We’re Slipping (Part 2)

Just over a year ago I posted an entry entitled “We’re Slipping” in which I addressed how we are already slipping down that slippery slope that will come with any efforts to normalize homosexual relations, and certainly with any approval of homosexual marriage. Unfortunately we are still slipping, a fact made painfully clear in a January 2 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, an article entitled “Paedophilia: bringing dark desires to light.” Andree Seu Peterson took a very insightful look at this article in her column in the February 9 issue of WORLD Magazine; in fact, I found it to be one of the better columns by Seu Peterson I have read. Her column was entitled “Culture creep.”

Side note, since I am not British, nor do I imagine many if any of my readers are, I am going to drop the “a” and use the spelling we are used to when I reference pedophilia for the rest of the article, even when I quote the piece from The Guardian.

The Guardian‘s article highlights the fact that we are slipping. Seu Peterson’s column highlights three strategies used by those on “The Dark Side” (her term) to gradually make us more accepting of behavior that has previously been clearly understood as immoral and wrong.

At one point The Guardian article includes this statement: “There is little agreement about pedophilia, even among those considered experts on the subject.” That in and of itself is troubling to me, and should be to you, because it should sicken you to think that there could possibly be any disagreement as to whether or not adult-child sexual relationships are wrong. However, Seu Peterson calls this Strategy No. 1–“the notion of different opinions.” She writes that by suggesting that any behavior is controversial rather than wrong, the door is immediately thrown open to the possibility that perhaps it is not wrong. After all, if people can sincerely disagree on the subject–particularly the so-called experts–maybe it is not as cut-and-dried or black-and-white as we originally thought, right? As Seu Peterson writes, “Relinquish the word ‘wrong,’ accept the softer ‘reasonable difference of opinion,’ and the camel’s nose is well under the tent.”

Strategy No. 2 identified by Seu Peterson is distinctions. The Guradian article includes these lines: “A pedophile is someone who has a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children. Savile appears to have been primarily an ephebophile, defined as someone who has a similar preferential attraction to adolescents.” Seu Peterson states that “ephebophile” was a new word for her, and it was for me, too. In fact, Dictionary.com does not recognize it as a word. However, by creating a distinction between different kinds of sexual attraction to children, Seu Peterson writes, “automatically confers a certain legitimacy without even having to argue for it.”

The third strategy is what Seu Peterson calls the domain of the professional. How does that work? By quoting and citing individuals with impressive titles and/or who work at impressive institutions–thereby giving the impression that the “smart people” understand all of this much better than the rest of us. The piece in The Guardian did this by citing results from “Sarah Goode, a senior lecturer at the University of Winchester and author of two major 2009 and 2011 sociological studies on pedophilia in society” and “two eminent researchers” and “the Harvard Mental Health Letter,” the last of these which “stated baldly that pedophilia ‘is a sexual orientation.'”

These are strategies that are used by the media, used by individuals and groups motivated to change the acceptance of previously-unacceptable behavior, and by the scientists and research centers that cater to these groups (and depend on them for funding). As with the warnings I gave in the last post, we must be careful how news is “spun.”

Perhaps more troubling than any of the above, though, and the clearest evidence that we are well on our way down the slippery slope? This statement in The Guardian: “Some academics do not dispute the view of Tom O’Carroll, a former chairman of PIE [Pedophile Information Exchange]…that society’s outrage at pedophilic relationships is essentially emotional, irrational, and not justified by science. ‘It is the quality of the relationship that matters,’ O’Carroll insists.”

Seu Peterson is correct when she ends her column with this: “The thing to notice is that while you weren’t looking that word ‘relationships’ snuck in without debate. Another place gained. The language of alternative lifestyle slowly replaces today’s more common terminology of ‘abuse’ and ‘victim.'”