Academics defend pedophilia

Are pedophiles the next campus "victim" group? A tiny but vocal group of academics are working to make the answer yes. New York University Press's Lavender Culture calls to demolish the "archaic" notions of "the innocence of children" and "the potential harmfulness of sex." To do this, an essayist in the text advises readers to "proselytize" to "young gay people with the message that ... they should get out of their families as soon as they can." The danger of not doing this, the author explains, is having "future generations of gay people who wait until their twenties before they start to live."

The essay seeks the repeal of "repressive, ageist legislation." How did this rant against age of consent laws wind up in an ostensibly scholarly publication? Since the piece cites famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, New York University Press transforms it from screed to scholarship. The piece claims, for instance, that "the myth that children are not sexual beings ... is maintained, after all, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary ... Infants in their cribs have orgasms - Kinsey documented them in babies less than a year old."

UC-Santa Cruz Professor Gayle Rubin calls the government's crackdown on child molesters "a savage and undeserved witch hunt." Intolerance of pedophilia, she claims, has "more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics." Rubin advances these opinions in the first essay of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, where she writes: "boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth." Rubin, too, cites Kinsey's scholarship. She writes, "Alfred Kinsey approached the study of sex with the same uninhibited curiosity he had previously applied to examining species of wasp. His scientific detachment gave his work a refreshing neutrality."

In a piece once used in a Cornell University course called "The Sexual Child," Pat Califia writes, "Culturally induced schizophrenia allows parents to make sentimental speeches about the fleeting innocence of childhood and the happiness of years unbroken by carnal lust - and exhaust themselves policing the sex lives of their children. Children are celibate because their parents prevent them from playing with other little kids or adults." [...]

Actually, Kinsey didn't verify anything. Child molesters with whom he corresponded with supposedly "documented the existence of sexual capacity in children." Kinsey took them at their word, and dressed up their findings as his, as "science." Aversion to child-adult sexual contacts, Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male maintained, is "culturally conditioned." Pedophiles don't harm children in most cases, the Indiana University professor argued, but the "hysteria" caused by police, parents, and others in authority does. According to Kinsey's pedophiles, who became "trained observers" in his reports, signs of "orgasm" for children as young as infants included "violent cries," "loss of color," and an "abundance of tears." This wasn't science. This was perverts rationalizing their criminal behavior. [...]

source: Article 'Academics Defend Pedophilia' by Daniel J. Flynn; www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/9/23/94446.shtml; 23 September 2004