Stop the man-boy love junk

T

IME

MAGAZINE has started its annual speculation about its Person of the Year. I asked my listeners who they would pick, locally and nationally.

Seal Team 6, that got Bin Laden, is the runaway national leader. Locally, even though Joey Vento was loved by listeners, my audience's attention was focused on a college town four hours away.

Most of my listeners believe that the "Person of the Year" should be the alleged victim of Jerry Sandusky who persisted in reporting Sandusky until authorities finally moved on it and started the probe that led to his arrest.

This victim clearly had to overcome not only his own fears, but the system that could not or would not stop Sandusky. Sandusky seems to buy into the idea that he had loving relationships with these kids, and, if the truth be told, probably believes that even any alleged sexual acts were loving and consensual.

This viewpoint would be right at home and receive a safe harbor of alleged research among a cadre of academics and professors. That's right, there is a growing number of mainstream people on campuses maintaining that this outcry over Sandusky is part of an over-reaction and hysteria over adults having sex with kids.

These so-called scholars have been trying to normalize pedophilia by claiming that our moral and legal outrage over this behavior results in a mob mentality in our society that does not exist in other cultures. I think the people proposing this dangerous nonsense are in the same league as Holocaust deniers and do not deserve the fig leaf of academic freedom to pursue their mission to normalize and legalize sex between adults and kids.

Probably the document that they most often cite is "A Meta Analytic Examination of Child Abuse Using College Samples," a collection of 59 unvetted "studies" that former Temple Professor Bruce Rind used in arguing that when adults have sex with kids the "negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense." The reason this evil masquerading as science reached me (and resulted in Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature condemning all this) was that the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association Journal published Rind's findings.

After Rind, I turned my attention to Cornell Professor Ellis Hanson, who teaches courses like "The Sexual Child."

Henson was only too happy to support Rind and say that sex with kids would be fine if we did not create a sexual hysteria over it. He cited societies that initiate males into sex by having them have sex with men. He still teaches these things at an Ivy League school.

There is even a Penn State connection to this academic propaganda factory. In early 2001, Penn State paid for and hosted Patrick Califia Rice, a champion of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which is the biggest proponent of the legalization of sex between men and boys. Of course, deposed Penn State President Graham Spanier argued that the first amendment protected speakers like Califia.

Spanier and his ilk hide behind the First Amendment because they don't want to challenge evil. I wonder if Sandusky attended the event and was inspired by Califia.

By the way, Bob Costas would probably have been better served if he asked Sandusky not if he was a pedophile but a "minor-attracted" individual. That's the lingo used by outfits like B4U-Act, a Maryland-based organization of psychiatric practicioners. The group recently held a conference at which, according to Liberty Counsel Action's Matt Barber, the agenda was to strategize on how to push to get pedophilia removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

As we've seen in the case of Sandusky, pedophilia is at best a mental disorder or sickness that murders the souls of young children. We don't need a doctorate to know that it's wrong. America is not engaging in mob mentality in demanding that Penn State clean house. Let's make sure that we challenge all the academic hideouts of those who want to prey on our kids.