Hah! Richard Dawkins, noted Apologist of Atheism, says, "Mild pedophilia does not cause lasting Harm."

He said this, apparently, in a recent interview in Time magazine.  I know about it from Katie McDonough's piece in today's Salon, in which Dawkins' remarks are immediately followed by a handkerchief-twisting rebuttal from Peter Watt, director of child protection at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who called Dawkins' "defense of sexual assault [my italics--Note the perverse, deliberate prevarication of Dawkins' "pedophilia"] a terrible slight to victims of such abuse," and who said further that, "Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way--but we know that the victims of abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or today."

Let us herewith immediately acknowledge that the last quoted statement, anent what we "know" about what "victims suffer," is merest, purest, made-up-of-whole-cloth horse-shit. We know nothing of the goddamned sort.  Dawkins did rather let his guard down by saying (which is not germane to his argument that mild pedophilia neither hurts nor harms, and therefore creates no "victims") that it's useless to judge the past by the present (Even I don't believe that); and he vitiates his case by equating the fearsome, horribly painful physical abuse of caning with presumably friendly and pleasurable non-abuse of fondling:  Any child could've told him that the former is abuse (It hurts!), and that the latter isn't (unless it hurts--in which case it's hardly "fondling").   But ah! in referring to a "child"--and not to a "boy"--I've lost my footing, slipped a bit, in the solemn pig-shit of "Depth Psychology" that still lies fathoms deep on the fictive science of Child Psychology and Development, and which, with the blind, unconscious brutality of Received Wisdom, perceives no real, essential difference between boys and girls.  It may, for all I know, or care, be abusive of girls to fondle them (I certainly wouldn't do it myself, and it quite sickens me to think of anybody else's doing it); but, speaking like Mr. Dawkins who was fondled as a boy and liked it, and never afterward regretted it, I can say that fondling boys is a wholly positive experience for them, especially if they are allowed to reciprocate it.

That said, note that the Official Refutation of Richard Dawkins' case for pleasurable, not harmful or painful, "mild pedophilia," comes from the director of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which in effect, by definition, makes pedophilia a form of cruelty (in the minds of women and the pussy-men who cater to them).  And perhaps, for all we know or care, for girls it is.  But ask any boy whether he would rather be flogged or fucked.  And, that aside, if you will but descend for a moment to the mundane realm of actual statistics derived from the records of Child Protective Services, you discover that, more than three quarters of the cases requiring the removal of a child from the home concern acts of the most appalling physical cruelty and neglect, and less than a quarter (19% is the figure that comes to mind) involve sexual abuse.  You will also discover that about four times as many girls as boys are the victims of sexual abuse.  And, if you dig really deep, you will discover that the victims of real physical and mental abuse and neglect, real cruelty, are, by an overwhelming majority, boys.

So, what the fuck do you think that means?

Well, one of the things it means, if you treat offenses of dissimilar gravity, such as physical child abuse and sexual child abuse, as the same sort of offense, is that you very disproportionately exaggerate the seriousness of the lesser offense of, say, pedophilia, and trivialize and make light of the greater offense of physical and mental cruelty.  Which means that, with your reptilian stupidity and cowardly and self-serving refusal to face facts, you greatly increase the incidence of cruelty to boys.