California Considers Downgrading Soliciting Minors for Sex to Misdemeanor

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, a rather bizarre topic came up here in California. There was a bill introduced in the California Legislature not to have a felony designation for men who solicit minors 16 and 17 years old for sex. In other words, the interest is in favor of the solicitor, the person who is trying to buy sex from a young person 16 or 17.

Why anybody in the world would consider that’s not a terrible thing and it’s not a felonious act I don’t know. But I do know I live in California and anything’s explicable.

In fact, the people in the Legislature made it a civil rights issue: This is unfair to gay men that they shouldn’t be able to experiment, search for, solicit young boys—I think 16 and 17 is a young boy—for sex. And maybe they might be mistaken. They didn’t know how old. So, why should we punish them as we do heterosexuals who solicit young girls for sex?

This is part of a larger trend. The Man/Boy Love Association has been around for years. But this is a larger effort in the homosexual radical community. Most homosexual men and women are not for this. But there is a group that is that wants to legitimize sex between younger boys and older men. The word—it’s an ancient practice but there’s something we should remember. The word is not “pedophilia”—that means love of a boy—but “pederasty,” which means a love, an eros, rather than a philia.

And it’s used in ancient Greek, pederasty, to indicate a Socratic—if you read Plato’s dialogues, people in those dialogues have attraction for men. But remember, Socrates was famous for not including a physical element to that affinity. In other words, he would take on as a mentor and tutor a younger man but he drew the line about sexual congress. That was not true, however, in most cases in Greece. We hear that the poet Sophocles was a pederast. It was not considered taboo. Philip of Macedon was.

In societies, in general—and it’s true of the Middle East and some countries and elsewhere in societies where women are suppressed or repressed and it is considered taboo to have sex with a woman before she’s married—virginity is not highly prized but essential. Then men often turn to younger men for sexual gratification.

But in the West, we have a long history of trying to suppress that and feeling that it should be illegal because we are—our code, our ethics, our legal system believe that someone 15, 16, 17, below the age of 18, is still impressionable. They’re still not sure what their sexual orientation is. They don’t know much about sex. At least until recently, that was true.

And so, the state, the government stepped in and said, for those people below 18—and that’s the age of consent in many states, sometimes in some it’s 16—but for men, at least, below the age of 18, they shall be a protected class from older men that try to prey on them. Doesn’t seem such a hard thing to ask of the gay community, is it? Just simply saying, “If you solicit sex from other men, please respect the youth of those 16 to 17.”

But here in California, we’re trying to repeal felony punishment for that type of activity and we want to mainstream it by making it a misdemeanor.

And what will be the net result of this legislation? It will be another tessera in this larger mosaic of green-lighting and mainstreaming something that throughout history has been very problematic. And we in the West have decided that it’s not a wise thing for older men to have sex with men, boys, I should say, below the age of 18.

Seems a minor topic. But it’s indicative of the general moral and ethical decline of the United States. And it’s incumbent upon our leaders to draw the line somewhere and say, “We’re not going to do this. We care more about the welfare and mental health of youth 16 and 17. And we do not want them subject to the sexual predations of older men. And we’re ready to charge people with felonies who cross that line.”

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