Jennifer Roback Morse May 1, 2024 at National Catholic Register
Editor’s Note: Read with care as comments made by TV host Bill Maher are graphic and offensive to some.
If you haven’t seen talk show host Bill Maher’s recent monologue calling out the pedophilia problem in Hollywood, you really should take the eight and a half minutes to do so.
I’m glad someone finally said the sexual exploitation of children is wrong, and that Hollywood’s complicity and hypocrisy are appalling. However, the problem is deeper than Maher thinks. In my opinion, pedophilia is baked into the core principles of the sexual revolution. The potential for full-on acceptance of pedophilia has been latent from the very beginning of this ideology.
Here is what I mean.
Sexual revolutionaries basically tell people they can do whatever they want sexually, without any negative results. Nothing bad will happen to you or anyone around you. The old-fashioned, out-of-date taboos are the real problem, filling people with unnecessary, irrational and repressive guilt.
Advocates of the revolution seldom blurt this out, as it would be too obviously ridiculous. But when the typical advocate is pressed, this belief will surface in some form or fashion.
What’s the connection with pedophilia? Sex makes babies. The social expectations, rules, and yes, taboos, around sexual activity have consequences for children.
Pre-sexual revolution social rules around sex increased the chances that children would have lifelong access to both parents. In the new taboo-free society we’ve created for ourselves, many children don’t even know who their parents are, much less have stable relationships with both of them.
To accommodate our new beliefs about sex, we have had to revise our beliefs about children. Advocates of the New Sexual World Order suggest that children are not as helpless, dependent and needy as we supposed.
Some of these intellectual fathers and mothers of the sexual revolution held that children are “sexual beings from birth.” People like Alfred Kinsey and Wilhelm Reich suggested that kids be given judgment-free space and time to explore their sexuality with their peers, without shame or guilt. Reich advocated for children to be provided with their own apartments for this purpose. The idea that society should “protect childhood innocence” becomes no more than a relic from a benighted era.
This new understanding of childhood offers very different answers to the questions of what children really need from adult society in general and from their parents in particular. Guiding children from innocent helpless dependence to mature independence is no longer necessary, in this view. “Kids know what they need.” “Follow the child’s lead.”