I surmise you meant to say “They were not pedopholes, per se,…”
Frankly, I do not understand your distinction suggesting that a child having reached puberty should be the deciding factor as to whether an act is considered pedophilia and thus inappropriate/wrong. It seems that you are saying that if it happens before puberty, such an act is wrong. I agree. But you also seem to be saying that if an adult has sex with a child who has reached puberty, it isn’t pedophilia. I’m not sure this is the law in the United States, but I’ve seen others on this Board advance this legalistic argument and I find it troubling. Hate to break the news, but some girls reach puberty by age eight or nine. Are you suggesting sex with a child somewhat older that this is not pedophilia or that it is not outrageous? I have seen on this board people argue that adult sex with a teenager is not pedophilia and thus not inherently wrong. More evidence of the creeping moral relativism awash in this nation.
But we tend to lionise individuals who achive great things rather than their works. You don’t think it is at all questionable to make heroes of people who may have been paedophiles?
And if my question is without merit, as so many seem to think, why have so many Gay campaigners cited major historical figures as homosexuals who are admired?
Also, as for people “buying that argument”, you may want to read this article by Peter Tatchell, as an example of someone who receives major mainstream coverage, including regular opinion pieces in British quality newspapers and who was even described as a “Christ-figure” by a former Episcopalian bishop:
I would suggest that when someone with these views becomes “respectable”, there is indeed a danger that such views may become more acceptable in mainstream society.
Such judgment can only be done properly if it considers the context. Someone who was inclined to commit a certain act that was condoned by society may not have done it if it had been considered unacceptable at the time.
I don’t believe their actions were as wrong as, say, someone who molests boys in boarding schools today, now that it’s generally understood to be unacceptable.
I don’t believe “pedophilia” is a legal term at all. It’s a medical term, and it refers to an attraction to prepubescent children.
The legal term may be “sexual misconduct with a minor”, or “sexual assault in the (nth) degree”, or even “rape in the (nth) degree”, or some other phrase depending on your jurisdiction. No such law that I’ve seen has mentioned puberty at all; those crimes are all defined by the age of the participants, and/or the age difference between them.
I will say that it’s not pedophilia. Whether it’s outrageous depends on the individuals involved, but I’d say in general it is.
Whether or not a particular sex act can be called “pedophilia” isn’t the only factor in whether it’s wrong. Taking advantage of a mentally challenged adult, for example, is wrong, but certainly isn’t pedophilia. You can still argue that sex with a teenager is wrong without having to define it as pedophilia.
Furthermore, I don’t think Erwin was saying anything about whether the act is right or wrong, simply that it’s not technically pedophilia. It’s ephebophilia.
I was just saying it is not paedophilia. It is ephebophilia (Thanks Mr2001). Whether it is wrong or not is up to each society to decide, same with paedophilia.
Suppose that, 100 years from now, animal rights activists like PETA have persuaded most of society that their philosophy is correct, and it is no longer considered moral to eat meat or own pets.
Would it be appropriate to condemn all the great thinkers, authors, innovators, and statesmen of the 20th century, simply because they ate meat and owned pets?
I say no, because it’s important to remember their contributions, regardless of how morality might change in the future. Otherwise, we may eventually end up condemning all of history. We really can’t predict what future generations will call normal or abnormal, and if we want the great men of our generation to be remembered, then the least we can do is extend the same courtesy to the great men of the past.
To state the obvious, wealthy ancient Greek men wrote love poems to prepubescent boys.
Leaving aside “perfectly acceptable,” there are few if any time periods where it was considered as heinous as it is now. A man – especially a noble – wanting marriage to a 12 year old girl wouldn’t be thought that unusual in most times and places.
Washington owned slaves. Martin Luther King plagarized his dissertation and cheated on his wife. And on and on.
Do we stop praising Churchhill for fear people will think we condone smoking and drinking?
I prefer my heroes be human; it makes them more heroic, not less.
I don’t believe in heroes. However, I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a pedophile. There is definitly something wrong with having sex with children, but the desire itself does not make one immoral. So far as anyone knows, neither Carrol or Montgomery ever acted inappropriately with children. So, I see no reason to hold their feet to the fire over what they may or may not have been thinking about when they were spankin’ it alone in their beds.
Is anyone citing major historical homos as evidence that having gay sex is okay? If so, then they are committing the same fallacy you are. However, most of the time when I see someone mention a famous, laudable homosexual, it’s to counter the accusation that one cannot be gay and moral at the same time, not to prove that having gay sex is moral. (Which it is, but that needs be proven in other ways.) Now, if someone wanted to use Lewis Carrol to prove that one could be a pedophile and still be moral, he would be a wonderful example, but that would be precisely because he never acted on his desires.
What views, precisely, is that article promoting? That age of consent laws are not as clear cut a case of right and wrong as moralists would like us to believe? I think that would be pretty self-evident, just by referring to the vast disparity in age of consent laws between different nations, or even within the same nation. IIRC, it’s not against the law for a fourteen year old to have sex with a forty year old in Canada. Is Canada a torrid cauldron of sexual immorality because it’s age of consent is four years less than the UKs? Is it immoral to argue that the UK should have age of consent laws more like Canada’s? This is a legitimate issue for debate, I think, and far removed from the issue of sexual predation of underage children.
I thought about that, but the OP mentionned somewhere in the thread that pedophilia was not acepted in the time and place these famous people lived, hence, it was different from, say, owning slaves.
I’m sure you read the article, which referred to a boy being sexually active from the age of eight but finding that sex with another young boy wasn’t a patch on sex with a real man.
That seems to clearly imply that the writer thought that it was acceptable for eight year-olds to have sex.
Maybe you don’t have a problem with that but I have difficulty in taking seriously anyone who advocates sex for eight-year-olds and sex between kids and adults and then claims that there is not predation.
So you need the approval or disapproval of your peers to tell you whether molesting boys is wrong, do you?
So, by your logic, presumably groups of soldiers committing rape should perhaps not be judged too harshly as they were in a gang of men who found that behaviour acceptable. The same guys very probably wouldn’t have raped girls in front of neighbours in their home towns.
Seems to me that you and some other posters “standards of the time” argument is suspiciously like saying that whatever others let you away with is okay.
I don’t believe that anyone who held people in slavery should ever be held up as admirable. You might recognise their military or political tactical abilities - but that doesn’t change the fact that slave-owners were not good people.
Oh come on. You are taking His quote out on context. You know as well as I do that Jesus just wanted children come unto Him for a good moisturizer. The desert is dry and nothing works better than young semen. It didn’t have anything to do with sex. Same thing for the little squirtter girls.
So, are you of the position that we should admire the content of the Declaration of Independence and Alice in Wonderland, and be impressed by how the battles of Trenton and Alamein were conducted, but we should demean and deprecate the persons responsible for the achievement, because of defective morals?
Also, on the other line of questioning: Mr.2001 is right, pedophilia is the sexual paraphilia that has prepubescent children as its objects, it is NOT a “legal term”. ‘Sexual misconduct with a minor’ is a legal term, and ‘minor’ is itself a legal/social term.
That even having pedophilic or ephebophilic ideation should be considered in itself "evil"is a matter of social mores(*) ; however, that acting upon it may be harmful is strongly supported by observation, so it is then encoded into the legal concept of “Age of Consent”, under which “minors” up to a certain age (somewhere between 14 to 18 in most Western countries) are off-limits.
(*Is it evil for some Japanese cartoonist to do a porn parody of CardCaptors, where all the characters are somewhere between 10 and 14?)
Generally, I think that all achievements should be considered in their own terms without ascribing great moral virtue to the achievers.
However, it seems the norm to celebrate the individuals for their achievements. That in itself, is always a deeply flawed method of recognising things of which we approve, as there is a danger of holding these people up as role models for children.
But, given that we do tend to lionise individuals for their good works, there is a case for revising our evaluations of their characters.
I’m no fan of Montgomery. His ineptitude most likely resulted in the death of 10s of thousands of my former countrymen. You can be the judge on Operation Market Garden. But the above assertion without evidence really rankles me. To suggest that anyone is a child molester is a serious charge indeed, and if you have no evidence, than you are merely the lowest form of a scandelmonger.
No, it seems to clearly imply that the kid the writer was interviewing thought it was acceptable. If someone got an interview with Osama bin Laden, would that imply to you that the writer supports terrorism?
How much weight you give to the argument is up to you, and it’s clear that the kid being interviewed had a lot of personal troubles entirely apart from his sex life, so it’s questionable how much weight to give his insistance that he knew what he was doing and that he wasn’t being harmed by it. However, I think it is none-the-less interesting that at least some of the very people this proposed law is meant to protect disagree with the law. That doesn’t necessarily mean the law should be scrapped or re-written, but with any issue, I think it’s valuable to have as wide an array of input as possible, especially from those most directly affected by the proposed legislation.
I think you would be well served by learning the difference between your peers and your society, as this entire post is an egregious mis-representation of Mr2001’s argument. Behaviors that, with the advantage of hindsight, we can recognize as being harmful and destructive were not necessarily so obviously negative at the time they were being practiced. Today, we can easily see the immense evil of slavery, but 200 years ago, it was a topic of bitterest debate. Are you saying that, in the 19th century, half the population of the United States was either irredeemably evil or terminally stupid? If not, how do you explain the fact that so many people did not have a problem with slavery at the time? Morality simply is not an absolute. It changes over the course of years, and to judge a person in a distant period of history by the standard of today is grossly unfair.
