In Millard v. Harris (1968), U.S. District Court Judge David Bazelon ruled the confinement of a male who compulsively exposed himself to children was not justified, because his exhibitionism only affected “unusually sensitive adult women and small children.” (!!!) Laws that had formerly allowed the institutionalization of diagnosed child molesters were argued against in scholarly works such as Nicholas N. Kittrie’s *The Right to Be Different *(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1971), and Fred Cohen’s
The Law of Deprivation of Liberty (St. Paul, Minnesota: West, 1980).
In Europe you also had literati like homosexual activist Tony Duvert, whose 1973 novel Strange Landscapes won the prestigious Prix Médicis and promoted pedophilia as part of a doctrine of gay sexual liberation.
The European left wing had an obsession for the normalization of pedophilia, as shown in an article from the on-line international edition of Spiegel:
spiegel.de/international/…702679,00.html
(CAUTION: The article uses some graphic language to describe what went on in the circle of the left-wing intelligentsia)
From the article: "Hardly any leftist texts of the day did not address the subject of sexuality. For instance, “Revolution der Erziehung” (“The Revolution in Education”), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: “The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation – as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system.”
In France in 1977, the cream of the French intelligentsia signed a petition to parliament demanding the end of all age-of-consent laws (which already allowed sexual relations between adults and children as young as 15 at that time). The petition was signed by the philosopher Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer Philippe Sollers, and pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, among others. In 1979, many members of the same group of individuals published a letter calling for the release of all those imprisoned for sexual offenses against a child, and again called on the French Parliament to abolish all age-of-consent laws.
Foucalt (a moral relativist of the very type denounced by the Pope), Danet, and Hocquenghem debated the issue on French radio. The dialogue was broadcast on April 4, 1978 by radio France Culture, and the transcription was published in French as La loi de la pudeur and reprinted in English as The Danger of Child Sexuality The text was later included under the title Sexual Morality and the Law in Foucault’s book Politics, Philosophy, Culture – Interviews and other writings, 1977-1984.
All 3 denounced any laws against sex with children. Danet claimed children morally could give consent to sex and decried court prosecutions of pedophiles, claiming that "what takes place with the intervention of psychiatrists in court is a manipulation of the children’s consent, a manipulation of their words…It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves. We may even agree that it was he who seduced the adult. But we specialists with our psychological knowledge know perfectly well that even the seducing child runs a risk, of being damaged and traumatized. (…) Consequently, the child must be ‘protected from his own desires’, even when his desires turn him towards an adult” (Brrrr…) Hocquenghem argued that in court “everybody knows” the child really consented: “The public affirmation of consent to such acts is extremely difficult, as we know. Everybody - judges, doctors, the defendant - knows that the child was consenting - but nobody says anything, because, apart from anything else, there’s no way it can be introduced”.
A letter in support of the release of a child molester charged with molesting children aged 6 to 12 was published in Le Monde on January 26, 1977, which stated: “Today they risk a long prison term either for having had sexual relations with minors, boys as well as girls, or for having encouraged and taken photographs of their sexual play. We believe that there is an incongruity between the designation as a `crime’ which serves to legitimize such a severity, and the facts themselves; even more so between the antiquated law and the reality of every day life in a society which tends to know about the sexuality of children and adolescents.” This letter was signed by 63 French intellectuals, writers, philosophers, and doctors, including the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ronald Barthes.
