Such ambivalence informs the New York Times story about homosexuality, too. The account is filled with titillating facts of perverse bravado. Many pubescent girls in this account are bisexual; one parent even prefers his daughter to date girls. "His biggest fear has always been that I'll get pregnant before I'm 18," says Tina, "so my dad's really supportive of the girl thing." Says Austin: "Bisexual girls have it the easiest. Most of the straight guys at school think that's 'hot,' so that can make the girl even more popular."
Some of us thought the early sexual revolution went too far, making the illicit explicit and the personal political, and trivializing sex as the equivalent of fast food.
The exploitation of children is still expanding. The homosexual revolution finds accomplices among adults in the name of socially redeeming value, and the ability to discriminate between the legitimate and the illegitimate continues to recede. Soon nothing is illegitimate.
A new outrage in Washington shows how far distinctions have been lost at the highest reaches of power. Kevin Jennings, President Obama's "safe school czar," is revealed to have once failed a 15-year-old boy who came to him for help after he was enticed into sexual relations with a man in a bus station rest room.
Jennings, who was then a high school teacher, not only did not report the incident, but told the boy to make sure "to use a condom" with the man. When another teacher scolded his conduct as "unethical," noting that statutory rape is severely punished by the law, Jennings threatened to sue his colleague for slander. He recounts the episode in his book, boasting that the boy "left my office with a smile on his face."
Bullying and discrimination against homosexuals, like all bullying and discrimination, is wrong and shouldn't be tolerated. But someone at the White House, who either didn't find out who Kevin Jennings is or found out and didn't care, deserves a reprimand. The editors of The New York Times ought to be ashamed of their exploitation of 13-year-old Austin. We live in an anything-goes culture, but the poaching of children is still over the line.