Yes, they want to make it easier to have sex with your kids

This is how they move the needle

A report from the International Commission of Jurists last month, written and published in partnership with the United Nations, is seeking to broaden the legal and social acceptance of what the report calls “adolescent sexual activity.” The report argues that “international human rights law” should acknowledge “adolescents’ evolving capacity to consent in certain contexts, in fact, even if not in law,” that “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law,” and that laws regarding sex “should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct.” It is very plain that this report is seeking to move the needle on underage sex, to make it more acceptable for adults to have sex with children. It’s just there in very plain language. No need to complicate it or ponder it. It is right there.

This is not historically unanticipated. Children have been targets for sexual exploitation for thousands of years. That hasn’t changed. The number of people who want to sexually abuse children is very large, and the number of people really willing to go to bat against it is surprisingly small. It is not surprising that a major international political organization would feel comfortable publishing this. Let’s at least acknowledge what’s happening here. There is no need to play dumb about it.

I can tell you right now that many people are going to play dumb about it. This is how the needle is moved. Here’s how it will go:

• This report will get a lot of play on conservative websites and conservative social media accounts. Many conservative commentators will be (correctly) outraged about it.

• Mainstream media organizations—legacy newspapers, left-of-center commentary websites, 99.9% of commentators and journalists on social media—will ignore it for maybe eight or nine days.

• Then USA Today or PolitiFact will run a fact check: “Did a UN Report Really Call for Decriminalizing Sex With Children?” The fact-check will be aggressively pedantic (“the ICJ is not actually part of the UN,” “international law defines ‘adolescence’ as up to 19 years old”). It will not actually cite any of the relevant passages from the report demonstrating a desire for adults to be permitted to have sex with children, such as the report’s explicit, pointed remarks about “persons under 18 years of age.”

• It will finish: “Some conservative web sites claimed a UN report sought to decriminalize sex with children. But the report, which wasn’t issued by the UN, referred to ‘adolescents,’ not children. We rate this claim False.”

• Left-wing journalists and news websites will circulate this fact-check on social media, smugly saying things like: “Another right-wing conspiracy theory disproven.” These people will not actually engage with the flawed and incorrect content of the fact-check itself; they might not even have read it themselves. They will just circulate the headline and triumphantly declare conservatives to have been wrong about something.

• Progressives will be able to use this outcome to dispute any sort of real-world discussion of this report. If a conservative somewhere criticizes the UN’s efforts to legalize adult-child sex, a progressive can say: “Um, that was fact-checked and disproven.” This sort of thing tends to immediately shut down most conservatives.

You can bet the rent money that this is how it will go. This is sort of a ritual of online discourse. It’s just the way this sort of thing plays out. And, I mean, look, on the one hand, nobody is more contemptuous than me of the idiotic pathways of Internet modalities. It’s just an endless loop of retarded ineptness and hysteria and opportunism. So in normal circumstances I’m inclined to just not care about any of this type of stupidity. But of course the end result of cycles like this is that the United Nations makes it easier for adults to rape little kids. That’s very bad. This isn’t the usual sort of braindead social media dustup. It has very real, very bad consequences.

You might think it could never happen—that a report like this will simply fade into obscurity and languish in a far-flung cabinet in Nairobi or something. Picture how silly you sound saying this: “Oh, no, that would never happen. Tons of people don’t want to sexually abuse kids! This has never happened in history before. It’s impossible to imagine a concerted effort to make it easier to sexually abuse children.” This denialism is silly on its face; it’s even sillier when the UN throws its weight behind a report which explicitly, literally, advocates for “the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age” to have sex. Come on, folks.

You might think that child sexual exploitation is nominally beyond politics, that something so horrific couldn’t be a part of the normal din of political debate, but that is not really the world we live in anymore. The political moment has become so comprehensive and so perpetual that even something as morally unambiguous as the horror of child sex abuse must be subject to the test. In this case, the only thing progressives need to know is that a bunch of conservative websites and commentators are coming out against these proposals. In most cases that’s all it takes to both solidify and galvanize the progressive response to something like this: If conservatives are against a thing, the Left must absolutely be for it. That’s why you’ll see nearly all left-wing public figures (a) ignore this report, and then eventually (b) support it wholeheartedly. The first step to deny it exists, the second is to acknowledge it exists and affirm that it’s actually good.

I’d love to be wrong about this. After enough time you start to recognize how these sorts of things will inevitably go. Don’t be fooled by it. They want to make it easier to have sex with your kids. Don’t close your eyes to it.