HIGH-PROFILE MEN CAN’T SEEM TO STOP DEFENDING THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN
One especially disturbing twist of the Epstein story? All the famous guys insisting pedophilia is no big deal
In September 2020, prominent MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman made a clarification on his personal website regarding his beliefs about sexual contact with children, under the heading “Sex Between an Adult and a Child Is Wrong.” “Many years ago, I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it,” he wrote. “Through personal conversations in recent years I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically [sic]. I think adults should not do that.”
That Stallman, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, took so long to arrive at an ethical norm so obvious and basic that most of us hold it intuitively beggars belief, and his previous stances make for queasy reading. In a 2003 post, he said, “Everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately,” adding in a chilling parenthesis that “some people are ready earlier.” Three years later, he wrote that he is “skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.” In 2013, he reiterated this position: “There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.”
It’s unbelievable that a publicly renowned scientist ever made such irresponsible and illogical claims, but he’s not as much of an anomaly as you’d hope. In 2013, famed biologist and atheist figurehead Richard Dawkins told the U.K. Times magazine that he can’t find it in himself to condemn “mild pedophilia,” which he says doesn’t do “lasting harm,” comments he’s reiterated several times (in 2006, he also wrote that the Catholic Church has been “unfairly demonized” over the issue of child sex abuse). And in 2017, flailing far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos expressed gratitude to a Catholic priest who had sex with him as a teenager, saying he “wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him” and defended sexual contact between adults and “somebody who is 13 years old and sexually mature.”
The list goes on, too. In 2014, millionaire novelist John Grisham spoke out in defense of the “60-year-old white men in prison [for accessing child pornography] who’ve never harmed anybody” and drew a distinction between “real pedophiles” and those who look at videos of “16-year-old wannabe hookers.” In 1997, lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz argued that “it is doubtful that sanctions should apply” to people who have sex with “teenagers above the age of puberty” and that the age of consent should be lowered to 15 as an “appropriate compromise.” Academics like Ken Plummer and Philip Tromovitch have also claimed that “pedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males” and that pedophilic action doesn’t harm children. And recently, British socialite Lady Colin Campbell opined that soliciting sex from minors is “not the same as pedophilia” and that “there’s a difference between a minor and a child” — statements issued in defense of Jeffrey Epstein, a man who abused dozens of girls, some as young as 14, when he was in his 50s and 60s.
Source: Mel Magazine by Madeleine Holden