The American Spectator
by Peter Roff
5/10/2018
Excerpts:
Sooner or later the unthinkable becomes acceptable and staunchly defended.
You must hand it to the people who are bent on upending societal norms. They’re clever, very clever to the point they can turn black to white and up to down while the rest of us stand on the sidelines wondering what happened and how we got there.
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most powerful intellects to ever serve in the world’s greatest deliberative body, famously described the phenomenon as “defining deviancy down” — the idea that each generation is more tolerant than the one that preceded it of behaviors considered outside the norm. So far we haven’t hit bottom — and possibly never will — but we’re running out of things to normalize.
Some standards still exist, thank goodness, which is why New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned late Monday after it was alleged he’d been physically abusive to women with whom he’d been involved and called one of them, a Sri Lankan, his “brown slave” while demanding she call him “master.”
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What brings this to mind is an essay published in the New York Times in October 2014 that, for one reason or another, is suddenly making the rounds on social media. In it Margo Kaplan, at the time an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Law, argues for treating pedophilia as a disease rather than a crime.
“By some estimates,” she wrote, “1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse.”
It’s a sophisticated construct. Take something we find abhorrent like sex between adults and children, argue without providing real evidence the impulse leading to such conduct is more prevalent than we realize, and tack on for good measure it is our Neanderthal-like attitudes toward said impulse that produces an effect opposite of what society intends. Say it often enough and pretty soon you’re beginning to win the argument: People who commit crimes should be punished, people with a disease should not. They deserve our compassion and understanding because they are really not responsible for what they do.
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