How does the unthinkable become thinkable? Through slow, persistent, and quiet change. At a time when abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are becoming widely accepted, you might wonder: What’s left that could possibly be called “unthinkable?” The answer: pedophilia, the sexual exploitation of children.

Most Americans view pedophilia as an abomination. But gay activists are now openly advocating it, calling it “inter-generational intimacy.” As Mary Eberstadt writes in a provocative article in the Weekly Standard, the “social consensus against the sexual exploitation of children… is apparently eroding.”

The process of erosion began at least fifteen years ago, when academics began questioning the almost universal condemnation of pedophilia. Soon, filmmakers and advertisers joined in, giving us movies like Lolita, depicting a sexual liaison between a twelve-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man. More recently, advertisers like Calvin Klein have pushed the envelope, using child-like models in sexually explicit poses in billboards and advertising.

Most Americans didn’t fully wake up to the danger until 1998. That’s when the journal of the American Psychological Association published the results of a study that argued that sex between adults and children is not always harmful, and that so-called “willing encounters” should be relabeled as “adult-child sex.”

The public was outraged. But, shockingly, mainline newspapers allowed homosexual activists to use their pages to attack, not the study, but people like Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who criticized it. As one example, in National Journal, Jonathan Rauch wrote approvingly of the study and called the vote by Congress condemning it “faintly sinister.” Mainline publishers also helped lower the deviancy bar, publishing trashy novels with sympathetic portrayals of men having sex with boys as young as seven—books, by the way, that are available at your neighborhood bookstores.

Well, the effort to make the unacceptable was predicted some twenty years ago. In their 1979 book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, Dr. C. Everett Koop and Dr. Francis Schaeffer predicted that things considered unthinkable in the seventies would be quite thinkable in the nineties—including things like adult-child sex.

This would happen, they predicted, because “the consensus of our society no longer rests on a Judeo-Christian base, but rather on a humanistic one.” Humanists, you see, view people as products of chance, not creations of God. So, there are no transcendent standards. Standards fluctuate depending on what’s viewed as “necessary, expedient, or even fashionable.”

Well, Christians don’t live by what’s fashionable, and we need to let our voices be heard on this issue. And the next time you see an ad exploiting children, speak out. Write the advertisers, boycott their products, and inform your congressman.

We can’t afford to keep silent about this issue. God help us if the barbarians in our midst are able to convince the American people that child molestation is just another fashionable trend of the twenty-first century.