Normalizing pedophilia

Normalizing pedophilia
Posted: July 9, 2005
By Ted Byfield
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Now that the gay lobby has successfully persuaded the Parliament of Canada to legalize same-sex marriage, the question arises: What will it do next?

Will it retreat for a time into inactivity and wait for the public to bestow semi-respectability on the new condition? Or will it brazenly push the government to silence Christian churches that carry the gay-marriage conflict into the next federal election by removing their tax deductibility status? Or will it open a new campaign to prohibit all criticism of homosexual practice on moral grounds by deeming it an exercise in "hate"?

Last week, eight days after the bill went through the Commons, Canadians learned the answer. While the lobby may pursue some of the above, it would also push forward against the last standing barrier to sexual "freedom." It would tackle the laws against sex with children.

Not directly, of course. Public opinion has not "advanced" sufficiently to accept pedophilia. But it will fight a current government move to tighten the child pornography section in the Criminal Code. The gays will insist that possession of material that represents sex with children remain legal in Canada on "educational" or "artistic" grounds, provided the representation is the product of a writer's or artist's imagination and that no actual children were involved in its production.

This exemption was made three years ago by a British Columbia court trying a self-confessed possessor of photographs and stories of children engaged in sexual activity. The court convicted him for possessing the photographs and acquitted him for the purely "imaginary" material.

This meant that drawings and stories of children engaged in sex could be freely bought and sold in Canada. Public outrage at the ruling became so severe that the government introduced an amendment to the Criminal Code to remove this exemption. The amendment has passed the Commons and is now before a Senate committee.

Last Wednesday, the Globe and Mail, chief voice of the gay lobby in the Canadian media, in a lengthy lead editorial launched a formal attack on the amendment. While acknowledging that "politicians are right to seek to protect the victims of that sick abusive trade," (i.e., child pornography), "they are wrong to lose their sense of proportion in fighting it."

The amendment would jeopardize the legality of such literary works as Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," says the Globe. It "covers a wide territory: A 16-year-old sneaking a picture of a 17-year-old in a shower, or a 16-year-old who invites someone under 14 to touch his or her body. Writers beware."

The amendment also sets minimum sentences for people convicted under the section, denying the courts the right to let them off with a wrist slap. This, too, the Globe saw as a threat. It quoted approvingly the warning of one senator not to "impose new minimum sentences simply because some people consider the legal system and sentencing proceedings to be ineffective."

Such "glaring flaws," says the Globe, are being overlooked because "emotion is over-riding research." The amendment represents "an attempt to whittle away at free expression."

The Senate will pass the amendment, as the Globe knows full well. But the question arises: Why did this editorial appear now? After all, the amendment has been before Parliament for three years. Coming, as the editorial did, right on the heels of the gay-marriage bill, some kind of strategy must be involved. Clearly, it signals the next move in the culture war, the opening attack on the last sexual taboo.

The real battleground will not, of course, take place in Parliament at all. Whether the amendment survives in Canadian law, or is deemed unconstitutional under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, will be decided in the courts. The Globe's editorial is not aimed at senators, but at judges. It serves notice upon them: Here is where we're going next.

"Educating the public" to this new reality will naturally take time. But the arts lead the culture. If purely imaginary drawings and stories of sex between children and adults can be made acceptable today, creeping first into literature and the visual arts, then into music, then into the movies, eventually the physical acts themselves will become acceptable as well. That's the way things work.

So it's onward until the last bastion falls. The fact that our whole society may be collapsing along with it has not been seriously considered. History alone testifies to that possibility, but so what? Who reads history?