By Selwyn Duke

If you had told someone in the 1950s that, in about two generations,
homosexuality would largely be normalized and faux (same-sex) marriage
would be gaining widespread approval, they’d have called you crazy.
Never, ever under the stars and stripes. Why, pugnacious pundit Bill
O’Reilly himself opined as recently as 10 to 15 years ago that faux
marriage would never be accepted in America. Ah, what a difference a
decade makes in the (mis?)information age, where ideas can be
transmitted worldwide at a button’s touch.

I can’t tell you
exactly when I knew faux marriage would gain traction — not in terms of
date and time, anyway — but suffice it to say it was at least as soon as
I heard the idea uttered by some obscure academic or activist on
society’s fringes. As for homosexuality, there were some sagacious souls
who realized decades ago that it would eventually be accepted. How? The
same way a few of us knew in high school, almost instinctively, that
our education paled in comparison to that of previous generations:
trajectory. If you know an asteroid’s trajectory, you can predict not
only where it was years ago, but where it will be in the future. And so
it is with cultural trajectory.

Terrible Trajectory

Yet
if I say that our current cultural trajectory — a bizarre trek that has
caused us to boldly go where no American had gone before — has as a
point on its arc the acceptance of pedophilia, I’m sure I’ll hear
“never, ever under the stars and stripes!” This is a normal human
reaction. But the past is a picture of futures man inevitably will paint
again, and history hollers its warnings for those with ears to hear.

First
consider a simple fact: There is virtually no historical precedent — if
any at all — for faux marriage, yet we’re accepting it. But there is
great historical precedent for pedophilia, that thing most would
currently say we could never accept. And the obvious place to start here
is with ancient Greece. The civilization is well-known for its
acceptance of homosexuality, yet what actually was most common in this
arena was pederasty, sexual relationships between men and boys. It is
said that in the mid and late periods of ancient Sparta, the practice
was institutionalized in the city-state’s military camps, with a
12-year-old boy being attached to a mature man who would become the
child’s mentor and, apparently, molester. And homoerotic ancient Greek
art and, more significantly, the casual way prominent Greeks spoke of
pederasty attest to its widespread acceptance. As to the latter,
historian Plutarch addresses Theban pederasty in Life of Pelopidas
and explains that it was an educational device for boys that was
designed to “soften, while they were young, their natural fierceness”
and “temper the manners and characters of the youth.” The poet Solon
gushed about pederasty in his poem “Boys and Sport,” and tradition tells
us that the warrior group the Sacred Band of Thebes comprised
pederastic man-youth pairings. In fact, the Greeks even had words
describing the players in man-boy relationships: An erastes was
an adult man who courted or was in a sexual relationship with a boy
(this accounts for part of the derivation of “pederast”), who himself
was known as an eromenos.

Read the rest here.