When opponents of legalized same sex marriage and socially normalizing homosexuality ask the question: what’s next? proponents scoff at their warnings of a slippery slope into doing the same for bestiality and pedophilia. However, the claims of the slippery slope were vindicated when psychologists argued that pedophilia was a sexual orientation, and activists began to lobby for “equal rights” (sound familiar) for zoophiles. Now academics at a conference at Cambridge are arguing that it’s perfectly normal — and natural — for men to be sexually attracted to and aroused by children.
(Telegraph) — “Paedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males,” said the presentation. “At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children … Normal males are aroused by children.”
Some yellowing tract from the Seventies or early Eighties, era of abusive celebrities and the infamous PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange? No. Anonymous commenters on some underground website? No again.
The statement that paedophilia is “natural and normal” was made not three decades ago but last July. It was made not in private but as one of the central claims of an academic presentation delivered, at the invitation of the organisers, to many of the key experts in the field at a conference held by the University of Cambridge.
Other presentations included “Liberating the paedophile: a discursive analysis,” and “Danger and difference: the stakes of hebephilia.”
Hebephilia is the sexual preference for children in early puberty, typically 11 to 14-year-olds.
[…]
In other academic quarters, with rather fewer excuses, that lack of understanding appears to be reasserting itself. The Cambridge University conference, on July 4-5 last year, was about the classification of sexuality in the DSM, a standard international psychiatric manual used by the police and courts.
After a fierce battle in the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which produces it, a proposal to include hebephilia as a disorder in the new edition of the manual has been defeated. The proposal arose because puberty in children has started ever earlier in recent decades and as a result, it was argued, the current definition of paedophilia – pre-pubertal sexual attraction – missed out too many young people.
Ray Blanchard, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, who led the APA’s working group on the subject, said that unless some other way was found of encompassing hebephilia in the new manual, that was “tantamount to stating that the APA’s official position is that the sexual preference for early pubertal children is normal”.
Prof Blanchard was in turn criticised by a speaker at the Cambridge conference, Patrick Singy, of Union College, New York, who said hebephilia would be abused as a diagnosis to detain sex offenders as “mentally ill” under US “sexually violent predator” laws even after they had completed their sentences.
But perhaps the most controversial presentation of all was by Philip Tromovitch, a professor at Doshisha University in Japan, who stated in a presentation on the “prevalence of paedophilia” that the “majority of men are probably paedophiles and hebephiles” and that “paedophilic interest is normal and natural in human males”.
Once you’ve used activist vocabulary to defend same sex marriage and the normalcy of homosexuality, you’ve essentially argued in favor of any sexual desire. LGBT activists have argued that homosexuality is something you’re born with; something you can’t change; feels natural and have always felt that way and that disapproval is degrading, dehumanizing, and makes you a second-class citizen. But anyone can apply these qualifiers to any sexual desire.
LGBT activists have argued their case in a very particular way. They’ve opened the door to any group of people who claim their sexual niche is similar in biological nature to the LGBT community. They can now use of their line of reasoning of normal, natural, and inborn. If the reasons to accept and embrace homosexuality are legitimate, then the same reasons must also be legitimate for pedophilia and zoophilia, especially now that academics and psychological professionals are on their side.
Sifting Reality 
I’ve been pointing this out for years and years. I even had a guest column in the local Newspaper a bit over a decade ago, pointing out that pedophilia is just another “sexual orientation” so if we approve one perverse “orientation” we have to approve them all.
You’re right Glenn, given the line of argumentation the LGBT activists used, they have given no room to deny or disapprove of any sex related inclination with any consistency.
Why do you have to approve them all, Glenn? That argument doesn’t even make sense.
I can think of at least one really big difference between gay sex and bestiality and pedophilia/hebephilia. I bet you might be surprised to know that every reasonable and informed person who supports gay relationships uses this really big difference to be the dividing line between legally condoned sex and criminal sex.
Can you guess what it is Glenn?
Because I bet you can. It just seems convenient right now to not bring this really big thing up, because it totally ruins your unsubstantiated argument…….
George. Never is the LGBT argument justified with consent. It is always justified with claiming it is genetic, it is an immutable attribute, and everything else any other group can assert. IF homosexuality is to be embraced because of its inherentness, all other rejections of other “orientations” is arbitrary.
Or is the argument that it is “natural” really based on responding to the Christian/religious argument that it is “unnatural”?
I think you are trying to focus in on one trivially true argument that people make and claim it is the only argument they have.
Besides, I just justified it with consent- so you can’t claim it is “never” justified that way.
The LGBT use of natural is that it’s found in nature, in multiple species of animals. Which, if they are not offering it as a justification or as a reason to accept homosexuality, is as meaningless as saying grass is green.
I don’t disagree. The argument that it is “natural” is trivially true. It is meaningless. Intra-species killing is also “natural”, and we don’t condone it.
The argument has most regularly been used to answer the religious claim that it is unnatural. It is a rebuttal more than an argument.
But even as a rebuttal, what is it they mean by natural?
The Christian usage of unnatural is that it is a behavior contrary to the intended purpose of sexual interaction, which is even true in a secular biological sense. Our sexual organs are quite obviously intended for opposite sex interaction.
George, t
As John pointed out, the “logic” used to justify permitting and sanctioning homosexual behavior can apply to any sexual “orientation.”
Consent has nothing to do with it. Why is consent needed? With animals you don’t have them consent to be pets or perform work or even to be eaten. With children, why can’t they consent? What moral foundation makes it wrong for a child to say it is okay to have sex with them?
“Children are a disenfranchised minority. They should have the right to express themselves sexually – which means that they may or may not have contact with people older than themselves.” Larry Constantine, family therapist, Time magazine, 9/7/81
Age of consent tends to be arbitrary, because there are countries where as young as 12 can consent, and in many Islamic countries a man can marry as young as they want – even Mohammed consummated his marriage with a 9-year-old.
Your whole worldview has no moral foundation to make such judgments as to what is or is not proper sexual activity. You can’t logically justify one sexual perversion without justifying all with the same criteria.
The reason consent is irrelevant to this discussion is because consent is not a factor used by LGBT activists in order to lobby for social acceptance and “equal rights”. The very foundation of their logic is that their sexual identity is genetic, natural, and immutable…The very logic now being used by zoophiles and pedophiles, and now academics and the psychological community.
Glenn,
If you can’t answer “Why can’t children consent?”, then I totally understand why morally reprehensible scum like you need a God to tell them what is right and what is wrong.
I’m glad you have an imaginary friend feeding you your morality, because you obviously can’t be a good human being without it.
George,
It is in YOUR worldview that has no basis for saying children can’t consent to sex. My worldview has the correct and moral response. It is your worldview which is arbitrary and based on personal opinions, so one person’s opinion is as good as another’s.
I have no idea why you would call me a “morally reprehensible scum”, since you have no standard by which to make such judgments.
Ahh, the laughable old “atheists can’t ground morality” trope.
I’m not the one who asked why children can’t consent, Glenn. Maybe we all saw your true colors shine for one brief moment in time.
If I could stop you from raping young children, I would do it in a heartbeat.
George,
You are being intentionally stupid. And your attacks on me claiming I rape children are entirely unwarranted.
Ahh, the laughable old “atheists can’t ground morality” trope.
It is indeed laughable, because atheist DON’T have moral standards and yet continually make moral judgements base only on personal opinions. You can’t live your own worldview!!
My point is that you are demanding consent. My question is, with YOUR worldview, why must children consent? As Bubba pointed out, they don’t consent for a lot of things we do to them.
We who are Christians have a reason – sex is only allowed within the marital union of husband and wife (you know, one from each gender), and one of the purposes being the begetting of children, which means the man can marry only a female who has passed puberty — i.e., a young woman and not a child.
YOUR worldview has no such morals. It is your opinion vs someone else’ opinion – so who wins? Majority? Those who have power?
You can claim morality all you want, but you atheists HAVE to borrow it from the Judeo-Christian worldview. After all, evolutionism has no morality.
George:
There are a whole host of decisions that adults make for children without their consent, starting with the decision to bring them into the world, either deliberately or at least engaging in behavior that can result in pregnancy.
(If you believe abortion should be legal, you evidently believe that adults have the right to murder children, at least in utero, with no concept of acquiring consent or applying simple due process.)
Whether a child gets vaccinated or whether a child is given a religious upbringing are BOTH momentous decisions made without the child’s consent.
Richard Dawkins rather famously wrote, “I am persuaded that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”
(Dawkins also infamously theorized that he and his fellow schoolboys experienced no lasting harm from the “mild touching up” from a pedophile at his boarding school. I’d wonder how you would correct the renowned thinker.)
I personally think inculcating Dawkins’ hatred of orthodoxy would be abusive, and it’s possible at least one of us right, and yet society does (and probably should) permit such decisions regarding child-rearing.
I certainly believe that sex with children is immoral, but I believe Glenn is right, and I believe you’re missing his point: he doesn’t disagree with you in denouncing such behavior, but neither of us can see the rationale for why you draw the line where you do.
Why is consent crucial for sex but not other momentous and potentially devastating decisions?
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I’m not sure that animals cannot give consent to interspecies sexual activity. There are plenty of dogs that get entirely too friendly with a human leg or two, and there are cases where dolphins commit near sexual assault against women in their presence.
But even supposing that consent is impossible, I ask you to consider all the other things that we do to animals without their consent:
– We kill them, sometimes as pest control or merely for sport.
– We eat their flesh.
– We wear their skins.
– We use them as beasts of burden, as pack animals or animals to be ridden or used to pull a plow.
– We engage in animal eugenics, through selective breeding of traits that we want and by effectively sterilizing animals that we don’t want to breed.
Even a wholly vegetarian society would still milk cows and goats without their consent and harvest honey from bees without their consent.
Even a wholly VEGAN society would be guilty of displacing innumerable animals simply by practicing agriculture.
The one and only way to minimize our disrupting animals’ lives without their consent — MINIMIZE it, not eliminate it — is to live as vegan savages, foraging for our every meal.
Intimate relations with large livestock probably results in no serious harm to the animal, and it certainly results in less harm than the cow being killed and butchered.
So why is sheep-bothering immoral but not sheep-barbecuing?