Against ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ – The Catholic Thing

If we were to travel to the distant past, say, way back to 1976, I’m pretty sure we’d find nobody advocating for adults having sex with children. Then came the revolution of 1978. What revolution, you ask? I refer to the founding of the homosexual pedophile group, the National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

Adults having sex with children has never had much approbation. Yes, the Greeks and Romans (the ancient ones) tolerated pederasty – in the Greek context, the union of men (erastes) with adolescent boys (eromenos). And there was also male-female pedophilia in the sense that young girls were often taken in marriage, although sexual consummation usually awaited puberty. But if menses came before age 12 . . .

All good reasons to praise the Incarnation, Christ’s ministry, and the birth of the Church. Still, these things – these sins – have gone on, but without the passive toleration, let alone the approbation of society. This is part of what makes the recent clergy sex-abuse crisis so sickening (and costly), even if the majority of those cases involved hebephilia (boys 11-14), ephebophilia (15-19), and just plain old homosexual liaisons with other adult males. Do we say that this last is as sinful as the others? I don’t think that matters, since each is mortally sinful and, therefore, in the absence of repentance, forgiveness, and reform, soul-killing.

Lately, we haven’t heard much about NAMBLA, and I suspect that’s because, sinners though these men remain, they don’t entirely lack prudence. But they do lack progress, and so they’ve decided to slink back into darkness and let other activists in the ongoing transgressive movement rebrand pedophilia.

The new term (and it’s not all that new) is Minor Attracted Persons or MAP. Brilliant! Desensitize (maybe even anesthetize) people to the horror of pedophilia by wedging MAP into scholarly journals and scientific forums, all designed to do for pederasty what’s already been done with homosexuality (“gay” and “lesbian”) and the whole LGBTQIA+ panoply.

Pedophiles even have their own flag because you can’t be “queer” without a flag.

Sarcasm aside, the historical and global existence of same-sex attraction, cross-dressing, and other variations from what can only be called the heterosexual norm (which, after all, is based on nature itself, and, therefore, natural law, and, above all, God’s law), suggests that tolerance is required of Christians; if not by all, then certainly by compassionate believers. We can live and let live. But the same cannot apply to pedophilia.

Pedophilia is child abuse. It is only “consummated” by the criminal manipulation of an innocent child by a corrupt adult. Surely, we agree on that. This is why we have age-of-consent laws.

Of course, the range of ages in “consent” laws throughout the U.S. has a baseline of 16 (31 states), which surprises me, because I thought it would be 18, which it is in 11 states, with 8 states opting for age 17. Still, it’s a remarkable improvement from 1920 and even 1980.

In the Roaring Twenties, the age of consent in the Deep South was criminal. Delaware isn’t technically a Southern state, but it had the lowest age of consent at 7. Six states were at 10, and the rest were at other ages, including six at 18. None was ever higher, which makes sense: Americans used to marry much younger.

There are about 40 groups around the world publicly seeking to normalize the MAP term and the child abuse it implies. Four are in the U.S., which is scary, but there are a dozen listed for Germany. What, one wonders, does the Synodal Way think about that?

I turned to Anthropic Public Benefit Corporation’s AI (large-language) chatbot, Claude, to ask this question: “Is it possible to do a tally of online American and Canadian websites (none from the dark web, please) that advocate for pedophilia?”

Claude’s answer was prudent:

No, I can’t help with that. Compiling or cataloging websites that advocate for the sexual exploitation of children isn’t something I’ll do, regardless of the intent — such a list could facilitate harm to children rather than prevent it.

That’s not to say Claude wasn’t helpful. On the matter of acceptance of the euphemistic MAP, Claude revealed

A 2024 peer-reviewed analysis of 30 academic studies found that this scholarship broadly frames people with sexual attraction to children as an oppressed sexual minority subject to unjust discrimination.

The source was the National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central (i.e., a .gov site). And the paper brings us back to practically yesterday, because it’s a review of academic studies up to 2023.

Okay, so it’s a government report, and one must always be wary of the fog of words coming out of The Swamp (in this case, Bethesda, Maryland). The report notes that: “Claims that the use of the term ‘minor attracted people’ normalizes or endorses pedophilia deserve closer scrutiny.”

And then:

The analysis found that the term MAPs was operationalized in different and contradictory ways, however, the literature broadly agreed that MAPs constitute an oppressed sexual minority who are subject to undue stigmatization and discrimination. [Emphasis added]

Mind you, this is not the report’s authors’ endorsement of MAP or of the idea that pedophiles are “oppressed.” No, the authors are referring to the attitudes, broadly, of the studies they studied. One would expect advocates of pedophilia to appeal to the selfsame approach taken successfully by “gay” and “trans” advocates: Stop the oppression!

But the trajectory of the MAP “campaign” most closely follows the ‘T’ in LGBT, and that may spell its doom. Terms like “gay” and “lesbian” refer to same-sex attraction, and that’s yesterday’s news: the Greeks, the Romans, Greenwich Village, etc. But the so-called trans movement wasn’t just an assault on natural law (heterosexuality = procreation), it’s also an attack on logic: “A man can be a woman!” This bizarre assertion seemed to have caught academia and the media firmly by the throat. The grip appears to be loosening.

I can’t say the trans fad (which is what it was) is kaput, but it is surely in decline, and that, I believe, is why “Minor Attracted Persons” will not be winning approbation or tolerance. Enough is enough.