The Next Taboo

Recently I speculated on VP as to which would be the next taboo to fall in our culture, a culture which seems determined to topple every taboo, especially sexual taboos, that it can find.

I suggested it would be the taboo against incestuous marriage, but mentioned that the taboos against polyamory (group marriage) and pedophilia (sex with children) are also good candidates.

As if the folks at The Federalist were reading VP (They're smart people so maybe they are!) a piece appeared soon thereafter by Spencer Lindquist introducing us to the thinking of a SUNY Fredonia professor named Stephan Kershnar.

Professor Kershnar is an apologist for pedophilia, and he's not the only one in academia who harbors his perverse views. He may, though, be one of the most outspoken.

Lindquist posts a Twitter video in which Kershnar makes the claim that, as Lindquist describes it:

an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.

Lindquist adds that,

It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”

Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.

What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.

Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids.

He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.”

There's much more about this at the link, including a discussion of other attempts, both subtle and unsubtle, to normalize pedophilia and three things those who see this as an evil, which it surely is, can do to fight it.

I'd like to pose this question, though: How can people in a secular society, a society that has abandoned all objective moral authority, call this, or anything else, evil?

How can one who believes that we're simply the product of blind, impersonal forces plus chance, declare Kershnar to be morally reprehensible? Where does moral right and wrong come from in a Darwinian world?

Secular folk might find what Kershnar is advocating to be distasteful, of course, but why, exactly, is it immoral? What makes it morally wrong?

The secular man has no good answer to these questions. Hemingway expressed the secular, naturalistic view this way: "Right is whatever you feel good after. Wrong is whatever you feel bad after."

In the absence of God, Hemingway is correct, and if a pedophile feels good after molesting a child then there's nothing wrong with it.

If one is a secularist and one finds child molestation morally abhorrent then one has two options: Either shed your abhorrence or shed your atheism. You can't have both and claim to be rational.