Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?

Pedophilia is an up and coming subject, as pedophiles strive to become mainstream.  In an article about Dr. Earl Bradley, a convicted pedophile, Fay Voshell makes an incredibly important point:

Dr. Bradley’s behavior is illustrative of the sort of things a pedophile does to his victims, including sometimes killing the child he rapes, sodomizes, or performs oral sex on; and it is why the American public holds such people in odium.  Pedophilia is not a matter of innocent hugs and kisses, or thanking heaven for little girls, or just plain loving kids in general, but of perversions so frightful that to put words to them scorches the page and makes angels weep.

As prominent twentieth-century theologian C.S. Lewis said when writing about sexual perversions, “I am sorry to go into all these details, but I must.”

Knowing what it is pedophiles actually do is the reason there are severe restrictions on their movements, on where they live and where they may walk among the rest of society.  Such perversions have so distorted their souls that the likelihood of cure is quite low while the reversion to their vile practices remains quite high.  That is because, as Lewis remarked, “perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful.

This is a point to remember when you think about other efforts to mainstream behaviors that traditional Judeo-Christian societies frowned upon.  Rather than being less open-minded than we are, those societies might merely have been less innocent.  As the oh-so-sophisticated post-Edwardians said, “Victorians have minds like kitchen sinks.”  It was true, too, because the tightly constrained Victorian era was a response to the unrestrained licentiousness that characterized large segments of late 18th and early 19th century British culture.