c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)

(UNDATED) It would be nice to believe that even the remotest association with the sexual exploitation of children would earn a person, at the very least, complete ostracism. But these days, to be associated with pedophilia is no longer automatically taboo.

In fact, Time magazine recently honored a fashion designer who quite clearly exploited pedophilic desire in a notorious advertising campaign for his line of jeans: Calvin Klein.

Unbelievably, Time named Klein among the top 25 most influential Americans, people considered remarkable for their”ability to show us the world anew, to educate and entertain us, to change the way we think about ourselves and others.” The magazine praised Klein as”fashion’s Frank Lloyd Wright.”And only glib, uncritical mention was made of Klein’s advertising campaign”that featured models who looked like teen-agers in sexually evocative poses.”In fact, an official of the Metropolitan Museum of Art characterized Klein as”the true American Puritan.” A more serious view of Klein’s paean to pedophilia was presented in the Weekly Standard magazine by journalist Mary Eberstadt: “There were, first, the images themselves: teen-age models _ most looking bored, with legs spread apart and underwear revealed _ lounging around semi-dressed. There was also the matter of setting. The cheap wood paneling and shag carpets were supposed to suggest a suburban rec-room _ another visual convention, it seems, of the child-porn genre.” Equally shocking were Klein’s television advertising scripts (later withdrawn after airing in New York) which were suggestively spoken by an off-screen male narrator:”You take direction well _ do you like to take direction?”And this:”You got a real nice look. How old are you? Are you strong? You think you could rip that shirt off of you? That’s a real nice body. You work out? I can tell.” While I do not excuse Klein of his responsibility for promoting pedophilic ideas, he was right on target when he noted at the height of the controversy over the ads that”… the world is seeing a reflection of what’s really going on.” Eberstadt seconds the notion, reporting that articles sympathetic to pedophilia have appeared in a variety of mainstream publications.

Writing recently in the New Republic, Hanna Rosin reports that a movie about the notorious North American Man-Boy Love Association”is worth seeing”for the reason that it”succeeds, at least partially, in making monsters human.” Some of us, of course, continue to believe that no matter how many times you kiss this particular toad, he remains a toad. Yet a large question confronts us: On what grounds do modern-day Americans oppose the attempted normalization of pedophilia?

It will no longer do to protest pedophilia on grounds that traditional morality teaches that sex between children and adults is wrong. As the U.S. Supreme Court made clear in the recent Romer vs. Evans decision, anyone who opposes certain behaviors because it offends a traditional moral code _ in Romer the issue was homosexuality _ is automatically considered to be inspired by animus, and animosity is not a legitimate basis for legislation.

The courts will put up with a great deal _ I suspect polygamy will be making a return before too much longer _ but it has no time for traditional morality.

Which leaves us hoping that laws mandating relatively high ages of consent can be maintained. Yet consent is another old-fashioned idea that now goes about on wobbly knees. The idea behind having ages of consent is that when it comes to judgments involving sex and its consequences, children are not always capable of making the best decisions and must therefore submit to parental authority. Yet some abortion rights activists insist that parents should have no say on whether or not their daughters can have an abortion. By that standard, there is no real no age of consent for exterminating a human life. One wonders how long we can maintain the belief that sex between”consenting”children and their elders should remain forbidden.

As Rosin pointed out in her New Republic article, the age of consent for sexual activity in the Netherlands is 12. Many Americans no doubt oppose the idea that a man could legally have sex with their sixth-grade daughter or, for that matter, their son.

But in an age of discarded moral absolutes, in which fashion designers who pander to pedophiles are honored by a national magazine, one wonders how long such unenlightened views can survive.

What should the age of consent be? Perhaps Time should pose the question to Calvin Klein. Perhaps, as a Puritan, he’ll opt for something above the single digits.

MJP END COLSON