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Part_5_2
leads to such tragedies. If we are to fulfill this part of our mission, I believe there is one part of
our message we must not forget - and that is the message of hope.
It is a daunting thing to say to a young child-lover, perhaps still in his teens, that all he can
reasonably look forward to is a life of constant yearning with no hope of fulfillment. Must we
really tell this young man or woman - by the message of our own abstention - that in order to
behave ethically in our society he must never, ever, hold a child in a way that brings love and
desire together? Must we tell him that for his whole life he must take the fox to his breast and
let it gnaw in the way of the Spartans - even those heroic figures, remember, famed for their
discipline and fortitude, were also great boy-lovers. This negative way of thinking is like Kant's
dull ethics of duty in which the only actions regarded as truly ethical are when we do
burdensome things we'd really rather get out of if we could.
Better, I suggest, to offer hope. In practice, the young man or woman in our society will of
course more often than not be wise to exercise restraint. In practice there may not be all that
much difference between the path of total abstinence on the one hand, and the path of rejecting
dangerous possibilities on a one-by-one basis, as they occur. But if we say to the young childlover
"Here are some principles, think about them, but make your own mind up" we do two
things. We give him a tool to help his thinking but we also leave him with some hope for the
future. Not a lot, but as much as we reasonably can. Such hope, I suggest, is utterly vital.
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