Daleth

You kept comparing him to Allen Ginsberg. Exactly what did you mean in doing so?

An adult hugging and kissing a kid is not necessarily eliciting sexual feelings in that kid. This guy didn't grope his genitals. Why would a 9 year old kid think that unless they'd already experienced sexual abuse that had started with hugging and kissing or if they are filled with fear of being sexually abused? A 9 year old takes things at face value for the most part and would take hugs and kisses as hugs and kisses. We don't even know if this adult intended to elicit sexual feelings or if he found it sexual himself... after all, he was mentally disabled and might not have known a lot more about sex than a 9 year old.

yguy

Here's what I said about them:

If Rind et al did not misrepresent him, he's only a notch or two better than Allen Ginsberg.

And:

vylo: Children have been shown not to have the capacity to understand their sexuality.

yguy: Martin Seligman and Allen Ginsberg evidently did.

They were both giving aid & comfort to the cause of pedophiles, even if only Ginsberg did it consciously. Truth to tell, these statements were based on the assumption - a reasonable one in my view, seeing how Seligman said it would be called CSA today - that the contact between Seligman and the newspaper man was definitely sexual, which it now appears may be false.

Well now, there's kissing and there's kissing, isn't there?

How many boys wouldn't think being kissed on the mouth by a man was weird, if that's what happened? That's the problem here: only Seligman knows exactly what happened, and the details presented here are too skeletal for it to be positively determined.

Daleth

You left out the most hyperbolic:
Not just a single opinion, but an opininion which is indicative of latent Allen Ginsbergian insanity.

He condemns CSA as evil and deserving punishment, but is still giving aid and comfort?

So you've tempered your position, eh? Amazing. Bravo. It's funny that it took additional evidence to get you to consider that there may not be enough evidence. Thing is, CSA is used today to describe a huge range of behaviors. Some are more harmful than others, not all are sexually motivated, and some are called CSA not because they are necessarily harmful themselves, but because they sometimes lead to harmful things.

Probably a lot of boys would think it was weird, which is not the same as thinking it's evil or feeling abused by it. One of the reasons for laws against CSA is that children don't understand sexuality. And again, we don't know enough about what happened to judge anyway.

Ronin

It was settled here, Fr.Andrew.

Though the post was closed, I, as an atheist, had summed up the rational position against your views regarding CSA without a contextual obligation to any religious culture.

However, I am sure you will continue to deny it and consistently claim some sort of persecution of your assertions.

Ronin

Precisely.

Fr.Andrew

(Fr Andrew): Still quite full of yourself, I see.

Ronin

Still good to know you think so.

yguy

Yes.

That wasn't too bright either, even if he was not merely enunciating his own self-deception, which I think likely.

http://www.csulb.edu/~asc/child.html

More recently, the Past President of the APA, Martin Seligman (1994), argued that the case for CSA being a "special destroyer of adult mental health" (p. 232) was far from proven. The existing research indicating harm, according to him, "abandoned methodological niceties" (p.233). These studies were characterized by sampling bias, lack of adequate control groups, and a failure to consider alternative explanations for the findings. He wrote: "Once the ideology is stripped away, we still remain ignorant about whether sexual abuse in childhood wreaks damage in adult life and, if so, how much" (p.234).

Seligman, M.E.P. (1994). What you can change and what you can't. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Really? We don't know if CSA is damaging without studies? If that isn't raving lunacy, I don't know what is. There are people on this very board who know it so intuitively that the creep ever laid a hand on their kid with bad intent would be strangling on his own testicles before he knew what hit him. Know why? Because THEY KNOW it's a hideous outrage against a child's innocence. Seligman, having substituted pseudo-intellectual fatuities for the common sense he was born with, is utterly oblivious to the glaringly obvious.