For all the publicity about child-molesting priests, there's a related story that may have greater long-term significance. There's a growing movement among academics to legitimize pedophilia — or as they prefer to call it, "intergenerational intimacy." And if they have their way, future generations will view sex with children as just another alternative lifestyle.

One of the apostles of this movement is Judith Levine, author of a new book (set for publication in early May) called Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Kids from Sex. Levine says she doesn't favor molestation or sex in cases when adults have authority over kids, but that there's such a thing as "happy consensual sex among kids under 12," and that "young — even quite young — people can have a positive [sexual] experience with an adult." In fact, she calls a Dutch law that lowers the age of consent to 12 a “good model” for the U.S. As Levine sees it, America’s problem is that we’re all too uptight, focusing on approaches like abstinence instead of affirming experiences like hers. “When I was a minor, I had sex with an adult,” she says, and “on balance . . . it was a perfectly good experience.”

Levine's book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, drew a lot of fire. But the UM Press is delighted with it — or at least with the advance sales generated by the publicity. They've already ordered a second printing, and they've made sure that Harmful to Minors is the first thing you see when you log on to their Web site. They act downright proud about it: The Web site positively gushes over Levine's work, featuring quotes from reviewers who praise her for "[coming] down always on the side of trusting not only our kids and their pleasures but our own."

Ah, “trusting our pleasures.” So that’s what we’re going to call it now. Can pedophile-pride parades be far behind?

Maybe not, since as an article in The Washington Times points out, Levine’s book “is only the most recent in a series of academic arguments for ‘consensual’ sex involving children.”

For example, psychologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University gave an interview to the Dutch pedophilia journal Paidika about “genuine, totally mutual” sex between boys and men. Harris Mirkin of the University of Missouri-Kansas City wrote in the Journal of Homosexuality that “children are the last bastion of the old sexual morality,” and griped that boys who have sex with men “are never considered willing participants, even if they are hustlers.”

Perhaps the most significant development, however, is a 1998 article that appeared in an especially prominent spot, the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. In it, Temple University’s Bruce Rind and two other academics argued that “value-neutral” language such as “adult-child sex” and “age-discrepant relationships” should be used to describe a “willing encounter.” Often, they said, children aren’t harmed much by the experience, and may even benefit by it; you see, it can build their self-esteem by letting them know how much they’re valued by adults.

Are you grossed out yet?

A lot of people were. Reacting to public outrage after the article was publicized on Dr. Laura and denounced in Congress, the APA apologized and promised to be more careful about what they published in the future. There’ve been scholarly rebuttals too. Psychological Bulletin published a response to the Rind article which critiqued its methodology and slammed it for omitting other relevant data. For example, men who had sex with adults when they were boys were more than twice as likely to use illegal drugs, three times as likely to seek therapy for mental problems, five times as likely to attempt suicide.

On one level, I’m glad to see researchers fighting back against pedophilia. But it’s troublesome to see there’s a debate at all. There are some things whose evil should be so obvious that no debate is necessary. We wouldn’t be a better society if we sat down for calm, dispassionate discussions of the merits of, say, rape. (“Sure,” one side would argue, “women say ‘no means no,’ but some of them don’t really mean it.”) The same is true of sex with children. That’s why it’s important that we not only reject pedophilia, but reject it vehemently, with undisguised disgust.

We modern folk hesitate to display that sort of disgust, for fear we’ll be considered “judgmental.” But we’d better recognize something: If the pro-pedophilia crowd can simply get recognized as a legitimate side in a debate — sharing podiums with opponents, haggling over the fine points of scientific studies, gradually accustoming people to the idea that some types of pedophilia aren’t really so bad — then they’re well on their way to achieving their goal. As Newshouse News Service writer Mark O’Keefe summarizes their view, “it may be only a matter of time before modern society accepts adult-child sex, just as it has learned to accept premarital sex and homosexual sex.”

That’s a sobering comparison for anyone who complacently assumes society will never reach the point of tolerating pedophilia. It’s also an important reminder of where the roots of the threat really lie.

Though few people want to face it, the pro-pedophilia movement is a child of the same sexual revolution that legitimized first premarital sex, then homosexuality. For the first thing the sexual revolution did was to reject the concept of morality everyone understood to be rooted in God’s will. Once we do that, any substitute ethical guidelines we cobble together can’t hold together for long. After all, if there’s no God, all moral concepts are strictly artificial; we may want to hang on to some, but we really have no grounds for telling anyone else these concepts apply universally. And we can be certain that there’s no rule that some people, somewhere, won’t break. Ultimately, all restrictions — gender, age, even consent — will be swept away by the tide of ever more twisted lusts.

The point is, the sexual revolution has a built-in dynamic that will push us further and further into perversion. So if we don’t want to see a world where pedophilia is legitimized, we need to reject a lot more than pedophilia; we’ll need to reject the sexual revolution itself.

In its place, we need to recover a worldview based on God. That worldview contains specifics about God’s design for sexuality — things that have been well articulated in various Boundless articles (J. Budziszewski does it especially well in many "Office Hours" and "Ask Theophilus" columns). But the most important thing we need to know is that God makes the rules; we don’t.

In the end, the only real alternative is “trusting our pleasures.” And that's a pretty shabby alternative to trusting in God.