Discussing the Politics of Child Sexuality

When Professor Harris Mirkin, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, published an article entitled "The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia," in the Journal of Homosexuality, in 1999, it received little attention. Then came the Catholic Church scandals and the hubbub over the book "Harmful to Minors" by Judith Levine. Mirkin suddenly found himself in the middle of a storm of controversy. He has since been featured everywhere from the New York Times to the New Yorker magazine to NPR. Amidst all the spin and scandal, Mirkin is rapidly gaining a reputation as a proponent of pedophilia – a charge that Mirkin dismisses as a gross mischaracterization of his work (Mirkin also agrees that priests or teachers who touch children in a sexual way are abusing their authority. He does not condone rape). Mirkin spoke with AlterNet about how his ideas have been distorted, and how the "moralists" have commandeered the public debate and rendered it anemic.

ALTERNET: Did you expect this kind of publicity?

No. I mean, the article was published years ago, it was written years ago, in 1997, and published in 1999. The reason it came up was partly because of Judith Levine's book. A lot of these very conservative groups said that that book shouldn't have been published at all because it said children were sexual. In that whole thing, my article came up. My article had been on the Internet; the same groups had been writing about it there and didn't like it. When it was just on the Internet, no one paid any attention. Then it came to the attention of some newspapers, and then the constitutents of one of the representatives in Missouri's lower house raised the issue on the floor… Then they fined the University $100,000 and everyone heard about the article.

ALT: How much of the attention you're receiving comes as a result of the crisis in the Catholic Church?

I think that the whole issue about defining children's sexuality has been around -- it's certainly been discussed and attacked on the Internet. Levine's book got so much publicity partly because of the Catholic church crisis. It's standard really. The book was attacked before it came out. [Conservative groups] were saying the university shouldn't publish it before anyone had even read it. The argument of this whole group is that this is an undisccussable, unanalyzable, un-talk-about-able topic. Any discussion of the topic will serve to legimitize pedophilia or whatever bugaboo they have in mind.

The approach is essentially biblical. We know the answer, we know that it's bad, and any discussion is to move away from the right answer. The argument that they want to forbid discussion is from… Jeremiah, Ezekiel. The other position is: We don't know the right answer. We can discuss issues, put them in context, and the correct answer may emerge. The thing that they're really opposed to is discussion, which is similar to the position on terrorism that comes from Ashcroft, for example. To discuss the issue is to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

ALT: In an article in the New Yorker, the author took you to task for "intending to be subsversive."

That was a joke. I said that to the New York Times reporter… I forget what she had said. But the article intended to be subversive in the sense that Socrates was subversive. I teach political philosophy, I cause people to question the things that are "true." In that sense, I meant to be subversive, to lead to questioning. Because I question the whole cultural construct of childhood, adulthood and sexuality. That's sort of what I was looking at. In that sense, I was saying that these constructs aren't absolute, but change from culture to culture and from time to time. If you believe they are absolutes, then I'm interested in subverting the absolutes. So in that sense, I meant to be subversive.