Tag Archives: Paedophilia

Richard Dawkins: “mild paedophilia” not so bad

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It seems that the young Richard Dawkins was groped by a teacher; he doesn’t think it did him any “lasting harm”. Obviously the teacher was not a Catholic priest or Dawkins would be denouncing him as a leering old villain in a frock.

He also doesn’t seem to object to having been caned. If I were of a psychological bent (I’m not), I might be tempted to consider the applicability to Richard Dawkins of Theodore Dalrymple’s question :

Is flagellation for the purposes of sexual pleasure as English as cricket and buttered crumpets?

Or, if I were given to unkindness (other than to bishops, I’m not), I might suggest that Dawkins’ calling a religious upbringing child abuse and his encounter with phalangeal meandering “harmless”, is a twisting of values that brings disrepute to respectable atheists everywhere.

Interestingly, in the last paragraph below, Dawkins tells us that ethical standards should be determined by the values of the day: very fitting for someone who calls himself a cultural Anglican.

From here:

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

 

The normalising of paedophilia

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From here:

A group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals say it’s time to change the way society views individuals who have physical attractions to children.

The organization, which calls itself B4U-Act, is lobbying for changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the guideline of standards on mental health that’s put together by the American Psychiatric Association.

The group says its mission is to help pedophiles before they create a crisis, and to do so by offering a less critical view of the disorder.

“Stigmatizing and stereotyping minor-attracted people inflames the fears of minor-attracted people, mental health professionals and the public, without contributing to an understanding of minor-attracted people or the issue of child sexual abuse,” reads the organization’s website.

B4U-Act said that 38 individuals attended a symposium in Baltimore last week, including researchers from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the universities of Illinois and Louisville. According to the group, which said to not endorse every point of view expressed, the speakers in attendance concluded that “minor-attracted” individuals are largely misunderstood and should not be criminalized even as their actions should be discouraged.

Speakers also argued that people who are sexually attracted to children should have input into the decision about how pedophilia is defined in the DSM, which they said is supposed to be a guide to promote “mental health vs. social control.”

It was inevitable that once the normalising of homosexuality was a fait accompli, western culture would look for even less appetising sexual extremes upon which to confer its blessing. Sodomy, sadomasochism , polyamory and adult consensual incest are now also old hat – boring even – so we are strenuously searching for new taboos to sanitise.

Paedophilia is the obvious choice. Today’s secular society regards all inclinations as morally neutral, although acting on some of them might still result in an invitation to spend a part of one’s life locked up: consummating the urge to murder, for example. But there is almost nothing that one can copulate with, providing it is inanimate, insentient or has given consent, that will lead to societal censure, let alone prosecution.

It is understandable that psychologists, with their long and varied experience of telling people that what they are feeling is perfectly normal no matter what it is, are leading the charge to sanctify the inclination to have sex with children. Otherwise, one so inclined might feel stigmatised – and that, if nothing else, is on the psychologist’s list of unforgivable sins.

From a Christian perspective – and I don’t include mainline liberal denominations in that category – inclinations and actions are relatively straightforward:

An urge to have sexual intercourse with a person of the same sex or a child is an urge that exists as result of the Fall, a perversion of God’s gift of sexuality. Neither urge was created by God; rather, they are a corruption of something that he created, so they cannot be good – or even neutral. To experience such a aberrant inclination is one of the consequences of living in a fallen universe: it is, like many other urges, a temptation to sin; it has to be resisted.

If Christianity is true, no amount of psychological sophistry can change this.

Paedophilia is a ‘sexual orientation’

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From here:

In a recent parliamentary session on a bill relating to sexual offenses against children, psychology experts claimed that pedophilia is a “sexual orientation” comparable to homosexuality or heterosexuality, a definition that was questioned by one Member of Parliament who was present.

Bill C-54, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code, seeks to increase or impose mandatory minimum penalties or punishment on sexual offenders of children for particular crimes.

Parliamentary discussion on February 14 centered on the mandatory minimum imprisonment and how offenders respond to treatment.  Dr. Vernon Quinsey and Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem, experts on the issue, were called to witness.

“When we speak of therapy or when individuals get therapy and we feel as though everyone is pacified, the good news is often illusory,” said Van Gijseghem, psychologist and retired professor of the University of Montreal.

“Pedophiles are not simply people who commit a small offence from time to time but rather are grappling with what is equivalent to a sexual orientation just like another individual may be grappling with heterosexuality or even homosexuality,” emphasized Van Gijseghem.

Although this opinion was voiced sooner than expected, I knew it was only a matter of time.

Making paedophilia a sexual orientation prepares the ground for the next step: declaring that the impulse to have sex with children is a morally neutral one.

Since no sane moral framework would ever condone the active expression of a paedophile’s impulse, it’s difficult to see the impulse itself as anything other than wrong.

The same could be said for homosexual inclinations, of course, and that is why the Anglican Church has laboured mightily to convince its flock that there is at least one outlet for homosexual activity that is not wrong: a monogamous, civilly married same-sex partnership.