A Letter On Justice And Open Debate About Raping Children

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests against raping children are leading to overdue demands that people not rape children, along with wider calls for greater avoidance of raping children across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments against raping children that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy and to the generous funding of elite doctors, professors, writers, and intellectuals like us. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of anti-child-raping dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides regarding promoting and socializing with people who rape children.

The free exchange of information and ideas with rich and powerful people irrespective of whether they have raped children, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty that raping children is bad and that people who rape children are bad, even if they can give us rides on helicopters and make us feel important. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech against raping children from all appropriate and qualified quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought, such as socializing with and promoting child-rapists and treating them as cherished friends. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Crucially, these punishments are not just levied against regular employees whose role is to listen to us. They’re being imposed on us: editors, writers, journalists, professors, the heads of organizations, the people widely and justifiably recognized as the leaders of society. These leaders are are being ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes, like engaging in prolonged and mutually admiring correspondence with child rapists. We have reached the point where praising and celebrating a child rapist is seen as worthy of public condemnation even if we waited until the child rapist was not in the course of raping a child to praise them.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said to child rapists about how great their parties are without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, doctors, professors, journalists, and other leaders of America who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement, that being special friends with child rapists is “bad.”

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time, which child-rapists tell us they are willing to fund and promote, often at really great parties. The restriction of debate and social interaction, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society that discriminates against anyone who socializes with child-rapists, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat child rape is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish child rapists away or turning down their dinner invitations or not flying to their islands to socialize amongst the children who are, we are certain, merely coincidentally present. We refuse any false choice between opposing child rape and embracing child rapists. We reject the censorial and repressive demand that we reflect on whether our normalization and promotion of child rapists enables them to rape more children. As doctors, professors, thinkers, writers, and other deserved elite of society we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes in terms of exactly how much engagement to exercise with child rapists, especially when the child-rapists are funny and kind of awesome. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement about whether to accept money and plane rides from child rapists without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us. Please join the few proud and brave institutions that realize that we should continue to thrive in our careers even if, for completely defensible reasons that prominent people like us are best suited to understand, we think child rapists are cool.