Note: This essay is the third (and hopefully final) one in a series I have written on pedophilia. The other essays are found at http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Lbtn/Lbtn-Sex&Kids-ALibertarianView.htm and should be read along with the one below for a full explication of my views. It is written in response to a recent denunciation by Ed Steele of two men who have had legal troubles because of their involvement with pedophilia.
In recent weeks it has been revealed that two white racialist leaders have been in some wise involved with pedophilia. I am shocked, SHOCKED! Which is to say, I am not particularly shocked at all. More to the point, I think it is time for people to stop bloviating and hyperventilating about this particular subject, and look at it without playing the game that Eric Berne so properly identified as "Ain't It Awful!"
To begin, we need to realize that the bloviating and hyperventilating about pedophilia generally comes from the political Right. That is logical, because the Right is that part of the political spectrum which tends toward intolerance, especially intolerance of sex, but also intolerance of just about everything else which deviates from the norm, including different religions, different races, different nationalities, different tastes, different looks, and you name it. In contrast to the Right is the Left, which is famous for tolerance, but which is rightfully criticized by the Right for tolerating everything under the sun, no matter how bad, how ugly or how evil -- except, of course, for people of the Right, who are never tolerated.
Now given these observations, let us ask, What is a True Crime, ie, what is something which would be recognized as a crime by everyone everywhere? The answer is that a True Crime -- as opposed to something which is merely defined as a crime by legislation -- is an act in which one person does substantial physical harm to another beyond the limits of contract or self-defense. True Crimes, then, would include stealing, vandalism, bodily harm or substantial emotional harm, but would not include name-calling, libel and perhaps other things that have been defined as crimes by our legislatures.
Now with the above in mind, let us ask, Is pedophilia a True Crime? The answer, I think, is clearly No. No one has ever shown that pedophilia AS SUCH harms anyone, and all claims of harm are purely speculative. Yes, the way in which an act of pedophilia is carried out may be harmful -- rape, for example -- but pedophilia is not rape except perhaps in the legal sense ('statutory rape'). There is, however, one way in which pedophilia is frequently harmful, namely, that it causes the perpetrators to spend substantial time behind bars where they are almost invariably the subject of rape and where they are taught the pleasures of homosexual perversion. And of course where their lives are ruined.
But while pedophilia is not a True Crime, it IS a POLITICAL crime, because the political forces which have turned it into a (legislative) crime are precisely those of the (sexually intolerant) political Right. As I pointed out in an earlier essay, these are the folks who dislike 'deviance' in any form, whether sexual, racial, national, educational or any other. It is they who insist that you and I walk the strait and narrow, and, curiously, it is also they who -- probably as a result of the build-up of pressures caused by their prudery -- very often turn into the 'deviants' that they spend so much time denouncing. (Indeed, the very fact that a lot of Right-wingers spend so much time denouncing 'deviance' and are so ready to impose draconian punishments for it on others, may be a reflection of their fear that they themselves are 'deviants', as a surprising number have turned out to be.) All this is why I am not particularly shocked that our (Right-wing) racialists have been caught dabbling in pedophilia.
In short, I think that all the hoo-ha and hyperventilation over pedophilia is much do-do about pretty much nothing, and I think it is time for the Right to get over its apoplectic intolerance of a practice which is already rife among the elite, which is likely to become largely accepted in the future, about which there is no good evidence that it is harmful, and which -- as explained in earlier essays -- desperately needs to be legalized in order to reduce instances of abuse.
