In this episode Trent reviews a recent Washington Post editorial that defends exposing children to sexual perversion at Pride parades and then discusses popular academic books that argue for the normalcy of sexualizing children.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
There are some topics I really don’t want to talk about, and the topic for today’s episode is one of them. But I feel that it’s important to talk about because protecting children’s welfare should be of supreme importance to any civilized society. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about the disturbing escalation in our culture when it comes to sexualizing children. Crimes against children, in general, make me angry. They make me sad. To tie this into something like abortion, for example, it’s something I don’t want to talk about. It’s ugly. It’s gross. But you can’t ignore it because it still happens on a very large scale. And we ought to summon our strength, there but for the grace of God go I, and do what we can to protect children from harm. So whether it’s unborn children who would be aborted, born children who would be sexually exploited, that’s what I want to talk about today.
And what motivated me to talk about this… I’m not going to talk a lot about this particular item, but it did motivate me. You might’ve heard about this. There was an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago on pride, taking children to pride parades, gay pride parades. And it says, “Yes, kink belongs at pride, and I want my kids to see it.” So it’s about a mother and her transgender wife, I guess, is her biological husband who presents himself as a woman, and taking their children to the pride events where there is sexual debauchery on display.
There is a larger program here that’s being hinted at, which is the destruction of the innocence of children and the reduction of sex to something that is a mere transaction, something that’s a mere pleasurable exchange, and unhinging sex from any kind of moral judgments, except for maybe the wrongness of rape. To reduce sexuality to just purely an activity as long as it’s consensual. And anybody could theoretically consent to it, would be the ultimate goal. That is what I think those in the culture who want to degrade sexuality and reduce it to purely autonomous expressions of oneself, that’s their end game, and children are a part of this. Now thankfully, our culture has a double standard when it comes to sexuality and children that we can still use to turn our culture back to sanity. But we need to act quickly before they take a sharp left turn into pure insanity.
So I’m going to read a little bit from the article. Then I’m going to offer some other thoughts. So they were at the pride parade. And then it says, “When our children grew tired of marching, we plopped onto a nearby curb. Just as we got settled, our elementary schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses, whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong.” If you couldn’t have told already, a mature content episode today. If your younger children might be watching or listening, maybe click over to something else.
“The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. ‘What are they doing?’ my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on.” I think the emphasis should be on doing here. What are they doing? But what are they doing? “The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes. At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth: that these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.”
So right there, what makes something good or praiseworthy? The fact that somebody thinks it’s good and praiseworthy, and that’s it. And so if you’re in this community and you say that some sexual acts are perverse or perverted, like what goes on in the BDSM community, bondage, domination, sadomasochism… These are people who inflict pain on one another and use dominance to get some kind of sexual high or submissiveness and even use things like bodily fluids to humiliate one another and exert dominance.
If you start to say that that’s perverted and wrong, then they’ll… If you have just the transgender person or the self-identified lesbian at the pride parade that says, “Kink is weird,” they’ll say, “What about you? You’re transgender. What about you? You’re a lesbian. People say the same thing about you.” “Oh, well, I guess we can’t say that then.” And so they’re caught. And I think a lot of average people who support transgender ideology, sexual perversion, I truly believe they actually don’t agree with it. They just go along with it because they don’t want anyone to judge what they do behind closed doors, frankly. So then she goes on to talk about how the presence of kink at pride is something that has been debated, but she says she wants her children to see they can make their own ways in the world and know they’ll be supported and celebrated by their community.
And actually, let me just jump down here to the top comment on this article. It’s from a self-identified gay person named Lucy, and he or she says, “We in the gay community fought for years to dissuade people of the notion that we were somehow dangerous to children. Articles like this put us back decades. We will have to deal with the fallout while straight couples, like this one, can identify their way out of it and go on their way. Why on earth did the Post publish this trash?”
Next week, I’m going to talk about the LGBT playbook from the ’90s that helped them to win the culture war, frankly. And in there, it talks about how that the LGBT community, to win public support, had to present themselves as similar to their critics as possible. So no more crazy San Francisco gay pride parades, leather thongs, and flogging and things like that. Instead, you have Ellen DeGeneres. You have Pete Buttigieg. Even now, Caitlyn Jenner is someone who’s a former Olympian athlete, someone who was known for masculinity, presents himself as a Republican even. So it’s something to not totally scare off the other side. And I think there’s other people on the other side who would say they don’t like having children exposed to kink because it says the quiet part loud basically. They do want to expose this to children, but not necessarily right now because most people are opposed to that.
And that gets me to the double standards that are in our culture that we can still get ahold of. So at the one hand, our culture abhors sexual relationships between adults and children. Think about Dateline’s To Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen. “I’m Chris Hansen. What are you doing here today?” They would catch online sexual predators with decoys, adults pretending to be children. And the adults would say, “Can I come over to your house to hang out?” And they’d show up with condoms. And instead of finding a 12-year-old boy or girl, they would find NBC correspondent Chris Hansen, who would bust them on camera. Then they would get arrested. And people liked this because the adults were the bad guys. They were villains trying to have sex with children.
But at the same time, our culture sees no problem, by and large, with children having sexual relations with one another. They just say, “Well, use a condom. Make sure that you’re safe.” After all, if it’s bad for an adult to buy alcohol for a minor, wouldn’t it also be bad for minors to buy alcohol on their own, or for one minor to give alcohol to another minor? So you might say, “Well, children can’t consent to sex with adults.” They can’t consent, though, to sex with one another. It’s the same activity with the same lifelong ramifications and consequences.
So when you have double standards, though, you have to be careful that you could escape a double standard by embracing an even worse consistency. For example, Dr. Peter Kreeft once was speaking to a group of feminists, and he explained to them how abortion is really no different than infanticide, and so it’s inconsistent to support abortion but not infanticide. And after explaining this, the feminists said to Dr. Kreeft, “You changed our mind.” And he said, “Oh, good. Are you pro-life?” They said, “No. Now we’re pro-infanticide.” So the problem there is you could go from an inconsistency to something that is a consistent even-worse evil.
It’s the same with sexual relations between adults and children. If you see an inconsistency of approving sex between children or teenagers, but not between adults and teenagers, the correct way out of the inconsistency is to say that all sexual activities should be within the marital act among adults, within those who are allowed… within at least among those who are allowed to be married, who are capable of expressing marital love through the marital act. That is what sex is for. And then if you do that, though, then you say that expressing sexual activity outside of the marital act, fornication, adultery, sodomy, even things like contraception is not the full expression of the marital act, they become disordered and they become wrong. A lot of people don’t want to go in that direction.
Now, they have a repulsion to the other way out, but I worry the academics who defend the evil consistency, I worry about them gaining influence here, where they’ll say, “Hey, you’re right. It’s inconsistent. Adults and children and children with each other is okay. Adults and children is not okay. Maybe it’s just all okay.” And to show where that’s bad, we can go to a book called Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine. This was published back in 2002, University of Minnesota Press. Levine is a scholar. This is a reputable press. And in the book, Levine says, “Harmful to Minors, the book, says sex is not in itself harmful to minors. Rather, the real potential for harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex.”
So what Levine is saying here is that, no, sex between children, that’s not bad. It’s just when people, when they have diseases or unintended pregnancies. She also says, “Not to mention what I’d also consider an unwanted outcome: plain, old, bad sex.” So she sees no problem with children having sex with one another at all, and we should stop freaking out about it, is Levine’s position. And not just amongst children, but between children and adults.
So here’s an interview from shortly after when her book came out, and in it, she does talk about her personal background, which informs her views. Scholars are rarely objective. They have their own personal stories, bias, or scholarship. And she talks about how she had a relationship when she was 16 with a 19-year-old boy. And that was statutory rape, but she didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. She writes, “Her parents,” Levine’s parents, “didn’t have a clue about the relationship, but if they had, they could have charged the young man with statutory rape, a subject Levine covers in her book. She notes that parents can effectively put their daughter’s boyfriend behind bars, even if the girl staunchly opposes it.” Right, because he’s committed a crime. He had sex with a child.
“Levine supports a Dutch law, which allows children between 12 and 16 to willingly enter into consensual relationships with people of any age. If they feel abused by an elder lover, either the minor or her parents can press charges.” So now it’s just whether the child feels abused. Oh my goodness, there’s not going to be predators out there who will manipulate a child into thinking they’re not actually being abused. These people don’t really exist. My goodness, this is just something else to see this year.
So that’s Levine’s book, and it’s interesting to compare it and cross-reference the people she cites and the people who endorse the book. Two examples would be Sharon Lamb, another academic. Lamb is the author of the book The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do, Sex Play, Aggression, and their Guilt. The book opens with a pornographic… a description of a pornographic act between two seven-year-old girls. It’s disgusting. And Lamb argues that we shouldn’t be freaked out about any of this stuff.
Now, of course, children are going to be exploratory. Children, especially under the age of accountability, are not generally culpable for what they’re doing, and they’re trying to understand their bodies. But adults are morally culpable when they refuse to give correct instruction to children about how they should properly reverence and treat their own bodies. So here the same theme about things like relativism, for example. Like, we go back to the Washington Post columnist. She said she wanted her kids to see kink because she wants them to think that whatever they like is normal. This craving for personal feelings to be the norm. Everybody makes their own norm. Everybody is their own standard, relativism.
We find this in Lamb’s book as well. Here’s a quote from inside Lamb’s book, The Secret Lives of Girls. “Normal is something that we, as a culture, construct. Some people would say that we shouldn’t even use the word normal, and they might be right. It’s hurt too many people and gives special power to the word abnormal. But the one question that girls and women asked me over and over when I was interviewing them was: Am I normal? Usually, what I told them was that I had heard many stories like theirs already, and that answer seemed to satisfy.”
So what our culture tries to do to create normality is they can’t go to something like natural law. They can’t go to the norms given to us in God’s revelation, by reason or scripture or sacred tradition. They can’t use that as the norm. So they opt for a statistical norm. They’re hoping that if you see something enough and something seems to be common enough, you’ll accept that as normal. So that’s why you get these inflated counts that people think that 25% of the population identifies as LGBT, when it’s really like 1 to 2%, though that is on the rise. But to create the sense that every television show has an LGBT prominent character, even though that’s not demographically what is present, what they’re trying to do is create this kind of statistical normalcy because they can’t get actual normalcy in what they’re talking about because it violates the very norms of reason that God gave us written in nature and also within his own divine revelation.
All right. So what do we do about all of this? We have to walk a fine line between acquiescing to the culture and overreacting and withdrawing from the culture. So not acquiescing, I think a lot of people listening to this could be on board with that. We don’t support this. We don’t normalize it, and we vocally espouse the opinion that it’s not okay to sexualize children because… And just focus on this point. Tell people sex is for the expression of marital love. That is what sex is for, and children are not capable of entering into something as important as the bond of marriage. So they cannot, of course, engage in the behavior that is rooted in establishing that bond. Sex is for expressing marital love. Marriage is what makes children. Children don’t get married. And that’s, I think, the important way to go about it. So it gives us a larger framework for our sexual ethics.
But then there’s the overreaction of saying, “Well, we’re never going to talk about sex with our kids at all. We’re going to hide everything from them. If the child asks about sex, we’re getting mad at them. ‘Where’d you learn that? Where are you talking about that? That’s disgusting. Don’t talk about that.'” You still want to be approachable to children. Now, for little children, you want to protect their innocence as long as possible. Sometimes your hand is forced by our culture. They see something inappropriate, and you have to address it.
I cover a lot of that in detail in my book coauthored with Leila Miller, Made This Way: How to Talk to Kids about Tough Moral Issues. And we have sections in that book on how to talk about sexuality with little kids to protect their innocence or, at the very least, to help inform them about the world when their innocence has been shattered.
But with older kids, I find what’s helpful here, when it comes to navigating sexuality, is to talk about sexuality not so much in terms of purity, like losing your purity if you have sex. You don’t want to lose your virginity, because I think that treats teens as being very passive agents. You don’t lose your virginity like you lose your car keys or something like that. Rather, I want them to be active agents to know they are good, moral, holy, virtuous, upright people. And so they can be held accountable to practice honesty in all of their dealings, including in their sexuality, and that it is fundamentally dishonest to use the sexual act, which is a way to communicate through the body marital love, to another person that you are not married to. To talk about how it’s lying with your body, essentially.
So I think talking about sexual honesty, sexual authenticity, caring for other people, and offering protection for them within this realm, whether they’re boys or girls, and to encourage them that sex is a good thing that God has given us. To not talk about like, “This is your dirty secret. This is something… That’s not appropriate, da, da, da, da, da.” And it’s hard.
And if you’re in a situation where a child brings up something and you’re flustered, don’t worry about having the right answer right off the bat. I mean, my children have asked questions, and I’m like, “Where’d you hear that? Where did you hear that from?” And that’s actually a good response. When you’re trying to collect your thoughts and say, “What do I say to my child?” you can just say, “That’s interesting. Where did you hear that? Where did you see that? What do you think would be right in this situation?” And then that creates the dialogue where they’re talking and you can kind of formulate your thoughts a bit more, and then you can offer the thought to them.
So you always want children to see that you’re not their friend, but you are friendly. An adult, a parent is not a child’s friend, but we should be friendly. We should be authoritative without being authoritarian, and so that our children always know, if they’re confused or scared about something or worried or anxious, that they can come to us, and we will have a dialogue with them. We’re not always going to affirm everything they do. We’re not their friends seeking approval, but we will provide guard rails. And to tell them that their sexuality, it is a good thing, but it’s like a nuclear reactor. It’s very, very powerful. It can do tremendous good, but also you can have very negative consequences if it’s mishandled.
And you want what is best for them so that they can experience the goodness of it. Especially if they’re called to marriage, if they’re called to this vocation, to set themselves up to have an amazing vocation with someone that they would spend the rest of their lives with and to have children of their own to impart those same messages to. But ultimately, it’ll come back to us, living out positive, affirming holy sexuality in our own marriages and in our own families, and showing that the world with kink and pride that seeks after sexual pleasure for its own sake, it’s ultimately empty, and that God’s joy-filled plan for our sexuality is what we’re actually meant for. And that’s what we need to model for people and starting with our own families.
So, hey, I hope this was helpful for you guys. I’ll leave some resources and a link to the transcription below. Be sure to like and subscribe to this video. If you’re listening to my podcasts, leave us a review at iTunes or Google Play. You guys are awesome, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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