Paedophiliaphobia
A cloud the size of man’s hand was seen in the distance:
The conference examined the ways in which “minor-attracted persons” could be involved in a revision of the American Psychological Association (APA) classification of pedophilia.Conference panelists included Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Renee Sorentino of Harvard Medical School, John Sadler of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and John Breslow of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Speakers addressed the around 50 individuals in attendance on themes ranging from the notion that pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society to the idea that “children are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with an adult. Also discussed were arguments that an adult’s desire to have sex with children is “normative” and that the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) ignores the fact that pedophiles “have feelings of love and romance for children” in the same way adult heterosexuals and homosexuals have romantic feelings for one another.
Could this cloud grow and produce a storm?
I submit that all that is needed is to characterize opposition to paedophilia as a violation of a civil right, or a sign of mental illness. All that is needed is to coin a catchy word: I suggest paedophiliapobia.
Do you think such tactics will not work, given the current philosophy of the current culture?
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/19/florida-teacher-suspended-for-anti-gay-marriage-post-on-personal-facebook/
Patton said the school system received a complaint on Tuesday about something Buell had written last July when New York legalized same sex unions. On Wednesday, he was temporarily suspended from the classroom and reassigned.
Patton said Buell has taught in the school system for 22 years and has a spotless record. Last year, he was selected as the high school’s “Teacher of the Year.”
But now his job is on the line because of what some have called anti-gay and homophobic comments.
Buell told Fox News Radio that he was stunned by the accusations. “It was my own personal comment on my own personal time on my own personal computer in my own personal house, exercising what I believed as a social studies teacher to be my First Amendment rights,” he said.
My comment: Logic continues to operate even when men cry that it should not, no matter how loudly they cry.
It is a small step to go from saying a disordered sexual appetite is something civilized men can tolerate among them, to saying any opposition is intolerable. The alleged middle ground of tolerating homosexuality and tolerating homophobia does not exist.
Logic says that if the mere presence of a sexual appetite, disordered or not, is sufficient to justify it, and if it is a civil right to indulge those appetites, disordered or not, and if it is anathema to voice opposition to those appetites, disordered or not, and if the sexual appetites are unrelated to the act of sexual reproduction, then there remains no reason in logic to prefer or to oppose one disordered sexual appetite above another.
Once the biological reality of the reproductive act is impeached as a grounds on which to judge between ordered and disordered sexual appetites, is mere fashionable sentiment to call homosexuality valid, a civil right, and pedophilia invalid, a crime.
At the moment, in the philosophy of the world, consent is the touchstone, the bright line that should not be crossed. The rule is that whatever wins consent is licit, and what is non-consensual is illicit.
The previous touchstone was nature, and the bright line not to be crossed was that whatever sexual appetites were prudent given the nature of the act and fitted to its natural ends were licit, and otherwise illicit. Hence it was imprudent to have sex outside marriage, and unnatural to have sex outside the natural pairing of the sexes, or within the bounds of consanguinity.
That was overthrown on the grounds that nature, i.e. reality, was arbitrary, or in the alternate, that human reason was insufficient to deduce a moral principle from applying ordinary prudence to the facts of nature.
It was argued, or, rather, it was asserted without argument (and any who dared opposed the assertion were scorned, shamed, and scolded) that the subjective passions of men, their fashions and sentiments, were a firmer ground on which to base moral and legal principle. Any evil fashion and sentiment said was good, was good.
This unargued assertion, not by coincidence, was accompanied by a very broad, very long-lasting and very successful attempt by the self-anointed in art, politics, intelligentsia and academia to alter the fashions and sentiments of men, and eventually to alter the law.
Is there any reason to believe that the touchstone of consent will be any more obdurate to alteration than the touchstone of nature? If reality can be ignored, why cannot consent be ignored?
The doctrine that men, being irrational, are indistinguishable from animals, or that men, lacking free will, are indistinguishable from machines (both quite popular among the self-anointed these days) must logically invalidates consent as a consideration in any moral question.
If you support the notion that consent is and should be the touchstone for moral questions, on what grounds do you rest your hope that the self-anointed will not turn fashion and sentiment against you?
Commenting disabled. The questions are rhetorical, and life is too short.