Unregistered 142, featuring my interview with Stephen Kershnar, a professor of philosophy at Fredonia University, was released in December 2020. 🧵

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Unregistered 142, featuring my interview with Stephen Kershnar, a professor of philosophy at Fredonia University, was released in December 2020.

🧵

Since then many thousands of people have watched or listened to the interview, and there was little controversy over it until early Wednesday morning, when the "Libs of TikTok" Twitter account posted a short clip of the portion of the interview . . .

in which Kershnar and I discuss age of consent laws. In the clip I say that for many years as a teacher and writer I have been "making arguments in defense of adult-child sex."

Over the last 36 hours I've received hundreds of death threats and been called a pedophile and pedophile apologist.

In the interview, Kershnar and I conducted an academic analysis of the philosophical justifications of age of consent laws in the United States.

We did not discuss our feelings about pedophiles.

So let me do that now.

I have stated publicly before that I believe that adults who cannot control their sexual urges with children should be incarcerated in concentration camps, separated permanently from both the civilian and regular prison populations. I want to kill adults who rape children.

These powerful, extreme feelings I have about the matter are held by many people. But they stop us from thinking rationally about the laws that have been enacted largely in their name.

Because of the taboo on discussing the subject, few Americans know that there are nearly one million people on the sex offender registry for life.

Those registered as sex offenders are legally barred from living in large portions of the country and denied access to employment, housing, and public spaces. Their movements and thoughts are monitored and controlled by law enforcement officers.

Their names and faces are reported to the public, and vigilante groups hound them out of their homes. Their lives are virtually ruined. For the registered sex offenders who raped a child, this punishment is insufficient. We must segregate them completely from the rest of society.

But for many other people on the registry, this punishment is a clear injustice.

The "adult-child sex" I have defended includes that between a 19-year-old boy and his 15-year-old girlfriend, which according to our law is an act of a pedophile and is punished as such.

The United States has among the highest age of consent laws in the world—in almost no other country would the 19-year-old be punished. Hundreds of thousands of people on the sex offender registry in the U.S. were convicted as teenagers.

The "adult-child sex" I have defended also includes the countless marriages that according to the law began as statutory rape.

Would those who called for feeding me into a woodchipper want to do the same to all the men and women whose current relationship with an adult began in violation of the age of consent law?

If an adult woman is married to a man she began dating when she was legally underage, should we call him a pedophile, put him in prison, and make him wear an ankle bracelet for the rest of his life?

American age of consent laws have done little to stop pedophiles from assaulting children. Rates of child sexual assault have not declined since the advent of the laws in the early 20th century.

But zealous, emotionally-driven enactment and enforcement of the laws have destroyed the lives of innumerable people, the vast majority of whom Americans would be shocked to find are sex offenders.

I welcome everyone to watch or listen to the full episode with Stephen Kershnar. The section in which we discuss age of consent laws begins at 30:17: youtu.be/ZIG__mlSEms

I learned about the sex offender registry from two guests on Unregistered: David Feige, whose film Untouchable documents the lives of people on the registry (www.thaddeusrussell.com/podcast/17)
. . .

and Emily Horowitz, a professor of law and criminal justice at St. Francis College and author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us (www.thaddeusrussell.com/podcast/62).

I presented my position on what should be done with pedophiles in this podcast (starting at 39:32): youtu.be/Cb1cSSZf3KI?t=2373

In every Unregistered interview I hope to find something of value in shunned ideas, something that will make the world more free and less harmful. I believe that in my interview with Stephen Kershnar I accomplished just that.

Much of what we consider to be human progress began with unpopular ideas. I will continue to talk about them.

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