Okay, so Britain has gotten around to sorting out gay marriage, which is good. However, the Tories are in total revolt, which is less good. To state my own position, I believe that marriage is very important, very much to be supported, I do believe that it has been under systematic attack, which has had the most terrible effects, and I also believe, along with Douglas Murray that gay marriage, has absolutely nothing to do with attacking marriage per se. If anything, it provides a basis for rebuilding its importance. So I am very glad to see that it has gotten done, and we can now move on.
Now, given the precarious state of things in Britain, stories like this are not helping matters. When members of UKIP say that there is a direct link between homosexuality and paedophilia, it would be a damn sight easier to combat this sinister nonsense if you did not have lesbian websites like After Ellen defending an eighteen year old raping a fourteen year old. The argument they are seriously advancing is that one should ask the fourteen year old and listen to her… I wonder if they are listening to themselves. It’s a matter of terrible fact that abused children can often say that they love the perpetrator,
I’ll quote from the FBI’s Lanning Report on child abuse:
There is another myth that is still with us and is far less likely to be discussed. This is the myth of the child victim as a completely innocent little girl walking down the street minding her own business. It may be more important to dispel this myth than the myth of the evil offender, especially when talking about the sexual exploitation of children and child sex rings. Child victims can be boys as well as girls, and not all victims are little “angels.”
Society seems to have a problem dealing with any sexual abuse case in which the offender is not completely “bad” or the victim is not completely “good.” Child victims who, for example, simply behave like human beings and respond to the attention and affection of offenders by voluntarily and repeatedly returning to the offender’s home are troubling. It confuses us to see the victims in child pornography giggling or laughing. At professional conferences on child sexual abuse, child prostitution is almost never discussed. It is the form of sexual victimization of children most unlike the stereotype of the innocent girl victim. Child prostitutes, by definition, participate in and often initiate their victimization.
Furthermore child prostitutes and the participants in child sex rings are frequently boys. One therapist recently told me that a researcher’s data on child molestation were misleading because many of the child victims in question were child prostitutes. This implies that child prostitutes are not “real” child victims. In a survey by the Los Angeles Times, only 37 percent of those responding thought that child prostitution constituted child sexual abuse (Timnik, 1985.) Whether or not it seems fair, when adults and children have sex, the child is always the victim.
My emphasis. And it gets to the point. If you have Attained The Age Of Reason, it’s your responsibility to regulate your conduct around children, not theirs. If a 14 year old ‘comes on to you’ – which children will sometimes do, when they are playing at being adults – it is your responsibility to laugh it off, or otherwise avoid it. To do otherwise is rape.
Incidentally, please read Lolita on this subject. Humbert Humbert’s official excuse is that he was seduced by Delores Haze, something Nabokov got spot on. There really isn’t any justification for this sort of thing.
Which brings me to something that the 50,000 people+who apparently don’t see a problem here, have not bothered to ask themselves. Let me be charitable and assume that this is some sort misguided defence of gay rights. Have they bothered to ask themselves the sort of rhetorical weapon they are handing to homophobes? Here‘s the Daily Mail’s take on it if you want to get an idea.
I wish that this were an isolated case. But according to Douglas Murray, this sort of insanity has happened before.
in a 1997 letter to the Guardian this same Peter Tatchell wrote that “several of my friends — gay and straight, male and female — had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused…While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.”
Lovely.
I support gay rights, gay marriage and gay adoption, and I could give you all the reasons I do so and all the research to back it. But the Gay Rights movement is going to have to get real about this. If they persist in defending the indefensible, they will be indefensible against an inevitable backlash.
UPDATE: Some people get it.
I’m pissed off that everyone is jumping on the gay bandwagon. As a lesbian, I wanted this to be a gay issue. It’s not. I wanted to support a fellow lesbian. I can’t. They headlines are misleading. Kaitlyn is not being punished for being a lesbian. She’s being punished for having sex with a minor as an adult. Stop complicating it by trying to make it a gay issue. We have enough problems without the rest of the country thinking we want special rights to have sex with children.
[…]
Kaitlyn Hunt is not lesbian hero. She is not a gay martyr. She’s an 18 year old who made a bad, perhaps uninformed, decision. Getting in trouble for finger f*cking your underage girlfriend in the school bathroom is not a noble cause.
Incidentally: Islamic fanatics in this country actually do want the right to have sex with 9 year olds. Meanwhile – I wish I could say I was surprised – Ed Brayton is siding with the perp. Granted, he is buying the b.s. line that was put forward at the start, but – come on. Just take a moment to listen to the parents of the victim. Even with the reporter’s grating style, the parents honesty and pain still comes across.
According to the affadavit:
Detective Shepherd] asked Kaitlyn if she knew it was wrong to have sex with [Smith] due to [Smith] being 14 years old. Kaitlyn stated that she did not think about it because [Smith] acted older.
That’s textbook pedophile rationalisation. It is flat out of Lolita.
