Mainstreaming Pedophilia?

Nope, sorry. Just can't go with this line of thinking, at Ordinary Gentlemen, "Desire and Deviance":

The brief legal justification McArdle offers is why there isn’t a slippery-slope argument to be made here. We are fairly sure as a society, or so at least we tell ourselves, that consent is the operative moral variable in sexual relations, and since the consent of children is understood to be deficient, child pornography is always something akin to rape. So, I don’t think another half-century will bring about the normalization of child pornography, though there have been changes in sexual mores equally strange and sudden in the past. I’m more interested in the way the evolution of views about sexuality can repeat itself. McArdle’s posts, along with the Dan Savage letter she links to, represent the second step in the process of recognizing people who have certain desires as constituting a group. With the caveat that I haven’t undertaken a Foucault-like cultural history of homosexuality, from a survey of medical texts and pre-war analogues to gay rights movements it seems to me that this process occurred in the United States sometime around the middle of the last century with regard to homsexuality.

Of course homosexuality in the sense of same-sex sexual acts has been around at least since Homer and probably much longer, but the notion that there is a class of people who experience permanent desire for members of the opposite sex in a manner analogous to the ordinary kind of love and desire between men and women is relatively recent, even if such people may have always existed (not that the forms of heterosexual attraction are stable throughout time and place; C.S. Lewis once wrote that the idea of romantic love was invented by a group of poets living in 12th-century France, and pace Ovid, I almost believe him). Specifically, while the idea of homosexuality has its origins in the Mollies of the 18th century and the Dandies of the 19th, it required the post-war mania for cataloging and extirpating deviancy by rational-technical means to sunder those terms from broader ideas about decadence, aestheticism, Continentalism and Catholicism, which were occasionally unified and apotheosized in infamous figures like Huysmans. Part of this cataloging and extirpation process was the identification of homosexuals as a sub-set of the population who were like other people except with respect to this single pathology. This made its way into general opinion in odd, quasi-medical ways, but the general sentiment directed towards this newly invented population, I gather, was not unlike the way we feel about pedophiles today: a covert, unspeakable menace threatening our children in the midst of us.

Read the whole thing for context and links.

Call me a "wingnut," or something, but for the life of me, I simply can't make the leap from the increasing social acceptance of homosexuals to the increased social acceptance of pedophiles, practicing criminals or not. (Gee, never did molest a kid, so I guess it's okay if he lusts after 'em all the time -- don't want to judge folks, you know?)

Nope. Just. Can't. Do. It.

And not only that, the analysis ain't so hot either. Name-dropping verbosity, mostly, with some sickening postmodernism thrown in.

E.D Kain's not quite that far gone yet, but he's working on it!