As The Federalist has recently reported, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the left is pushing toward social and legal approval of pedophilia. A failed effort in the Minnesota legislature to extend state-law protection to pedophilia as a sexual orientation should remove any doubt about where we’re headed.
Predatory adults apparently recognize the political problem inherent in protecting the “rights” of pedophiles. So they also cloak their efforts in the language of “rights,” “needs,” and “health” of minor children.
The most recent evidence of this goal comes from the International Commission of Jurists, which joined two U.N. agencies to issue a report advocating that all “consensual” sex between adults and minors be decriminalized. From Principle 16 – Consensual Sexual Conduct:
Consensual sexual conduct, irrespective of the type of sexual activity, the sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression of the people involved or their marital status, may not be criminalized in any circumstances. … With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. … Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacities of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.
The end game of normalizing pedophilia has been hinted at for some time. A critical step, as always, is to distort language. “Pedophile” has become “minor-attracted person” (MAP), which certainly takes the edge off. TED talkers insist that MAPs should not be stigmatized for their attractions as long as they exercise self-control around children (a talent for which pedophiles are not famous). These and other “experts” (and Minnesota legislators) describe pedophilia as a sexual orientation to be protected under state nondiscrimination law.
The left always plays the long game, and this one is no exception. Acceptance of pedophilia can be traced to the monstrous Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist by training who branched out into the study of human sexuality supposedly in response to student questions about sex and marriage.
Actually, though, as his subsequent work proved, Kinsey had a special interest in perversion. His groundbreaking “research” on sexual behavior included extensive observation of infant responses to sexual stimuli. If not a pedophile himself (views differ), he collaborated for years with at least one pedophile who meticulously cataloged his abuse of hundreds of children from 1917 to 1948 — the infamous “children of Table 34.”
So Kinsey and his criminal collaborations laid the foundation for sexualizing children. Based on his pedophile studies, he famously concluded that children are sexual beings from birth and therefore not harmed by sexual activity even as infants. The only harm, he opined, comes from other adults’ revulsion at the practice, so we should remain calm and let adults fulfill babies’ sexual needs.
Organizations that advance the agenda of the global left soon adopted Kinsey’s sexual-from-birth vision. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) embraces the idea that all human beings are sexual and concludes from this that children have sexual rights that trump the rights of parents to protect their innocence.
Not to be outdone, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (not ratified by the U.S., but give Biden time) holds that children have rights, regardless of parental consent, to access information and medical “services” concerning sexual and reproductive health. The globally influential International Planned Parenthood Foundation includes even prostitution among the concepts that should be taught to children under 10, since kids are sexual from birth: “Sexual activity may be part of different types of relationships, including dating, marriage or commercial sex work, among others.”
This kind of information, called “comprehensive sex education” (CSE), is an effective, widely used tool for obliterating childhood and, yes, grooming kids for increased and varied sexual activity. CSE advocates insist that practically any form of sexual activity can be normal and healthy if accompanied by the consent of the parties, contraception, and condoms. CSE, it is claimed, gives young people the tools they need to enjoy healthy sex lives.
Parents who object that there’s no such thing as a healthy sex life for a minor child are dismissed as non-experts who are failing to meet their children’s needs. But many pushers of this ideology aren’t interested in what’s good for kids, only what’s good for adults.
Consider the economic motive alone. Recalcitrant parents threaten the profits of organizations such as Planned Parenthood, “the nation’s largest provider of sex education” which, not coincidentally, also provides abortions and STD treatments to kids who take seriously the schools’ blessing of their sexual exploration.
But financial reward from the school-to-clinic pipeline is only one benefit for self-interested adults. Who else might favor having a pool of young people who learned in school that any and every sexual behavior is normal and acceptable? The left’s preeminent condition of “consent” is no obstacle to the smooth-talking predator who specializes in persuasion. A school curriculum that desensitizes a vulnerable child to aberrant sexual concepts does half the predator’s work for him.
Consider other situations that can only be described as grooming. In schools and other public places, children are made accessible to overweight men made up in a grotesque caricature of women, supposedly to offer “a platform for children to learn to be their boldest, brightest and most beautiful selves.” In reality, of course, exposing children to drag queens normalizes the fetish and attempts to overcome kids’ natural resistance to the deeply perverse (and demonic).
The same can be said of providing pornography to children in school libraries. As only one of many examples, a book such as It’s Perfectly Normal would prompt a jail sentence for any trench-coated creep who showed it to your child at the park. But school librarians apparently agree with the author’s argument that the book’s explicit images of a panoply of sexual practices are “what every child has a right to know.” It’s all about children’s rights, you see, not the adults who benefit from their desensitization.
Some CSE advocates push for “porn literacy” so that children can better evaluate the pornography they see either in their school libraries or on their school-provided digital devices. There seems to be little concern among sex-positive “educators” that pornography warps a child’s developing brain, and again, what adults potentially benefit from the damage?
So we come to the cause du jour, which is allowing children to choose their sex and (pretend to) change it at will. The trans industry insists that minor children — even as infants and toddlers, and even from the womb — know if their body is the wrong sex (misleadingly called “gender”) and that they must be allowed to dictate the world’s response to their secret knowledge.
And they are entitled to what they want regardless of parental objections, backed by the full power of the state. In some places, parents have already been stripped of parental rights for refusing to affirm their child’s delusion (see here and here, for example). In California, pending legislation obviously aimed at trans independence would allow children as young as 12 to leave their homes and enter a state-funded group home without their parents’ consent or even knowledge.
The argument that a child understands all about his sex regardless of his age fits nicely with Kinsey’s claim, amplified by leftist organizations over the years, that children are sexual from birth. And if a child is considered sufficiently mature to define his sex, why wouldn’t he also be considered mature enough to agree to sexual activity?
The International Commission of Jurists finds the logic unassailable. Children can consent to have sex with adults, and the law should not interfere.
In its lust to destroy every taboo about sexual behavior, the left is never satiated. It’s a shark, always swimming, always devouring, moving from one target to another while the first is still being digested. It’s not possible to compromise or find common ground with sexual radicals.
Having toppled so many standards of sexual decency in such a breathtaking time frame, the left continues its relentless assault. Will pedophilia be the final frontier?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
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