be beneficial." A Minnesota sociologist included pedophile sex among "intimate human relations [that] are important and precious." There were more.
My article caused some commotion, so budding apologists for child molesters' lib ran for cover. Since then, frank endorsements of adult-child sex have become rare. But pro-pedophilia (or anti-antipedophilia) rationalizations of the early '80s are still in play. Among them: Children are sexual beings with the right to pick their partners; the quality of relationships, not age, determines the value of sex; most pedophiles are gentle and harmless; the damage of pedophilia comes mostly from the shocked horror communicated by parents, not from the sex itself.
For example, take the controversy over the new sex book Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex . The mini-uproar comes from the fact that the author, a journalist named Judith Levine, recycles some of the old arguments that play down the dangers of pedophilia. (The book has a foreword by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, so don't say you weren't warned.) Levine says pedophiles are rare and often harmless. The real danger, she thinks, is not the pedophile but parents and parental figures who project their fears and their own lust for young flesh onto the mythically dangerous child molester. One section carries the headline "The enemy is us."
Priestly lapse. Levine opposes incest and adult-child sex that involves authorities with power over kids. That would seem to include predatory priests, but Levine thought this was a good time to endorse some priest-boy sex. She told Mark O'Keefe of the Newhouse papers that "yes, conceivably, absolutely" a boy's sexual relationship with a priest could be positive.
Harmful to Minors is a classic example of how disorder in the intellectual world leaks into the popular culture. In this case, I think the leakage comes from the Rind study, which caused a national furor after it appeared in 1998 in the Psychological Bulletin, a publication of the American Psychological Association. The study's conclusion that child sex abuse "does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis" was the highest-level endorsement yet of the no-harm rationalization for child sexual abuse. Understandably, the Rind study is the new bible of pedophiles and their groups.
The study also called for a sweeping change in language used to discuss child sexual abuse (a term the study rejected as judgmental). This delighted the pedophile movement, which favors terms like "intergenerational intimacy." One critic of Rind mockingly asked whether the word rape should now be changed to "unilaterally consenting adult-adult sex."
The Rind study was a meta-analysis, an academic term for noodling around with other people's old studies instead of conducting your own. Meta-analyses notoriously leave lots of room for omissions and arbitrary decisions to somehow fit together different studies with different standards and definitions.
The major point about the Rind study is not whether it was intellectually shoddy (though I think it was) but that it shifted the national discussion several degrees toward the normalization of pedophilia. It will take a great deal more to convince the American people that tots have the right to select adult sex partners. But the terrain has been changed. Instead of virtually all Americans versus the pedophiles, the Rind team (who grandly compare their case to the travails of Galileo) invited us to see it as scientific and fair-minded people who believe in openness and dialogue versus meddling, antiscientific, right-wing moralists. It invites the left and the center to view antipedophilia traditionalists as the real problem, just as Levine says "the enemy is us," not pedophiles.
Here's an example of the terrain change. For more than 20 years, pedophile advocate Tom O'Carroll has been a stigmatized outsider. Now he has been invited to address an international sex convention in Paris on the subject of privacy rights of pedophiles and their child partners (or targets). His pro-pedophilia book is on a course list at Cambridge University. O'Carroll is surprised and delighted by his new stature and thinks the Rind study brought it about. Intellectually respectable pedophilia? What's next?
That'll surely calm my fears! How's by you?
This is my entire political philosophy in a nutshell.
Honestly? No, I don't. But you'll understand why as I didn't turn 10 until December of '81. ;-)
But things have changed -- life expectancy is higher, marriage age is higher, and in the Colonial era, the intentions of such men were honorable.
The only question as to what would happen to them if they did would be how many pieces would their respective members be torn into.
NAMBLA, however, did march in "Gay Pride" parades until it was realized that this generated bad press. Now they participate without their banner.
The free speech envisioned by the first ammendment was primarily political, whereas today the entire argument has flipped. You can suppress political speech all you want, but not advocates of pedophilia.
Really though, we are a culture in decline. Some things the law can't really deal with. In times past, making such outrageously evil statements earned you an appointment with an angry mob and a rope. The authorities often looked the other way because the values being enforced where quite general. (Of course, this phenomenon is not generally a force for good.)
Today such evil is not just tolerated, but promoted. The animals making these demonic suggestions are not just safe from harm, they have government jobs paid for by taxpayers. We are subsidizing their sickness in every way.
What needs to be done may not be suggested. We have civilized ourselves to the point of defenselessness.
As documented in The Overhauling of Straight America
"A media campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which reduce the mainstream’s sense of threat, which lower its guard, and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep a very low profile in gay commercials and other public presentation, while sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability, such as NAMBLA, must play no part at all in such a campaign; suspected child-molesters will never look like victims).
You'll notice that Kirk & Pill didn't say that NAMBLA was unacceptable.
But what we have her on this thread is a bunch of different things being lumped together and mis-understood.
Pedophilia < > ephebophilia < > bestiality < > incest < > pederasty < > homosexuality.
Lumping them together and branding them equally evil does nothing for us.
Lumping them together and branding them equally evil does nothing for us.
Sorry, but I believe that you are quite wrong here. Going back to the days of Stonewall, you'll see that the most vocal proponents of the homosexual agenda also target the reducing or elimination of age of consent laws. You may not like facing the truth but Homosexuality leads to ephebophilia, pedophilia, and pederasty. Incest and bestiality are not a direct link but, being Biblically based morals, how long will it be before law against such are scoffed at as religious mores that infringe on individual liberties?
Actually, PETA will probably prevent bestiality from going very far. Guess we'll just have to wait to see if any academics start publishing books about how animals can give consent!
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