Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Ok, so, we can all agree that Michael Goldfarb entitling a post “Pedophile Lobby Gets Behind Freeman” is perfectly denotive of the total bad faith in which the Weekly Standard deals with questions of Israel and of foreign policy . But even if we accept that it’s all relevant that Scott Ritter, who endorsed Chas Freeman,”had arranged in an Internet chat room to meet with the girl at a Burger King in Colonie, a suburb of Albany, so she could witness him masturbating,” I want to make another, more minor point that really has nothing to do with Chas Freeman or foreign policy at all.

Pedophilia is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV for all you psychology folk out there) as:

• A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger);
• B. The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty;
• C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.

What’s important here is that the clinical definition for pedophilia has nothing to do with our intuitions about the appropriateness of relationships between adults and teenagers (not children, this is very important) or with any statuatory rape laws. For example, a 40 year old man who has a sexual attraction to, say, a 16 year old girl is not a pedophile, even if he acts on that attraction. To say otherwise is to just ignore the real meaning of these words. It’s really not that difficult to understand that a 16 year old girl is a whole lot different than a 9 year old girl. It’s the difference between Elle Fanning and Miley Cyrus.

*Interesting how Godlfarb never mentions that, along with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern (who he considers “crackpots”), some 17 former ambassadors — including Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to the UN for Bush I — had endorsed Freeman. Just more proof of the rampant bad faith on display here.