Children as casualties of the sexual revolution

“In contemporary America,” says Anthony Esolen, “condemnation of pedophilia rests on sentiment and not on moral reasoning. Nobody can simultaneously explain why pedophilia is so vile and uphold the first commandment of the sexual revolution: Fulfill thy desires.”  Though society, at present, still condemns pedophilia, Dr. Esolen shows that the same principle is governing other fronts in the sexual revolution:  children’s well-being must be sacrificed to adult desire.

Read it all, but here are excerpts from Anthony Esolen, The Moral Structure of Pedophilia | Public Discourse:

The moral structure of pedophilia is simply this: the welfare of children is subordinate to the sexual gratification of adults. . .

.[Then follows discussion of the Jerry Sandusky case and other pedophile scandals]

If we altered the question, and asked not how many people have done sexually abusive things with children, but how many people have done sexual things that redounded to the suffering of children, then we might confess that the only thing that separates millions of people from Jerry Sandusky is inclination. Everything that was once considered a sexual evil and that is now winked at or cheered, everything without exception, has served to hurt children, and badly.

We might point here to divorce. Unless it is necessary to remove oneself and one’s children from physical danger and moral corruption, the old wisdom regarding divorce should hold, if children themselves have anything to say about it. Parents will say, “My children can never be happy unless I am happy,” but they should not lay that narcissistic unction to their souls. Children need parents who love them, not parents who are happy; they are too young to be asked to lay down their lives for someone else. It is not the job of the child to suffer for the parent, but the job of the parent to endure, to make the best of a poor situation, to swallow his pride, to bend her knees, for the sake of the child.

We might point to births out of wedlock. The child has a right to enter more than a little nursery decorated with presents from a baby shower. He should enter a human world, a story, a people. He should be born of a mother and a father among uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, stretching into the distant past, with all their interrelated histories, with his very being reflected in all those mirrors of relation, not to mention his eyes and his hair, the talents in his fingers and the cleverness in his mind. This belonging to a big and dependable world can be secured only in the context of the permanent love of his mother and father, declared by a vow before the community and before the One in whom there is no shadow of alteration.

Most parents grow reticent when the time comes to tell their children about sex. That reticence is right and natural, as is the quiet of a man’s voice as he brings his son to a holy place, the grave of his grandfather who died in the war, or the little old house where his grandmother was born. Sex is not about the mechanics. The parent must tell the child about the love that brought him into being; and therefore sex is about the past and the present and the future, and about all those who share in the great family network of begetting and of love.

Then along come the Planned Predators, with a cadre of—what shall we call them? What would we call them if they had no “credentials,” no initials after their names? What would we call the old man down the street, wheezing and giggling, who likes to show little kids pictures of people masturbating? I believe the technical term is “creep.” So then, along comes Planned Predators with their creeps, lubriciously introducing children to the delights of meaningless sex, with cartoons of talking penises and vaginas, of a girl bending over with a mirror to inspect her anus, or a boy in his bedroom abusing himself.

Is that unfair? Some people want to have their sexual flings, but are discreet enough to try to keep children away from them; not that they ever succeed entirely, but at least their hypocrisy pays vice’s tribute to virtue. But Planned Predators do not believe in that tribute. There are pedophiles of the body, and pedophiles of the soul. Planned Predators happily enlist the latter among their troops.

One wonders how Sandusky managed to do what he did for so long, without getting caught by parents. Well, the abuser separates the child from the parents. “This is our secret,” says the creep. “Don’t tell your parents,” sibilates the lizard. “They won’t understand.” “Your parents haven’t treated you right,” hisses the snake. “Your parents are old-fashioned. Your parents are selfish. Your parents have their own agenda. You don’t have to submit to your parents. You can be your own person,” wheedles the weasel, meaning: Submit to me.

That is the same strategy that the credentialed spiritual pederasts use. Parents are the enemy. The parents are kept in the dark. The parents are too benighted to know what is best. The parents—even such sporadically responsible parents as our generation has produced—wouldn’t know about how happy it is to be sexually free.

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