Strike The Root

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

  Making Pedophilia Acceptable: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Tolerance

 by Steven Yates

 I.

Anyone doubting that academia is in free fall need only reflect on a little-reported event from a couple of months ago.  Penn State University sponsored a conference on women’s health and invited a keynote speaker who advocates the idea that pedophilia isn’t always harmful to children.  The speaker, Patrick Califia-Rice, describes “himself” as a “transgendered bisexual person.”  “He” has written books with names like Macho Sluts and Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex.

Just recently another author, Judith Levine, wrote a book with the title Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex.  The University of Minnesota Press has just published the book, which sports an introduction penned by none other than Dr. Joycelyn Elders.  The promotional literature for the book uses the now-familiar Orwellian approach condemning the “sexual politics of fear.”

In other words, a handful of extreme radical “sex-perts” both inside and outside academia is, little by little, setting a course that will make pedophilia acceptable.  To a certain kind of academic mind, this is cutting-edge stuff.

Actually, the movement to normalize pedophilia is at least three years old.  One of Levine’s sources is a 1999 study called the Rind Report (named for Bruce Rind who directed it).  There was huge flap over this report when it appeared in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. Entitled “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples,” its most significant conclusion was that some sexual liaisons between adults and children were beneficial.  It rejected the then-universal notion that pedophilia is a form of child abuse.  Further study, partly in response to Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s personal crusade, exposed the report’s pseudoscience.  Its methods illustrated perfectly how easy it is to mislead with statistics.  The study was repudiated by a thoroughly embarrassed APA leadership.  Now, of course, Levine is citing it as authoritative despite its having been shown to be pseudoscientific.

In other words, while the media has a field day with its coverage of pedophile priests, we are seeing the slow emergence of an academically respectable brand of what might be called something nice and euphemistic like “adult-minor sexual studies” in a few years.  Much of the slow and very gradual push for the normalizing of pedophilia is coming from—who else?—radical homosexuals (groups such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association).  The APA, of course, has a history of rejecting pedophilia as a disorder.  It once rejected homosexuality as abnormal. 

II.

Some of us warned that this sort of thing could happen.

Over 12 years ago, we observed that government-sponsored affirmative action programs were getting jobs for unqualified people (most of them women) in a wide spectrum of institutions, undermining quality control, and setting the stage for the long, slow, tortuous decline of every institution they touched.   

By the late 1980s radical feminism had surfaced.  These people weren’t doing tame and boring things like demanding equal pay for equal work.  They were saying that consensual sex is a form of rape.  While proclaiming themselves an “oppressed minority,” grown women and professors dealt with their critics by disrupting meetings—at national conferences, no less.  I witnessed one such event in 1987.  Others I merely heard about. 

Then, during the period 1992-94, homosexuality was “normalized” —something that would never have occurred to the activists, federal judges and educational bureaucrats who stuck us with affirmative action.  I had to rewrite part of my book Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) to accommodate the expansion of civil rights concepts to include gays and lesbians as “protected groups.”  I once asked sarcastically, “What’s next?  Pedophilia?”  The query was dismissed as alarmist and inflammatory.  

Well, folks, “pedophilia studies” is almost here.  Coming soon to a university near you. 

III.

The reason is not hard to figure out.  Today’s government-sponsored universities (and university presses) have become virtually medieval institutions, intellectually inbred fiefdoms functioning more like churches than educational arenas.  Their catechism has expanded from radical feminism and affirmative action to includes the moral equivalence of all “lifestyle choices,” protected by bromides about diversity and tolerance.  The only absolute is the denial of absolutes; the only judgment is nonjudgmentalism:  all encapsulated in the popular saying, “Whatever floats your boat.”

Now, to appease radical homosexuals, this catechism has begun opening the door to “normalizing” sexual relations between adults and children.  Those of us who began sounding those warnings 12 years or more ago have been vindicated—even though most all vocal critics of affirmative action, radical feminism, special rights for homosexuals, etc., were excommunicated from the academic church years ago.  The institutions that excommunicated us, however, are showing themselves to be not just intellectually, morally and educationally bankrupt, but as bona fide public health menaces! 

Here is the problem with universal tolerance:  How far does it go?  The only answer seems to be:  as far as the advocates want to take it.  The vapid relativism and nonjudgmentalism, so popular with the brand of intellectual who thrives in today’s mainstream, is the cultural equivalent of a wrecking ball.  Once started, there is no stopping it.  There becomes an urge among radical academics in particular, protected by tenure, to push the envelope further and further.  The impulse to “shock the bourgeoisie” is alive and well, although it has gone well past cultural Marxism. 

In 1994 one could ask, “What’s next, pedophilia?”  But in 1994, who would have thought that the Boy Scouts would be under attack by a well-organized (and financed) homosexual lobby for not allowing openly homosexual men to be scout leaders?  Who would have thought that groups like United Way would cave in, and that a sizable segment of the public would go along? 

Homosexuals wanting into the Boy Scouts?  Isn’t this just a little bit suspicious.  Isn’t it just a little bit suggestive of what this contingent really wants? 

What are we supposed to ask now?  What’s next, cannibalism?  Are we to raise specters of author Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) being perhaps two decades ahead of his time for having given us a cultural icon of the future, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. 

Don’t say it can’t happen!  We cannot tell how far deviancy will have been defined down by, say, 2010?  We cannot be sure that private organizations won’t be pressured into admitting homosexual pedophiles into leadership roles or be targeted for destruction by the tolerance police. 

Is it possible to stop the wrecking ball at least in government universities and university presses?  Only if those with the power and clout to do so—e.g., on boards of trustees and in alumni organizations—will somehow acquire the guts to start asking the right questions.  They will have to start speaking out against the religious ideology of universal tolerance and question the idea that all “lifestyle choices” are equal.  They will have to look at what liberals like to call root causes, which in this case go back to the hiring of incompetents courtesy of affirmative action programs. 

Then they will have to weather the heat.  Any board of trustees or alumni association doing this can expect to be excoriated by faculties nationwide and hung out to dry in the dominant media.  They will be called every name in the book—this is how leftists operate.  We will hear the usual noise about “academic freedom.”  My guess is, none of the official groups will do it.  Not even if it means pulling their institutions back from the brink of utter insanity.

The alternative is to build up new educational institutions, making use of the Internet and whatever other resources are available.  Those involved in the rapidly growing home schooling movement have a head start—but the educational and cultural secession home schooling represents will have to be extended to college—and beyond.  It won’t be easy—it is almost impossible to earn one’s living today without at least some dealings with the dominant culture and its government.  But if we want something resembling the civilization bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents to survive, we don’t have much of a choice.