The arguments made by Milo Yiannouplos (in a recently released and quite graphic video), that pedophilia is not what you think it is, that sexual contact between men and under-age teen-age boys is not wrong but a safe way to help young homosexuals come of age, are nothing new. According to a 2014 New York Times op-ed essay by Margo Kaplan, the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) “defines pedophilia as an intense and recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, and a disorder if it causes a person “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty” or if the person acts on his interests.” She agrees with this definition and argues that there are non-practicing pedophiles. She argues that it is a neurological disorder, that therapy and medication can help a pedophile control his impulses. She wants to bring pedophilia out of the closet so it can be treated. She writes, a “pedophile should be held responsible for his conduct — but not for the underlying attraction.”
For those with personal or historical memories that extend beyond that last two weeks, this pattern should be familiar. A century ago, homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a sin. Socially it was treated as a crime. Fifty years ago, however, was treated as a mental illness. In a 1958 column in Ebony magazine, writing as a pastor and counselor, Martin Luther King (1929–1968) described homosexuality as unnatural and an indicator of mental illness requiring psychiatric care. He rejected the notion that homosexuality is innate (“I was born this way”), as a culturally acquired habit, and counseled this boy to get to the root of his problem in order to overcome it. Then, in 1973 (44 years ago), the therapeutic set removed homosexuality as a psychological disorder from the DSM. The way the therapeutic establishment has spoken about homosexuality is analogous to the language used about alcoholism. In the 1920s alcoholism was said to be an “allergy.” This was the scientific equivalent of phrenology. By the time I encountered AA and the alcohol treatment establishment in the 1970s, orthodox dogma said it is a disease. It is a diagnosis in search of evidence. Crohn’s is a disease. Alcoholism is a way to describe addiction to alcohol that occurs because of abuse. Unhappy people abuse alcohol as a way to “self-medicate” (as they say in the alcoholism treatment business). Not only is there no evidence for alcoholism as a disease, alcoholism treatment centers recognize this by offering group therapy and counseling for the underlying issues that prompted the alcoholic to abuse alcohol initially. No one treats Crohn’s with group therapy. So it is with homosexuality. The way we have spoken about over the last century reflects a similar process: rationalizations for deviant behavior. To be sure, that behavior is often rooted in a childhood abuse (e.g., an alcoholic parent, parental neglect, sexual abuse etc—in the video Yiannoupolos suggests that he was sexually molested by a Roman priest) but the evidence that homosexuality is “innate” is just as weak as it was when Dr King rejected that explanation in 1958. As Dennis McFadden summarized in 2012, there is no unambiguous evidence that homosexuality is innate and not learned. The defenders of homosexuality and same-sex marriage seem largely to have given up on the argument that homosexuality is natural and have increasingly conceded that it is a choice, which the choice they defend on the grounds that affection and consent are all that matter. In 2015, a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Obergefell that marriage is fundamentally an expression of affection between consenting adults and therefore it is unconstitutional for states to forbid it.
All that remains is to manufacture consent by re-defining it and that process is under way. This is, if you will, child’s play. Any moderately creative undergraduate freshman can deconstruct consent: “Consent is a social construct that is understood variously in different cultures. New studies suggest that children are capable of signally consent at an earlier stage than we hitherto thought” and so on. We are witnessing this process and trajectory with pedophilia. The HB has been keeping track of it for you:
- If It’s In The News Is It Still A Slippery Slope?
- It Was A Slippery Slope
- Pay No Attention To That Slippery Slope Behind The Curtain
- In The Middle Of The Slippery Slope
- Hide Your Pets
Reasonable people have legitimate reason to be concerned about the normalization of pedophilia. E.g., in 2013 Italy’s highest court overturned the conviction of a man for pedophilia because they determined that the relationship was consensual (HT: Shawn Mathis). Please do not think, “Oh, that could never happen here.” That would be quite naive. We live in an electronic global village. What people think and say in Europe is no different from what is being thought and said, in some quarters, in North America. In 2013, Wesley J. Smith noted the trajectory toward the normalization of pedophilia. The trajectory is on full display in this 2013 Atlantic essay. The therapeutic approach is reflected in this 2010 essay.
The trajectory has been something like this:
- X is a sin
- X is unnatural
- X is a crime
- We no longer know if X is sin but it should not be a crime
- X is neither sin nor crime but disorder
- X is innate
- No one would willingly choose X
- We must remove the stigma to treat X
- X is not that bad
- X is consensual
- X is perfectly normal and the scaremongers need to be quiet
- X is a legitimate choice
- X legal and you must support it or face social/legal consequences
The push is on to normalize pedophilia. The leading edge of the movement in Europe is at stage 10. The rest of the dominoes will fall sooner rather than later.
To the list I would suggest an addition at the end:
Posthumous pardon for people convicted of X when it was considered a crime.
The last verses of Romans 1 seem to indicate that homosexuality and even pedophilia becoming normative in a godless society is not only possible, but probable. If, as inventors of evil, men have continually pushed the boundaries of sin and if, as these verse indicate, God gives such men up to their passions, at some point it seems as if the lines between “biology” and “choice” will be blurred and, eventually, erased. This is no way removes the responsibility of men engaging in such sinful practices, as Paul points out in Romans 2, but does give Christians a frame of reference from which to approach such things. While we must constantly fight the downward spiral of sin and depravity, we should also recognize that the spiral itself is something that shameless, debased men will pursue until the righteous judgment of God is meted out. Protecting the flock against such predilections is paramount for elders, but doing so will be increasingly difficult in these dark days. However, recognizing such should give even greater import to Romans 3:23-26 as the only true answer to the problem.
“Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned amid a social media backlash over comments he made that appeared to condone pedophilia.”
*Lying
Could you explain how on earth you think homosexuality is a choice? Surely you do not think that for example the likes of Wesley hill is living to Christians when he reports feelings of sexual attraction to other men? If yes can you explain these same experiences ?
Hi Richard,
1. I’m reporting the course of the discussion of and explanation of homosexuality. The appeal to choice is now a regular part of the homosexual self-explanation.
2. I know Christians who have a same-sex attraction. To their credit they acknowledge that attraction as sin and they live chaste, penitent lives. How did they come to have that attraction? The answer to that question is complicated. How do heterosexual sinners come to have sinful predilections? Do I think that every homosexual makes a conscious choice to be homosexual? No. Do some? Yes. I think that, in some cases, as with alcoholism (or other addictive patterns), the predilection to homosexuality may be biological but in many case, as Dr King wrote in 1958, it is the product of a corrupt or corrupting culture, i.e., abuse, neglect, etc so that the parameters in which one’s sexuality develops are fundamentally warped. Does the alcoholic consciously choose to become addicted to alcohol? Perhaps, in some cases but not typically. What typically happens is self-medication that leads to addiction. So too, in sexuality, there is a web of conditions/circumstances and smaller choices that culminate in unhealthy and even unnatural relationships, which becomes a lifestyle, which then gets justified after the fact.
In his 2011 book “A Queer Thing Happened to America,” Michael Brown did a nice job laying out the intense political bullying that forced the hand of the professional psychiatry and psychology organizations into “de-abnormaling” homosexuality. It was not, as so many like to pretend, a decision based on science.
Salon has removed the pro-pedophile/pedophilia article from it’s site/publication.
Rome has been deliberately facilitating this.
In your logical sequence, #14 might say to the victims of X, “X does not hurt you so stop acting like it does!”