Accused murderer and pedophile John Mark Karr claims that he is "trapped in a world that does not understand." In other words, it's not the pedophile's fault for molesting kids but society's fault for not understanding. This is a convenient, and predictable, rationalization from a pedophile. But pedophiles aren't the only ones advancing it. A small number of academics, who seem to add to their numbers every year, see nothing wrong with pedophilia, either.

More than a half-century ago, Alfred Kinsey likened adult-child sexual contacts to children's encounters with spiders--frightening but harmless. By taking the word of pedophiles at face value, Kinsey actually claimed that small children, infants even, enjoy molestation. If harm came, the Indiana University professor reasoned, it did so because of the overreaction of authorities who traumatized children.

Today, Kinsey's academic progeny have tenure across America. Perhaps we should be thankful they teach at colleges and not in grade schools. But who knows? One's advocacy or tolerance of a behavior doesn't make one a practitioner of that behavior. But some behavior is so extreme that advocacy or tolerance of it is abhorrent itself.

"Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s," University of Michigan assistant professor Gayle Rubin writes, "boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone erotic orientation." She points to a "savage and undeserved witch-hunt" engineered by the authorities "to wipe out the community of men who love underage youth." Opposition to pedophilia, she maintains, has "more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics."

New York University Press's Lavender Culture lambastes "archaic" notions, such as "the innocence of children" and "the potential harmfulness of sex." The text's essay advocates that activists "proselytize" to "young gay people with the message that…they should get out of their families as soon as they can." If they don't, the author warns, "future generations of gay people who wait until their twenties before they start to live." The piece demands the repeal of "repressive, ageist legislation."

A few years back, the University of Minnesota Press published Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. The book advocates lowering the age-of-consent to twelve--not low enough for John Mark Karr, apparently--and touts a day-care center where "children of all ages may engage in masturbation without shame and consensual child-with-child sexual touching without adult interference."

Mark Karr may be "trapped in a world that doesn't understand." A few of the world's inhabitants do claim to understand. But the rest of us don't--understand, Mark Karr or academia's pedophila apologists.

Allen Ginsberg was into that, too.

That bastard Democrat!!

Howard Dean and John Kerry are pedophiles too!!

Let's burn em!!

Seriously, what does this have to do with politics??

Everyone knows pedophilia is wrong.

You think that's a conservative issue?

Cult. Cult.

Anyone else think of the trailer for Ultraviolet?

At the end of the day Dan Flynn is a conservative because coorporations like Exxon and families like the Olins paid him off:

http://exxonsecrets.org/html/listorganizations.php

Here's a story to make the conservative anti-sex crowed cringe:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5277884.stm

Why can't I ever meet chicks like Ultraviolet?

asdf, because she comes from a world you may not understand.

Actually, she comes from a world that doesn't exist. But, I'm always hoping to meet a contemporary just like her. ;-)

Me thinks HaHa is another internet troll whose biggest acheivement of the day is to sabotage Flynnfiles with Liberal rhetoric bull$hit. Any relation to Truth?

How in the hell could anyone ,but a freakin sympathizer or a useful idiot, misunderstand communists. They murdered 100 million,enslaved countless others,and were dedicated to the violent overthrow of democracies. Only some academic egghead could find shades of gray with the destruction caused by Marx,Lenin,Stalin,Mao,etc.

It must be nice living in the insulated world of a "know nothing" professor.

Todd, I agree.

Haha,
Time to take your meds now.....

One year, for my father's birthday, I bought him some audio recordings of Jean Shepard's radio shows from 1965 (for those that don't know, he's the guy who wrote and narrates the movie "A Christmas Story"). These tapes are amazing, and sometimes it's hard to remember that these were recorded in the 60s and not yesterday. It's interesting that he was actually one of the Beatnick crowd that hung around the Village in NYC, but luckily he never really lost his sense of humor, like Ginsberg and the rest seemed to.

Anyhoo....I was listening to one of these 30+ year old tapes, and he was talking about the limitations of man. He was complaining about how the 60s generation was being raised to think they could do anything. It struck him that it was an insulated generation, the example he gave was that they had never piloted a riverboat on the Mississippi or seen the river swallow a person, or some other power of nature. But basically, he was trying to say that they'd never been allowed to see their natural limitations. Their parents had told them that such limitations didn't exist. And for a person that never knew any limitations, they're finding themselves amazed to discover that there are some things they just CAN'T do. Shepard uses this to explain why there is so much bad art out there. The artist, frustrated because he'd always known that he could do anything, just assumes that they world doesn't "get" him, or they're "not ready" for him yet, rather than admit that he just sucks at this. But the real problem, is that the truth of themselves and the world they live in was shamefully and unjustly hidden from them.

Shep, in 1965, knew he was living amongst a generation of arrogant asses, specifically bred to be so. That generation continues to spread this idea that that everything is subjective, all things are possible, etc., and makes such defenses of bad or stupid behavior (or the most hideous crimes imaginable) defensible.

So, yes, I'm saying that the same conditions that gave rise to modern art (my most hated art), are the same conditions that lead otherwise sane men to justify raping little kids with a straight face.

May god deliver us from the influence these people have had on our world.

I should note that it's also rather late, and I should be in bed, so sorry if this didn't make any sense.

As usual Homer, a brilliant observation. Thanks.

Did someone just link modern art with pedophila.

Wow. Y'all are way outside the mainstream.

Nutcases.

The NY times had an article about online pedophile forums which was filled with (justified) outrage and disbelief that pedophiles saw themselves as great civil rights pioneers.

What it reminded me of was 2004 op ed in the Washington Post by Michael Kinsey where he talked about how self evidently outrageous gay "marriage" was just 15 years earlier and how now it is considered extreme not to support at least civil unions.

Rather than be shocked at how quickly our morals have changed, he was worried that he may be holding onto an intolerant position that he hadn't realized was intolerant now.

I doubt (and hope) that pedophilia will ever come into a movement like the gay rights movement, but Kinsey's views are sure to make it more likely.

What's wrong you liberal dope? Too much reading for you or just too complicated to understand what Fong was getting at? Probably both.

Told y'all.