Looks like a nasty piece of work to me, Jonah.

I can’t see that this gets us very far with the “harmless old bugger”

theory, though. The theory asserts that most pedophiles are harmless. If you produce one who obviously isn’t, how have you contradicted the theory?

What concerns me is the gentle slide we are on — you could call it a “slippery slope” if you like — from criminalizing bad acts to criminalizing bad thoughts. In the old British regime whose passing was so eloquently lamented by that Leo McKinstry Spectator piece I drew attention to, bad acts were savagely penalized, while bad thoughts were waved away with a smile and an off-color joke. We seem to be drifting into a state where one big bloc of the population — the “root causes” Left — denies that the bad acts are bad or that society has a right to punish sociopaths, while another big bloc — a weird combination of anti-family radicals and conservative puritans — seeks 25-to-life for bad thoughts. Like Leo McKinstry, I prefer the old dispensation.