OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN

Mary Eberstadt, in her endless reply to the letters criticizing her “Pedophilia Chic” piece in the Weekly Standard, smears another person. This time it’s Wendy Kaminer, who wrote a piece in the American Prospect recently defending NAMBLA members’ right to free speech. Eberstadt claims in her response to the letters that, “just recently, writer Wendy Kaminer penned a classic example for American Prospect magazine called, casually enough, ‘Speaking of Man-Boy Love.’ Does anyone really believe that the same magazine would have licensed any writer to weigh the pros and cons of men having sex with little girls?” This is a good test of Eberstadt’s intellectual honesty since you all can read the Kaminer piece for yourself. Kaminer extends no sympathy whatsoever for “consensual man-boy love,” whatever that can possibly mean. Indeed, she puts it in quotation marks, which Eberstadt slyly removes. (For some reason, the title of the piece has been changed to “Speaking Of.”) Kaminer even finds consensual man-boy sex to be “absurd.” There is no discussion of the pros and cons of it in the piece, merely an examination of a lawsuit designed to prove that the very airing of such views should make NAMBLA legally responsible for a child rape and murder. Yet Eberstadt is able to imply that Kaminer basically endorses pedophilia or is anti-anti-pedophilia, when the sole point of Kaminer’s piece is pro-free speech. Another point. In her reply, Eberstadt argues that “there are plenty of [pro-pedophilia] books on the gay studies shelf [of any book store], as none of my critics deny.” Well, I do deny it. Perhaps if you looked really hard, you might find a reference or two somewhere. But pro-pedophile books or journals are simply a minuscule portion of gay fiction and non-fiction and I’ve never seen one in a gay bookstore. If any reader cares, let me know what your perusal of such a shelf shows up. I bet you: nada.