Bogeymen and Witch-hunters

“To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.”

Are the people of America today so mature and thoughtful as to appreciate the Senate as a check on their temporary errors and delusions? Are the people of today more like those of Athens,

Are you the kind of person who wants the Senate to pass a new law every time the popular media whips some subject up until it covers the airwaves for weeks at a time producing the illusion that it is important?

Remember the ‘year of shark attacks’ when statistically there were fewer shark attacks that year than average. Remember that that was followed by the ‘year of child abductions’ when in fact there were fewer than average abducted and murdered children that year. America has changed a lot since the Federalist Papers were written. Among many other changes is the speed of communications. News no longer travels on horseback from town to village to farm. Today a story is heard immediately in the remotest locations, frequently before any real facts are known. Today there are hundreds of news agencies struggling to fill their broadcasts with the latest popular fantasy. Once one story makes the headlines all the editors and managers say “Get us another story on that topic”. So, in years in which things happen less than usual we hear about them more and believe that an epidemic is in progress. Then the Senate must pass a law, special spending must be approved by the House, the President must act. Someone must do something!

This rapidity of communications has produced wild fluctuations in the Stock Market leading to changes in the rules of investment and triggering of various safeguards that were not needed in less rapid times. The Senate is still meant to act as such a check upon the momentary passions of the population. Do you still expect it to act in such a way? Do you appreciate it when the Senate acts slowly and deliberately in the face of public hysteria? Or do you resent a Senator who does not immediately vote the passions of the moment that his constituency hold? Do you believe

is true and that,

is equally true? Or do you believe that the public passion should be acted on thoughtlessly? If the example of day-trading in the Stock Market is any guide, then today with the speed and passion of today’s media fanning public passion, the Senate acting as a check on the passions of the public is more important than ever.

In a Democracy the People rule. Like all rulers the People are jealous of their dignity and proud of their power. The People do not like to remember that occasionally in the heat of the moment they may make a mistake. They do not like to believe that they need temperate counsel as much as any King or Caesar. Yet they do, and like any good Ruler, King, or Caesar, the People have a responsibility to know and accept such counsel at the times their passions rule them.

The Senate was specifically intended to provide such service. If you, as a member of the People were to watch a play or movie in which a King or Caesar ignored all the wise counsel of his aged ministers and persisted in a course dictated by passion, anger, hatred, or fear, you would boo and hiss him for a Tyrant. The People are no less a Tyrant when they ignore the duty of the Senate to act as a similar check on their passions. If a King were to execute an aged counselor because his counsel displeased the King, the People would boo him as a tyrant, but who calls more passionately for the disgrace of Senators who do not instantly bow to the will of the People? If this tendency is not checked by the People in themselves, recognizing their duty as rulers to accept the intended role of the Senate, then surely, they will suffer the bitter anguish which the people of Athens suffered.

Athens illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of Democracy in action. In the wars with Persia its passion and strength secured freedom for all Greece. In the Peloponnesian wars its passions led it to execute or exile its best military leaders and to its eventual conquest by Sparta.

The People being Rulers have a duty not merely to bear with the Senate as it attempts to serve them well, but to attempt themselves to be realistic and fair when facing the issues which confront them. The media will create bogeymen to inflame their passions, and witch hunters will fan their fear of bogeymen into hatred until the people act in manners which would shame a fiend, and will injure their freedoms, their homes and their children. Are you “a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address” or do you resent these words and this subject?

When you hear Oprah and O’Reilly fanning the flames of public passion do you rise up and cheer them on or do you wince a little bit in fear for the future? When some dark villain who is accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering a little girl is arraigned before the media as a villain do you shout “The Evil must be Destroyed” or do you wonder if possibly an innocent man might be convicted because of the public furor? Do you run with the mob, or does the howling of the mob worry you because you know it is no respecter of innocence.

The mob is the passion of the people, as anger, jealousy and pride are the passions of other sorts of Princes. When the mob rules a tyrant sits on the throne. All good citizens fear the mob as good citizens fear insanity in their Prince.

In the Middle Ages it was commonly accepted as fact that Jews would steal the communion wafers from churches, stab them with knives, and use the blood from the communion wafers in dark and satanic ceremonies. No one seems to have ever taken consecrated wafers and pricked the bread with a needle to see if it would bleed. They couldn’t. That would have been Sacrilege. Sometimes dedicated defenders of the ‘good’ and persecutors of ‘evil’ would take a wafer, mark it with blood and produce it as proof of the evil of the Jews. They KNEW the truth and would not let facts interfere with their crusade to destroy “evil” in the world.

You might think such things no longer happen, at least not in the US, but they do. The so-called ‘soft’ sciences like Sociology, Psychology, etc. allow for a lot of manufactured proofs. Because they deal with human issues, the issues they deal with are frequently subjects of passionate dispute and even anger. People are suggestible and so proofs can be manufactured by telling people how they should feel and react to various things. These effects good Placebo and ill Nocebo are well documented in the literature and almost universally ignored in popular discussion of psychological trauma and emotional injury.

Different cultures have different norms. These are not arbitrary, they are not equally good or equally bad, some are better than others. They are better than others in subtle ways. Sometimes it takes generations of competition between cultures for one to demonstrate that its norms produce a stronger more vital culture than the others norms do. Since the reasons for such norms are subtle, they do not always produce radical negative effects on individuals who violate them. A norm may in itself be merely a reflection of a generally held value in a society. The behavior might not be harmful in itself to the individuals involved it may just be a violation of a general rule of ethics which is important to society as a whole.

The tendency for people is to assume that when others violate the norms of their society there must be some terrible consequence involved. They insist that the people involved must get sick, become diseased, offend God, or die. In some tribal societies like Australian Aborigines, the power of suggestion is such that those who offend the tribal Gods do indeed get sick and die.

The fact is that generally the consequence imposed by the opinions and actions of society against behaviors not normative for that society are the major cause of the negative consequences of the action for the individual. Society might suffer major problems if the behaviors were not inhibited, and thus the norms may be justified, but it is the reaction of others not the behavior itself which generally causes the individuals suffering. Any person mentioning this in public is generally accused of heresy and burnt at the stake. Just as anyone suggesting you pierce a communion wafer to see if it bled in the Middle Ages might have been. This is as true, metaphorically, in the US today as it ever has been in history.

Recent scandals about recovered memory therapy and artificial memories have demonstrated how suggestible adults can be. It is well known that children are even more vulnerable to such suggestion than adults. Everybody knows that telling a child it will be a failure will tend to make it a failure. Everybody knows that telling children they are inferior because of their hair color or eye color or skin color will tend to make them fail. Nobody admits that telling a child it will be traumatized for life and suffer from nightmares and be emotionally crippled because this or that happened will make the child traumatized for life and suffer from nightmares.

This double standard, this insane hypocrisy is a great threat to the emotional health of children in the US today. Yet it is as dangerous a heresy in the US today to suggest that pedophilia and ephebephilia are not automatically traumatic to the children involved as it would have been to suggest that communion wafers did not bleed in the middle ages. This concern is not unique to this book. Dr. Tana Dineen has a book out entitled, “Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychological Industry is Doing to People”. In at least one of her columns she has expressed concerns about the negative effects of the assumption that pedophilia is inherently traumatic without evidence that it is. It is bad when psychologists make victims out of adults, it is despicable when they manufacture them out of children. No matter how noble they believe they are being.

At this point it is useful to discuss why outlawing pedophilia is necessary so that it is apparent that the rest of this article is not an attempt to legalize pedophilia but rather an attempt to bring the discussion of pedophilia into the realm of reason and decrease the injurious effects of popular hysteria on children.

In the first section in the book on the Social Contract it was demonstrated that one of the fundamental issues creating problems in society is the increase in population density created by superior agricultural technology and the urban environment. Aristotle’s discussion of the appropriate size of the Polis was quoted there. Assuming that there is 1 pedophile out of every 1000 human beings. If a hunter-gatherer tribe had a population of 100, it would see one pedophile every 10 generations. Since everyone knows everyone else, that pedophile would be unable to act on his fantasies. Since his actions would be known, his actions would be restrained and pedophilia would not necessarily involve any abuses of his victim. All of these factors mean that pedophilia and other behaviors with harmful potential could be mediated in a hunter-gatherer culture without formal laws and sanctions. This is a specific case of the principle demonstrated in the first chapter of this book where the role of culture and the state in adapting a hunter-gatherer society to a modern environment was discussed. In a city with a population of 1 million, assuming 1 pedophile per 1000 people, there would be 1000 pedophiles. Their behavior would not be known and could be concealed. They have greater freedom to brutally victimize children. Children are concentrated in various areas making access easier. Higher population density makes a risky behavior about 10,000 times more risky and dangerous to children than it would be in a small tribal group. Hence it is 10,000 times more necessary to make it illegal.

In addition, studies have shown a relationship between population density and mental illness. Cities have higher rates of schizophrenia than rural populations. A classic study done with rats by John Calhoun, Scientific American, 1962, showed large increases in sexual abuse, infanticide and other behaviors in rat populations with artificially high density populations. So, the incidence of abusive pedophilia could be expected to increase with the density of population and the actual incidence of abusive pedophiles would be greater. This loose speculation of figures suggests that the danger to children represented by pedophilia is 20 or 30 thousand times greater in a high density society than it would have been in a low population density society. Hence, while it may be possible to prove that pedophilia is not inherently harmful in any way to children by itself, in context of a hunter-gatherer species adapting culturally to a high population density environment it becomes a behavior which must be subjected to strong legal sanctions. Some might suggest that pedophilia is not an inherently risky behavior whose risk is increased beyond acceptable bounds by increased population density. Pedophilia is inherently riskier than other forms of sex because of the power differential between the persons involved. The power of the strong to abuse the weak is automatically greater and the chance of abuse is greater.

Pedophilia offends the norms of American society. It offends the idea of Liberty itself because a child is not truly free to make choices. It offends the idea of fair play because a child cannot be said to be an equal partner in any such relationship. It offends the idea of consensual sex. A child has not entered puberty and does not experience a sex drive. There is a famous statement or principle attributed to Hume to the effect that you cannot get an ought from an is. What this means is that all the facts in the world do not imply any value judgment. Judgments arise from the emotional reaction that people have to the facts. These are emotional and driven by our needs and instincts. A child has not yet felt the need for sex which develops at puberty. The presence of this need is prerequisite to any assumption of meaningful consent to sex. A child cannot understand or desire sex enough to consent to it because a child has no sex drive. Pedophilia offends many of the basic beliefs which are normative of American society. It subtly implies the ability of the strong to exploit the weak, the right of the powerful to own the powerless. The idea is as outrageous as slavery and wife-beating. It smacks of the abuse of power. Pedophilia offends, by implication, the Civil Religion of the United States, the principles advanced in the Declaration of Independence. These reasons are sufficient in themselves to justify it being illegal regardless of any possible psychological trauma inherent in the behavior. The assumption of a right to engage in sex with a child too young to comprehend or in any sense meaningfully consent to sex is implicitly an assumption of a right due to a position of power over others, that is antithetical to the principles of equality and personal sovereignty on which the US is founded. Pedophilia is as fundamentally an Un-American act as slavery, polygamy, abortion, or the right of a husband to beat or kill his wife. It is a pecking order behavior carried to the level of implicit abuse of others. This having been established it is now useful to look at the possibility that pedophilia is not automatically traumatic to children.

There are several different possible causes of emotional trauma to someone who experiences a behavior which is not normative for the culture in which they live.

1) The behavior itself is traumatic.

2) The person involving them in the behavior has failed to norm properly suggesting a lack of maturity and impulse control which makes the behavior inherently more traumatic and potentially dangerous than it would be with a normal individual.

3) The person involving them in the behavior is ashamed and guilty of the behavior and conveys this traumatic sense of shame and un-worth to them.

4) The person involving them in the behavior threatens them and abuses them to conceal the behavior.

5) Other people insist that the behavior itself is traumatic and insist on their being traumatized and crippled by the behavior. This includes injury caused by attributing trauma caused by 2, 3, and 4 to cause1 thus failing to treat the real causes of trauma properly.

Number 5 increases the severity of trauma originating from causes 2, 3, and 4. Number 5 creates trauma on its own. Whenever public passion becomes excited about a given behavior, that passion and crusade in its own destructive power will likely cause more injury to the individuals involved than the behavior itself. Unless people are allowed to thoughtfully discuss all of these causes and determine which are truly applicable, cause #5, the assumption that 1 is the cause can only increase the injury to the child involved. The witch-hunters refuse any possible cause but 1 and thus show a real lack of any concern for the welfare of the children.

Theoretically and historically there is little reason to assume any inherent negative effects on children from pedophilia. While the possibility of such a inherent harm cannot be dismissed out of hand, there is no compelling evidence for its existence. Insisting that children become traumatized by a behavior which may not have traumatized them is a form of child abuse. Attacking people who bring such unpopular facts into the discussion is no different than insisting that communion wafers bleed when pricked and burning anyone who suggests otherwise at the stake. In terms of evolution, sexual bonding is a human behavior which provides strong social bonds and helps survival. In a risky environment, a child bonded sexually with an adult would have preference and survival advantages. This hypothesis has support in the behavior of Bonobo’s commonly called pygmy chimpanzees these apes are now considered the closest living species to the common ancestor of humans and great apes. Adult juvenile sex is a common behavior in the species.

There is a great deal of scientific evidence that human beings need physical contact with other human beings to be healthy. Mensa has a special interest group or SIG about hugging. Studies have shown that hugging others several times a day promotes general health both physical and emotional. A woman with injuries to her central nervous system showed signs of response to touch. There is apparently a fine system of nerves in the skin independent of the central nervous system which responds to touch and stimulates various cellular processes. Studies of rats have shown that infant rats denied normal licking and nuzzling by mother rats failed to express various genes necessary for proper development. There is a story of an experiment done by the Nazis in Germany attempting to raise infants with only feeding and changing of clothing and without hugging, kissing, and caressing. According to the story all the children died. There is a lot of scientific evidence that suggests that children need, desperately need, a healthy diet of hugs, kisses and caresses to develop properly. Public hysteria over pedophilia leads to fear of being seen as a pedophile whenever you hug or caress or kiss a child. Denying children such necessary signs of affection is literally the physical abuse of children. The public hysteria over pedophilia can potentially result in the systematic physical abuse of children in our society by denying them the necessary physical contact they need from adults as all physical adult-child contact is increasingly considered to be evidence of pedophilia.

Possibly the most famous example of pedophilia in history is the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad’s youngest wife was 7 years old. This sounds strange to us in context of our times, but it is useful to put it in context of the legal codes of the time. Jewish Law as expressed in the Talmud requires that men having sex with children less than 12.5 years old marry them. If the girl is 12.5 or older, the possibility of consent exists and the obligation to marry is not automatically assumed. Marriage has always been an economic partnership. By marrying a child you assume economic responsibility for its support. You guarantee the child a respected status in society. Polygamy was a means of ensuring economic support for widows and orphans in Islamic society. Muhammad’s youngest wife does not seem to have suffered any serious trauma and loss of self respect from being the favorite wife of the most powerful man in her world. His action in marrying her was an example of caring for the families of fellow Muslims slain in war. Marriage and sex between adults and children are not unknown historically. It is popular in the modern world to assume that such marriages took place without sex, but reading of original sources does not support this belief. Mahatma Gandhi attributed the small stature of the Indian peoples to the custom of child marriages. This assumption requires an assumption of sex at a young age.

The interested reader may do some research into this area fairly easily. In 1951 a book was written comparing sexual behavior in animal species, and 190 different human societies. It is entitled “Patterns of Sexual Behavior” by Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, and was published by Harper and Brothers. It is very close to being an encyclopedic survey of the available anthropological data at the time. In chapter 9 entitled Self-Stimulation a very large number of societies in which adult child sexual behaviors of a wide variety are discussed as varieties of masturbation. In chapter 10 entitled development in the individual the age at which various societies accept or encourage sexual play in children is discussed. In some societies full sexual intercourse by girls begins as early as 6 with no apparent ill effects. The fact is that adult-juvenile sex has been a part of many human cultures for thousands of years with absolutely no evidence that it is in any way harmful or traumatic to the children involved. The authors conclude in the summary of the chapter on development chapter that there is probably a genetic drive for children to engage in sex play almost as early as they can walk. Far from being inherently traumatic, playing at sex is apparently as much of a normal developmental process as other sorts of play among children.

It should be noted here that saying that children have a probably genetically determined drive to play at sex as they are driven by instinct to play at other adult activities, is not the same as saying that they have an adult sex drive. The physiological changes involved in puberty, the brain, and the hormone system are so radical that the adult sex drive must be considered to be different in kind from any childish instinct towards playing at sex.

A strong case can be made that three of the worlds major religions, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam have recognized adult child sexual unions as legitimate. This does not automatically make them legitimate in the US. All of these religions also recognized slavery, polygamy, and the right of a husband to beat his wife as legitimate as well. Just because something was practiced for thousands of years in various societies in history does not make it right in the US. Most of the societies discussed were relatively low-population density, and in other ways different from the US facing different problems and different environments.

It is important to treat the actual causes of trauma involved in non-normative behaviors not create imaginary causes of trauma and then force children to be traumatized. Discussion of this issue in a forum dedicated to psychology and the law has produced a number of cases in which the victims of pedophilia committed suicide. One such case involved pedophilia within the family. Psychology recognizes this phenomenon as different than pedophilia outside the family. Treatment and handling of this behavior is different than that for pedophilia outside the family. The religious crusaders in this issue are crusading to end this ‘family exception’ to the legal sanctions on pedophilia. The problem is that it is different, a different bond exists between the child and the adult, and the child, feeling responsible for the adult being punished may commit suicide. Increasingly real psychological professionals are being denied the right to treat pedophilia related problems on the basis of science as religious hysteria and a crusading religious inquisition fuel this issue.

There are a number of ways in which children who are victims of pedophilia can be driven to commit suicide by the kind of ‘therapy’ provided by these religious crusaders. First and most obvious is that they can simply to told that they are emotionally crippled and their life is ruined forever so often that they believe it and kill themselves. Second, the ‘therapists’ can fulfill the prophecies of the pedophile about what happens if the children talk about it, making the children feel responsible for the punishment of the adult and causing them to commit suicide. Third, children who do not feel traumatized by the pedophilia but are told that they must be traumatized may conclude that there is something horribly wrong with them for not being what they are supposed to be and be driven to kill themselves.

The belief that cause 1 listed above that juvenile adult sexual contact is inherently traumatic creates the intense emotional abuse of children where suspicion of such contact exists. The belief itself is religious in nature. Society evolved a taboo against this behavior. The taboo became sacred. In order to defend the sacred taboo superstitious beliefs about the inherent nature of the behavior developed. Religious fanatics acting with the power of the government to force their beliefs on defenseless children is a grotesque form of child abuse. This abuse being done by those who believe that they are ‘protecting’ the children. This book respects the efficiency of evolution as a mechanism, and supports the defense of social taboos which have evolved. It does not support abuse of children in defense of religious convictions about the reasons for those taboos.

When the APA attempts to discuss the relevant facts necessary for realistic therapy for children who have been involved in pedophiliac relationships, it is roundly denounced as an organization of pedophiles. The APA published a study called ``A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples'' authored by Bruce Rind, Ph.D., Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman in the July 1998 issue of the APA's Psychological Bulletin. The publication of this study led to a general whipping up of public hysteria so intense that freedom of scientific research into the matter and the development of realistic therapy which is helpful and not harmful to children involved may be crippled for decades.

While child-adult marriage and sex is not unknown. It is not universal or a commonplace of history. Marriage of girls from the age of 8 up is a commonplace of history. This fact raises a question of when it is normal for puberty to begin and if setting the beginning of puberty around 13 is accurate. It has been common among various tribes in Africa for as long as anthropologists have been studying African peoples for young men to be mature enough to go off on their own and build their own homes, plant their own fields, etc. as young as 8. Girls mature sexually earlier than boys in virtually all known societies. In America today it is not unusual for African-American girls to begin showing secondary sexual characteristics as young as 6. This has produced a rash of articles on why early onset puberty is occurring. The most probable explanation is a high fat diet. Fat foods are implicated in the onset of puberty. This is logical in evolutionary theory as population expands with food supply. A rich food supply triggers early puberty to take advantage of it for reproduction. Feed your children a healthy diet, ensure they exercise well, and delay the onset of puberty.

Eight years of age as the earliest age of puberty in girls that shows up fairly consistently. Eight was the age of consent or marriage in many Islamic countries for centuries. Eight was the age of consent in New Jersey up until the 1950s or so. Outside of Africa, the Middle East, and New Jersey, 12 is a more common date for the onset of puberty in girls.

Roman law had girls married at 12. Athenian law required men to marry at 30, but they would not marry a girl older than 15. In the Middle Ages minimum marriageable age was generally 12 or 13 for girls and 14 for boys. During the Renaissance in Italy a girl was considered an old maid if unmarried by 15. The age of consent was 12 in England up through the 1800s. In much of rural America prior to the two World Wars a girl was considered an old maid if not married before 16. Cleopatra vamped Caesar when she was 12 and Napoleons mother had her first child when she was 14.

Ephebephilia, a fancy name for a psychological disorder which does not exist outside of the fevered imagination of a few politically correct fanatics, is a normative behavior throughout most of human history. Again the fact that something was normal in various societies for thousands of years does not necessarily make it acceptable in the US. The modern idea of an age of consent of 16 is probably an artifact of the industrial revolution, the need for more education in the workforce and thus the requirement that girls remain in school longer. It does have some biological justification. Bonobos enter puberty around 7 years of age but females in the wild don’t generally give birth until 13 or 14 years old. Aristotle was of the opinion that if a girl younger than 17 had a child the child was likely to be weaker than a child born to an older stronger mother. Among many peoples of the Middle East where marriage of young girls was practiced it was also customary to sacrifice the first born to the gods. Economically this would have removed a burden of weaker children from the support of the tribe. Some modern scientific studies suggest that girls should not have children prior to 16 or 17 years of age. Somehow in nature pregnancy does not occur soon after puberty there is some natural mechanism which tends to delay pregnancy until puberty has passed. The phenomenon is referred to as adolescent sterility and is discussed in chapter 10 of “Patterns of Sexual Behavior”.

As far as the psychological effects of having sex after puberty is concerned, there is no indication at all that it is inherently traumatic. Aristotle is of the opinion that you must keep girls of the age of 14 or so under very close surveillance as they are eager to use what they have acquired. The general assumption in the Classical period seems to have been that if you left a pubescent girl alone and unsupervised with an adult male she would drag him off and have her way with him. No one seems to have expected a normal man under such circumstances to resist too strongly.

It is fairly universal in all human societies that girls develop sexually earlier, and where societies have different rules for different sexes, the rules are generally stricter with regards to female sexual behavior than male. “Patterns of Sexual Behavior” notes that among chimpanzees and humans the male seems to not be capable of performing sexually without some tutoring and training, but that the female apparently can. In nature apparently females are more sexually aggressive than males and quite likely to be the ones to initiate sexual behavior and guide the male in what and how to do it.

The assumption that there is anything inherently traumatic about sex after the onset of puberty has no compelling factual evidence to support it. Any and all trauma associated with such an occurrence can be legitimately attributed to the other 4 causes of trauma from non-normative behaviors listed above. Nonetheless even well known and supposedly courageous media spokespersons like Bill O’Reilly react like docile lapdogs when guests make statements saying that a 14 year old boy having sex with an older woman is an emotional train wreck which will destroy his life.

This public hysteria can only generate lots of trauma through cause number 5 above, create a storm of lawsuits, first against the people, schools, etc. who can be implausibly blamed for not preventing the occurrence, and later against the psychologists involved in telling the victims they were traumatized. This hysteria is likely to lead to psychologists suffering punitive lawsuits just as the false memory hysteria did. As the facts come out and it becomes more and more obvious that much of the trauma which children suffer as the result of pedophilia is due to the ‘therapy’ they received, lawsuits against the therapists and institutions involved will multiply. Many of the same lawyers and people currently involved in suing the Catholic Church for trauma will soon be suing various mental health professionals and organizations for trauma. Lawsuits look for money and will follow any promise of money.

Statutory rape is the older, more mature and powerful individual taking advantage of the immaturity and ignorance of younger and weaker members of society. It is a kind of abuse of power and authority, again an implicitly abusive exercise of pecking order power or authority. As such it is legitimately a criminal act. Calling all criminal acts mental illnesses is nonsense. Psychology should be concerned with classifying and describing real mental illnesses, and hopefully finding means of successfully treating them, not with generating pseudo-scientific rationalizations to justify the criminal code. Many actions which are not the result of mental illness are quite legitimately illegal and this applies to sexual behaviors as well as armed robbery and burglary. There is a very real danger in doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If in the future the wrong reasons are proven to be wrong, then the right which was justified by them will be assumed to be wrong.

Maintaining that pedophilia should be outlawed because it is a mental illness which automatically traumatizes children involved is a dangerous policy. It is almost certain that science will eventually prove the argument to be false. This will lead to the legalization of pedophilia because the reasons advanced for outlawing it were proven false. It is better to outlaw pedophilia because for an adult to have sex with a child is for an adult to exercise a kind of power over another person which is so implicitly abusive as to be an Un-American act. The argument cited in the section of this book on Why Marriage was Invented advanced by the Supreme Court for outlawing Polygamy in Utah applies here as well. Pedophiliac relationships reinforce the pecking order or patriarchal system which is antithetical to the principles on which the US is founded. These reasons are sufficient to justify outlawing pedophilia. The storm of hysteria and pseudo-science which is currently sweeping the nation is unnecessary and dangerous. Responsible Citizens should look at these storms of public hysteria as dangerous to the public welfare and not encourage them.

The idea that people are still children after puberty is false. People are young adults after puberty. During this period their brains undergo a sudden spurt of growth which must be intended to allow them to adapt to the demands of their new status. If society prevents them from learning and adapting as nature intended during this period of brain development, it is possible that they never will adapt properly to their role as adults. Society should realize that young adults are young adults and not children. Legitimate social restraints on their natural desire for sexual activity because it is unwise at this point in their lives should not be justified by claiming that they are biologically children. Nor is attempting to keep them in a prolonged state of childhood until they graduate from college in their best interest.

In every popular crusade in addition to the noble motives publicly alleged by the promoters of the crusade, there is always a mixture of the normal human desire to dictate to others how they should live for their own good. Such a politically correct moral dictatorship is in fact an establishment of religion. Public policy and law should accept these facts. The rights to privacy, free practice of religion, etc. all mandate a minimum interference of the State in such matters. The desire for laws mandating this or that behavior for moral reasons regardless of its association with a theistic belief or not is a violation of separation of church and state as indicated in the discussion of that topic. Manufacturing imaginary reasons like inherent trauma in behaviors not necessarily traumatic is akin to painting a communion wafer with blood to justify burning people at the stake. It is easy to manufacture trauma in human beings and especially in children. People who do it can do so without realizing what they are doing. Driven by strongly held emotional convictions they force these on children and young adults and injure them emotionally. Allowing such people to provide ‘therapy’ to children is as frightening as turning children over to the Spanish Inquisition.

Returning to the role of the Senate. Certainly the last thing that should be done is to insist that the Senate pass more and more restrictive laws every time some new source of public hysteria is created by the popular media. The issue of pedophilia is one of the most delicate of such issues in the US today. Therefore it is one which demands to be challenged by responsible citizens in public debate. The behavior of parents with children and family members nurturing children is opened to hysterical panicked scrutiny by this issue. A panicked scrutiny which has resulted in several cases of innocent people being sent to jail for normal cuddling and hugging necessary to a child’s health. The fundamental rights and dignities of all Citizens are threatened by this hysteria. The hysteria itself promises to create the systematic physical and emotional abuse of children unless checked. These issues make challenging this and all such noble crusades necessary in a free society. In fact, all such crusades threaten the freedoms of the citizens by creating laws in ‘noble’ causes which will destroy traditional freedoms. It is exactly to check such things that the Senate and the Supreme Court exist in our Constitution. Though it is a duty which they frequently fail to discharge properly.