That whole “age of consent” concept is getting to be a real hang-up for liberals, and not just the fringe wacko freeze-dried hippie judge types. It’s been nibbling at the edges of elite liberal thought since their good friend Roman Polanski got in a spot of bother with an underage girl, and was obliged to haul his prodigious film-making talents to Europe, to elude knuckle-dragging American justice.
But the Left’s discomfort with age of consent and statutory rape has been bubbling for a long time, leaving the rest of us a bit shell-shocked when Roman Polanski hit the headlines a while back, and suddenly much of celebrity and academic liberaldom was stammering that it wasn’t really “rape-rape.” This is a philosophy they’d been working up for a long time. Talking about Polanski gave them a chance to share it with the rest of us; some liberals tripped over their own tongues in their eagerness to do so.
Pedophilia chic, of the variety on display in Miley Cyrus’ infamous VMA appearance, and the mad dash to put morning-after birth control pills in the hands of preteen girls are part of the process. The overall goal is to separate kids from their families. Sexualizing children is one important tactic. Denying parents any sort of sovereign authority over increasingly young children is another. If a 14-year-old girl cannot legally consent to sex with a middle-aged man, it means her parents still have authority to make decisions for her, and the acolytes of the Total State don’t like that one little bit.
As with much of the sexual revolution, the language of empowerment – the girl having “as much control of the situation as the teacher who raped her” – is used to mask a process that ends with forlorn dependency. Home and family are strongholds of independence. The Left doesn’t think anyone except the ruling class should have castles.