pop morality

[Jenny A]

Drich, you're right about pederasty. In Plato's Symposium, some of the participants rationalized the practice of older men taking young lovers by claiming that the youths benefited from the relationship. I predict that we will start to see attempts by some perverts to soon do the same. After all, aren't they helping the vulnerable boys to embrace their budding sexuality?  They did it "for the children!"

That is disingenuous.  Rightly, or wrongly, Plato was not suggesting sleeping with children, certainly not as children were defined at the time.  He was advocating September/May homosexual relationships.  Not sure how much I like that either given the difference in power, but pedophilia it was not. The age difference would not have shocked anyone had the participants been an older man and a younger women. There are however societies that did engage in male sex with little boys.  Mostly these involved a young slave (getting back to the unBiblical notion that slavery is wrong).

Perverts (or "preverts" as my husband's family says) are simply the class of people whose sexuality we don't like at the moment.  That would include at some time or another: gays, people with fetishes, pedophiles, those into bestiality, people engaging in anal sex, people engaging in oral sex, people who have sex with the lights on, those into BSDM of any sort, sex involving equipment of any kind, doggy style sex, incest, and so on.  

It's pretty easy to sort these by those that are definitionally nonconsensual or necessarily harmful to one party or the other.   All of them can be nonconsensual and therefore harmful to one party as can ordinary vanilla sex within a marriage.  The real question is whether we ask further than does this sex offend our personal sensibilities (not a sign of moral turpitude) and ask the more serious question, does it hurt a nonconsenting person. 

And yes our definition of non-consenting has expanded to include those too young to consent, and those too much in the control of another to consent.   I'd say that's a step in the right direction.  We have noticed that gay sex is not harmful.  We have also noticed that forced sex within marriages is as are forced marriages,  and sex between people of greatly differing power such as patient doctor sex, and teachers student sex.

If you really want to make the slippery slope argument, why not consider where we might go with Biblical morality if we accept a  little of it?  If we accept the ten commandments must we also:  punish rape victims, aborting the fetuses of adulators, and prohibit the jews from marrying non jews?  Or maybe we should bring back stonings? Multiple wives?  Slavery? Killing people for accidentally touching sacred objects to stop them from falling?