Pedantic Pedophiles
©William Gairdner

Some say the sign of a decent civilization is how we treat the poor. But a better guide is how well we protect women and children from sexual predators.
Faced with a bevy of homophilic judgements from courts and tribunals, critics in a mood of resigned premonition have warned that there are now no viable grounds to stop the normalization, protection, and promotion of pedophilia. Canada's gay Member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, has complained bitterly of the homosexual-pedophilia connection, saying it "is the most hateful ... most evil lie of all." But is it?
At the 1994 International Gay and Lesbian Association (ILGA) conference, many delegates protested as bitterly against throwing out NAMBLA, The North American Man-Boy Love Association, shouting: "pedophilia is about love, not child abuse."
Alas, the homosexual and pedophilia wagons have both been hitched to the rogue horse of modern liberalism: all sexual expression is good because unrestrained human freedom is good. Toronto's Gerald Hannon, a writer whose full-page defences of homo-erotic life are often printed in the Globe and Mail, and who describes himself as one with "a healthy commitment to depravity," writes that homosexual liberation is "about the liberation of all people." He recalls, approvingly, "watching some pornography in which two 10 year-old boys fucked each other."
Needless to say, most homosexuals are not pedophiles, and repudiate it in principle. But radical homosexuals, sexologists, and philosophers are another matter. By mid-century, Alfred Kinsey, author of the influential Kinsey Report, was having one-year-old babies masturbated by workers in his sex "laboratories" in an effort to prove they are capable of sexual arousal. He advocated child sex with adults as a healthy part of growing up. His co-worker Wardell Pomeroy actively defends "intergenerational sex" in the courts.
The newer generation of anti-authority homosexual liberal is even more militant, and has latterly discovered the tired "deconstruction" movement that drifted our way from Jacques Derrrida and Michel Foucault of France twenty years ago. They say the idea that there is some moral norm supporting social behaviour is merely a cover for elite power. All forms of social authority (taboos, restrictions, morals, laws) are just "constructed" by power-holders for their benefit as a class. So down with them, is the solution. And up with liberation.
This mood has been linked in the liberal (and especially in the homosexual) mind with the notion of "consent" as a validation for any freely chosen behaviour, whether abortion, euthanasia - or pedophilia. The 1972 U.S. National Gay Rights platform calls for the abolition of all laws governing age of consent. Child sex is not wrong, they argue, if the target child agrees. (You can see the brown bag full of candy coming out of the raincoat pocket.) NAMBLA says "People [meaning young boys] should be free to affirm their own values." An October '91 issue of this organization's Bulletin gives a New York 800 number to send for lists of children needing adoption.
The obvious error is that a child may consent to eating only popcorn every day, to trying Russian roulette, or watching porn movies. But this is agreement, not consent. The latter has always implied a standard of maturity - a knowledge of self and consequences - more reliable than mere appetite or fascination. Age-of-consent laws protect children predatory males with beguiling arguments.
Now it is true that heterosexuals commit most child sex abuse. But that's because at least 96% of the population is heterosexual. Homosexuals are only about 1 to 2% of the population (occasional bisexuals included, it may come to 4%). But because homosexuality has now been legally normalized, and activist pedophiles hang their main argument on seeking a meaningless consent from children, what we need to answer is the question, Do homosexuals indeed figure disproportionately in the sexual molestation of children?
It doesn't look good. A 1985 survey of U.S. data in the Los Angeles Times reported that homosexuals perpetrate between one third and one half of all child molestations. Good studies show that proportional rates for homosexual molestation of pupils by teachers is especially high - up to 80 per cent of all cases. A 1991 British Columbia Ministry of Health study reviewed 2,099 cases of child sexual abuse, and found that 94 per cent of perpetrators were male - and 50% of victims were boys, mostly under 12. The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics studying the decade 1980-1989, found the same. Perpetrators, 91 per cent male. Victims, 46.5% young boys. Go figure.
So the facts are not in question and, regrettably, neither are the politics. For sure, the next campaign in the name of democratic freedom and equality rights will be the legalization of pedophilia in a "pedophobic" society. The bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has already watered down the definition of pedophilia to suggest that a man who molests children is only a pedophile if he feels badly about it. Another harbinger is that the age of consent for homosexual sodomy - recently reduced by courts to 14 in Canada - has already been lowered to 12 in Holland ... as long as the parents of the child agree. It's no wonder liberalism has become a dirty word.