Unearthed audio of Tucker Carlson defending paedophilia etc.

[emailking]

I don't know what came before the snippet of the conversation in the article. But in that snippet he says he's not defending it and that he's against it. The only sense in which he's "defending" it is that he said it's not as bad as something else.

[emailking]

Could we also not call people who are sexually attracted to 16 year olds pedophiles, please?

A pedophile in medical/psychiatric terms is someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent kids, not to 16 year olds who in any biological sense are adults, if not in a mental sense.

16 year olds are most definitely not adults mentally. They do not have good decision-making skills as a matter of biology.

Also, I always get creeped out by comments like this. It feels like defense of pedophilia without outright saying it.

Does it creep you out that the age of consent is 16 in your state? You guys have decided 16 year olds can consent to sex.

Being attracted to a 16 year old does not imply pedophilia, either as a medical or legal matter, even if it creeps you out. Ephebophilia is the term for that, and it has a different term because it's a very different phenomenon, with different laws surrounding it as a result.

[emailking]

No the age of consent being 16 seems perfectly normal to me. What's creepy is when teenagers are pursued sexually by people twice their age, regardless of its legality.

Most of those people aren't also pursuing pre-pubescent children, which is a different kind of evil altogether, and what most people think of when they think of pedophiles. I believe that's what BlueSwan was getting at with the clarification.