Richard Dawkins talks about "mild pedophilia"

Let me put it another way.

Can you find any other descriptions in print, not from an Irish author and not from an Irish source, that capture this aspect (that the physical/emotional abuse was much more prevalent, and in some case more brutal, than the sexual abuse) of what happened in Ireland as decent as what was quoted from TGD?

As someone who has relatives who lived through these horrors, and as someone who has written extensively on this (still) underreported aspect of our Irish history, it is rare for me to see any non-Irish author ‘get it’ so well.

I assume you are sufficiently aware of Kinsey’s work to know that the bolded part above is utterly wrong. But, that may be a dangerous assumption to make on the evidence thus far ITT.

So because you, and your ilk, are determined to perceive such comments as “looking like a douchebag” that gives you the right to misrepresent, quote mine and distort said comments without challenge? It’s good to know that this is how your moral indignation is being acted out, it would just be much more honest if you would state it clearly rather than hiding behind a disgusting sense of undeserved moral righteousness.

From where I’m standing it really looks like injecting Kinsey into this discussion in the first place was yet another logically fallacious bomb hurled Dawkins’ way.

Claiming your intent was to provide a comparison would have been much more believable had you not opened with this disgusting act of ‘guilt-by-connection’: “This reminds me of another man, Alfred Kinsey, who used the excuse of studying human sexual to condone and incite child sexual abuse”
[] So what if you're 101% correct on all your wall o' text responses? People have always and will always have a diferent opinion than you.[/quote]
The first part would seem to be a rather crucial point, but you are missing a more important aspect here – do you really think people should hold their piece in the face of such distorting and quote mining? Do you really think any topic like is helped by allowing such misinformation to stand??? Or, if it is for the ‘cause’, does that make such completely excusable??

I don’t remember anyone else bothering to either link to (let alone post sections from) the original Times interview. No need when slandering a man in the cause of child protection is just such a great thing to do.

I don’t think anyone else would have bothered posting the sections that provided the context behind his book’s extracts. Why bother doing anything like fact checking? Don’t you know that none of that matters if the mob feels righteous and cause of child protection is advanced and we all get out outrage out?

The logical justification for mob rule?

When people bring up new distortions and new quote mines then, rather unbelievably, it may require new posts to address such. Surprising I know.

I’m sorry my anal need for fair treatment, my asperger want to get facts right and my general intolerance I have towards misinformation spread by mob mentality has gotten in the way of a good old fashioned verbal lynching.

Nailed it.

The real irony to all of this? The entire maelstrom of over simplification and emotive bullshit being peddled ITT is the same sort of stuff that helps lower society’s ‘child abuse IQ’. When factual inaccuracy and emotive-driven-but-incorrect-myth get spread that doesn’t help, in any way, the cause of child welfare – it harms it. But who cares right? As long as enough people in the mob feel righteous why should such trifles be considered?

yeah you made your point of miss information and white knighting for it.
there is no need to keep repeating your shit over and over again. Let people who feel different just read what you have wrote already. that way you save yourself from having to type the same thing out again and coming of as a raging heartless cunt.

You can't hold Dawkins accountable for the Times article. That's the work of a journalist and the editorial staff at the Times.

Few people on this Earth have been as mis-quoted and mis-represented as Richard Dawkins. For a couple of decades now he's been the target of sophisticated, well funded propaganda campaigns and undercover operations in the style of Scientology fair game ops. It's really a remarkable thing to watch from a distance and I hope one day more of the facts about this effort will come to light. I think some of the people are Aaron Barr style Federal contractors involved in the manipulation of public opinion --some of the same people who helped launch the "Kony 2012" hoax on us that nearly resulted in Obama sending US troops into Africa.

Sad that this kind of thing actually works:


I once wrote a letter to the Dawkins' foundation warning about the attorney representing the foundation in a legal case. I'd stumbled across hints of a link between this attorney and the people who made the movie: "Expelled!" which was an anti-Dawkins hit piece, mostly. Not long afterward I had a couple of strangers chat me up in a way that made me feel I was speaking with a PI. Anyway, the lawyer ate up a lot of money, the case was lost, and the Foundation had to pay the other side's legal fees.

Nah, I'm afraid FloGold nailed you, Anon.

The evidence of who is letting themselves be carried away by emotion is there for all to see - it's in your own posts, remember all those rants, all the hyperbole, all those ????s?

And you repeat, again and again, the same accusations of misrepresentation and 'quote-mining', without justification.

You know what is ironic? You accused me of taking a Dawkins quote out of context, so you provided the immediate context, but it only served to give further examples of Dawkins' minimising child sexual abuse, thus defeating your own argument.

So, what did you do? You just carried on posting more unsubstantiated accusations of 'quote-mining' - even though you provided the latest quote yourself. If that is quote-mining, you were the miner - and you unearthed a gem!

There was no rationale to support what you claimed, just the repeated failed attempts at trying to win the argument, not through evidence and reason, but by name-calling and attempts to smear. I doubt Prof Dawkins would approve.

You seem to imagine that everyone else is duty-bound to examine only what you consider to be the proper context (basically, whatever you say it should be), or they are guilty of 'quote-mining'. That is a foolish notion, almost child-like in its naivety.

We are all at liberty to check what Dawkins has said on the topic under discussion, whenever and wherever it occurred, to further our side of the argument - it's the same rules for everyone. The topic under discussion is in the thread title - ie Dawkins controversial reference to 'mild pedophilia'. Any other instances where he minimises child sexual abuse are legitimately within that context, as are counter-examples, of course.

I remain unconvinced by Prof Dawkins 12 Sept statement. He terms it a 'misunderstanding'. I take this to mean he thinks some people misunderstood him. Not his fault, but some folks just got the wrong end of the stick.

The problem with that is that it was Dawkins is the person who caused the confusion by his misuse of terminology. and a very odd, jarring turn of phrase. He has not retracted his description, or re-phrased it to clarify matters, so the confusion remains.

I would also like to understand exactly why, not only does he find he cannot condemn his own abuser, but would feel obliged to defend him, knowing him to be a serial abuser of others.

Hmmm. Odd, very odd.

Just to give an example of an earlier black PR effort aimed at Dawkins:

When Expelled! was released in 2008 a stealth promotional video appeared on YouTube, Beware the Believers, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. First, it underscores how Expelled! was aimed at Dawkins. Second, good production values. Far more articulate than most of the anti-science rhetoric we usually get.


In the interview below the guy who voiced the lyrics explains the video's theme: a contrast between the history of science, represented as a strange multi-generational effort to build an inhuman machine that one day will kill us all, and "true science." "True science" sounds like moonies, but I digress.


Why are some people so down on modern science? Well probably because the rules of evidence and methods of peer review within science stand as the biggest obstacle between the wealthy narcissists of this world and Total Freedom.

Maybe because the abuser killed himself not long after the fondling incident?

I don't follow. As I recall, Dawkins said only that he later gassed himself - how much later I don't believe he disclosed.

I think he was speaking about defending him against vigilantes and over-eager prosecutors, which would of course be superfluous after his death.

This bit implies the suicide happened while Dawkins was still a student at the same school:

quote]We discussed it among ourselves (the students molested by the teacher) on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. [/quote]

As much as you might loathe someone, it's pretty awful when you hear that they've committed suicide. That's a level of desperation and suffering that you can't easily ignore.

I don't think he was "defending" the molester. In fact he spend his own money to fight the effort to cover up incidents of child sexual abuse at Catholic schools.

quote]Only slightly less culpable than the abusers themselves are the institutions that protected them, of which the most prominent examples are to be found in the senior hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This is why I personally donated £10,000 of my own money towards a fund, instigated by Christopher Hitchens and me, to build the legal case for prosecuting Pope Benedict XVI for his part (when Cardinal Ratzinger) in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Our initiative, for which I paid 50%, the rest being raised by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, resulted in the book The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, in which the distinguished barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC laid out the case for the prosecution should any jurisdiction in the world choose to take it up in the future.[/quote]

Back atcha, FloGold!

So glad you joined this thread, because it's clear that you are not a 'Dawkins-hater'. Neither am I - quite the opposite, in fact. Reason and Science, ftw!

The Hunt For Britian's Pedophiles:

quote]We discussed it among ourselves (the students molested by the teacher) on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. [/quote]

It could be the case. Hard to say with any certainty, though. (He might have been in touch with his old schoolmates long after they left school, for example).

Found the quote I was thinking of, in the Atlantic article referenced earlier, from The God Delusion:

It's worth mentioning that here he is not singling out the teacher who he says molested several others, but he must be amongst the three Dawkins mentions. He weakens his case by an excessive loading of the hypothetical, so that it appears more reasonable and natural to want to defend the molesters.

But lawyers, at least, do not hound offenders as 'no better than child murderers' - the law would not permit them. (There are fairly rigid sentencing guidelines for the type of offence Dawkins described - I looked them up - and the range of sentences is from 1 - 4 years' imprisonment, nothing like the whole-life sentence murderers might receive.)

Dawkins' rhetoric, whether intentional or not, makes it possible for his defence of criminal acts to seem unremarkable.

A lot of people got mad at Dawkins for attacking the Catholic hierarchy for their effort to cover up child sex abuse. So in an effort to avoid being accused of an axe to grind or bad faith or Catholic hatred, Dawkins has done what he always does: the steelman argument. The steelman is the opposite of the strawman, which is where you take the weakest part of your opponent's argument and attack that. In the steelman you bend over backwards to support the other side's point of view. You make the strongest case you can for the other side then attack that.

Dawkins tries to be as fair as possible in pressing his arguments against clergy abuses --e.g., by conceding that public mores have changed and we can't expect people living 50 years ago to respect the mores of today, by saying that although sex abuse is bad there are worse crimes like murder, that in some cases (like his own) people do not dwell on the experience and go on to live normal lives.

tl;dr: Don't confuse the steelman for a defense of the opponent's point of view.

It's strange that you make this point in replying to my post, where the quoted text shows Dawkins adopting what is a typical straw man argument, ie in order to justify defending his teachers, the specifics of the hypothetical he proposes are heavily exaggerated - the 50-year gap between offence and charges, the lawyers hounding defendant like a child-murderer - and thus much easier to oppose. It is definitely not a steel man argument.

Can you give an example of Dawkins setting up a steel man argument?

Why do you keep saying that Dawkins is defending the guy who felt up his bum?

Ohai Barrett

I interpret this comment as a defense of child molesters.

Just to be accurate, I have never used the bolded words, but the quote I gave from Dawkins does include a mention of him defending the person who molested him in his hypothetical, as one of the three teachers he would defend - the same person he says had also molested several more of his fellow pupils.

Here it is again:

I think Van Allen is bored.
I don't agree with that poster.

Nope. Ohai. Guess again.

Is there an "if" at the beginning of the quoted sentence you left off?

If you told people I was a supporter of the Sea Org and quoted the words below to prove your point:

when what I actually said was:

...that would be a little misleading.

Seems an accurate way to describe what happened, but maybe you would use different language:

I already quoted the entire paragraph only a few posts ago. It should not be necessary to keep re-quoting the entire thing, so long as the meaning is retained.

Dawkins' meaning is preserved by re-stating that it was a hypothetical - a 'what-if' if you prefer - and that he 'would' defend..., 'should have felt obliged' etc

Clearly, then, there is no intent to mislead here.

Disagree.

The cremasteric reflex Dawkins describes experiencing "is elicited by lightly stroking the superior and medial (inner) part of the thigh regardless of the direction of stroke." according to a medical dictionary.

If Dawkins meant what you said, he could have said so, but he didn't.

Sorry I am finding this conversation confusing and it's hard to scroll back and find exactly the context for half a sentence. So here is the thing:

That is not a defense of the molester for what he did, which Dawkins calls, "reprehensible." That's a warning that we need to think about how mores have changed from 50 years ago.

Dawkins has written and spoken against child sex abuse many times. He's put up his own money to aid in the prosecution of people who tried to cover up sex abuse scandals. So even if you are having some trouble parsing his language, you can look to his actions for his meaning.

I guess I think of the bum as including the uppermost part of the thigh. But I wasn't there and I don't know if Dawkins was touched more toward the front than the back. Is this detail important to get exactly right?

Sorry you found it confusing. The balance to be struck is between retaining the meaning of the words, without continually re-posting the same thing over and over, which I think others might find irritating.

Had Dawkins himself been more explicit and precise, the confusion would have been lessened.

Yes, he does say it was reprehensible - arguably, rather a mild way of describing a serious criminal offence. But he does also say that he would, in the circumstances he describes, defend a man (whom he knew had sexually abused a number of children) against vigilantes and lawyers. I have no quibble with protecting people against mob violence, but I do strongly object to the idea of his defending serial sex offenders in the law courts, however trivial or 'harmless' he personally might have found the experience as a victim.

The law explicitly does not agree that the offences Dawkins is speaking about are harmless to the victim. In the same sentencing guidelines I mentioned earlier, it says this:

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/s7_sexual_assault_of_a_child_under_13/#content

Dawkins should know that there is often a gap before child victims of abuse speak out, because of feelings of shame and self-blaming (feelings encouraged by their abusers). There is inevitably a delay in prosecuting cases as a result. Yet he is happy to describe this delay as 'raking over the distant past'.

He should also be aware that the law regards it as an aggravating factor that the molester was in a special position of trust at the time of the offence.

As I have previously pointed out, it is not only I who have a problem with Dawkins' words and their import, evidenced by the numbers of people who have expressed strongly negative views about them, widely-respected publications such as The Times and The Atlantic among them. These are not far-right Dawkins haters, or nutjobs producing crude propaganda.

Dawkins is obviously correct in believing that the evidence shows the cover-up of child abuse in the RC church goes to the very top. At the same time, it is more of a headline-grabbing stunt, to campaign for the arrest of the Pope than it is support for the victims of the abuse.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Dawkins' influence played some part in highlighting the scandals within the church, but it was the snowballing effect of the law courts' actions and the financial penalties which ultimately forced Benedict to issue grovelling apologies (at the same time muttering weasel words, blaming everyone else but his own organisation).

It depends. I wouldn't want to go around saying Dawkins was touched somewhere else than he was, in fact. The law does distinguish different kinds of touching, penalising genital touching more severely than non-genital touching. Dawkins appears unable or unwilling to call a spade a spade, so we are left to guess at what he means. Not that he is under the slightest obligation to clarify, of course.

But the meaning is not being retained, that’s the point the other anon is trying to make. When you leave out relevant portions you are distorting the meaning.

The passage in question: “All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).”

Parsing this we get the following:
IF (conditional, a requirement for some later action to be enacted or endorsed) said teachers were being hounded by “vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers” THEN (an action to be performed or endorsed provided the conditional is fulfilled) “I should have felt obliged to come to their defence” (presumably against the vigilantes/lawyers and against the insinuation that the teachers were as bad as child murderers).

When you represent the passage as “I should have felt obliged to come to their defence” you have not retained the meaning. Leaving out this meaning, you then conclude that “the quote I gave from Dawkins does include a mention of him defending the person who molested him in his hypothetical, as one of the three teachers he would defend” which is a clear, blatant and deliberate distortion of the meaning of the original passage. You are insinuating here that Dawkins would defend his teacher against the charge of molestation – something that is not only incompatible with the sentence quoted in full, but also incompatible with earlier remarks in the passage (“That was indeed reprehensible”).

You make further distortions when you later write “ I have no quibble with protecting people against mob violence, but I do strongly object to the idea of his defending serial sex offenders in the law courts, however trivial or 'harmless' he personally might have found the experience as a victim.”

The bold is refuted by the passage in full. Claiming you have “no quibble with protecting people against mob violence” doesn’t sufficiently retain the meaning of the passage when you later write “…but I do strongly object to the idea of his defending serial sex offenders in the law courts, however trivial or 'harmless' he personally might have found the experience as a victim”. The insinuation that Dawkins’ would defend anyone in court against the charges of molestation (and not against mob houndings or comparisons to child murders, which is what he actually said) is clear, blatant and deliberate distortion of the passage in question.

Any person who was led to believe, with the same sort of distortion you have displayed in your post, that Dawkins would defend “serial sex offenders in the law courts, however trivial or 'harmless' he personally might have found the experience as a victim” would naturally be appalled. The problem, as is evident by merely reading the passage in full, is that what Dawkins said and what you are implying he said are very different things.

Jkng

If the teacher slipped his hand up the little boy's shorts while holding him on his knee, I would count that as "fondling" or genital touching, even if the tips of the man's fingers didn't brush the penis. It's enough that his hand was on the skin in that general area, intentionally to excite sexual arousal.

You seem to be faulting Dawkins for failing to be more explicit about the exact inches of his skin that were touched. I actually don't think those details matter in this context. And, having been abused myself, I think it took a lot of courage to say as much as he did.

I agree with the general proposition that it is always possible to distort the meaning of something by leaving out a portion of the text. Such a danger exists whenever you extract a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or even a chapter of someone's work, whether or not that was your intention.

It is of course possible that I did distort Dawkins' meaning as you say - that remains to be seen. If you are able to show conclusively that it did distort the meaning, that is regrettable, but there is no sinister motive here - no intention to distort. I simply wanted to avoid repeating the whole thing, when what I wanted to show was that Dawkins did mention 'coming to the defence' of the offenders in the passage, as a direct response to a one-line post. If you read the posts to which I was replying, I'd have thought that might have been rather obvious.

As already stated, when I gave the original, intact, just a few posts back, it would have been foolish to try to pull the wool over anyone's eyes in that way, and not credible, IMHO.

That is not a bad effort. It is your interpretation, as your use of 'presumably' implies. It seems to be a reasonable interpretation to me, on its face.

Stop there a moment. You did not quote the rest of Dawkins' sentence, nor any of my own words. Does that distort his, or my own meaning? More to the point, you merely assert here that I have not retained his meaning, but you haven't shown yet how Dawkins' meaning was distorted.

This is nonsense. If you did me the courtesy of 'parsing' my words as you did for Dawkins, you'd find that a good-faith attempt was made to retain the essence of his meaning, including the conditional nature of his hypothetical defence of the molesters. You would also find a reasonable interpretation of his words, but one which differs from your own.

My reading of Dawkins' words in their context leads me to the conclusion that he was indeed saying he would have defended the molesters in a law court under the conditions he specifies - which is the only place he could meaningfully mount such a defence against any hypothetical charges and lawyers. Dawkins' saying that the molestation was reprehensible (worthy of censure, morally wrong) is not incompatible with defending him in court against criminal charges or potential penalties which he might not believe were appropriate, again because he says it was 'harmless'.

He might be saying no more than that he would defend him by eg speaking up for him down at the Pig and Whistle, or writing to a newspaper, but what he actually means is unclear at best. (I'm not sure a letter to the Telegraph would be of much help against a violent mob, nor against criminal charges in court, so it's open to question that this was all he intended by saying he would 'come to their defence'.)

Again, you do no more than assert a refutation. You have also misquoted Dawkins here, while claiming it is 'what he actually said'. No, it is not what he actually said. It's how you have interpreted what he said.

Oddly - since you are disputing that his mention of 'defence' and 'lawyers' has anything to do with law courts - you left out any mention of lawyers in this part of your version of what Dawkins meant:

.

Might that not be because their inclusion is harder to fit into your version?

But I don't suppose you'll berate yourself for your 'clear, blatant and deliberate distortion', will you? You are in no doubt that your interpretation is the correct one, and anyone who presents a different one is dishonest or worse.

However, I will say that the text you bolded is too strongly-worded. I should have been more circumspect, added a conditional or two, to avoid giving any impression that Prof Dawkins is clearly stating or implying he would defend serial sex offenders in court. The trouble is, he's not making his meaning clear either way. But I might have put it better as follows:

If, by 'coming to their defence', Prof Hawkins means that he would attempt to absolve, or mitigate the criminal responsibility of a serial sex offender, simply because he felt that his own experience was harmless, I would find such a stance totally unacceptable.

Unless you could produce a statement from Prof Dawkins to say that he did not mean that he would have defended his molester in the courts, you will not be able to state definitively that your interpretation is indeed the correct one.

I wouldn't dismiss that possibility, since I have no more definite proof of what Prof Dawkins meant than you do. Indeed, I feel I should re-iterate that i find your interpretation here a reasonable one.

Thanks for that explanation. It is how I interpreted what Prof Dawkins said, too, but I wasn't sure.

I'm really not finding fault with Prof Dawkins on this point - not at all. I just find the oblique ways he puts things (not just about this topic) slightly odd, his reference to this (to me, anyway) obscure cremasteric reflex, hinting at what was done. The question arose in my mind: if he felt he wasn't affected adversely by the experience, as he says, what reasons might he have not to be explicit? I'm still slightly puzzled by that, but perhaps it is simply politeness on his part.

(My own interest was purely to understand the legal distinctions between different forms of sexual abuse, which necessarily includes details of the precise nature of the touching involved, so as to establish the criminal penalties given for such offences.)

Anyway, I do not criticise Prof Dawkins' choice to reveal only as much as he did.

I think Dawkins was trying to navigate between under-reaction and over-reaction to child sex abuse. There's a danger in both directions. In my case I never went to the authorities to complain about my abuser because it was someone in my own family. I would have been a thousand times more miserable if my family were forced to break apart due to over-reaction at that point in time.

Earlier VanAllen, you'd asked about another "steelman" example. What comes to mind is the interview in Expelled!, when Ben Stein asks Dawkins repeatedly if he believes in various gods (I'm paraphrasing from memory here). Each time Dawkins says "no" and finally he wonders aloud why Stein keeps hammering the point. Then Ben Stein says, "So there's no possible designer who might have intervened and created life?"

Now Dawkins had written books and articles critical of Intelligent Design many times prior to this interview. He rejects the idea as fundamentally non-scientific and largely based upon a logical fallacy, the argument from ignorance. Further, it has no explanatory power as you are left with an even bigger problem to solve than the origin of life: the origin of the designer. So Dawkins might have simply said as much bluntly in the interview. But to bend over backwards in fairness to the idea and for the sake of argument, he speculated aloud about an advanced alien race engineering the first self-replicating molecules on Earth and somehow leaving a signature pointing to themselves within the genetic code. He doesn't actually believe this is what happened and he ultimately rejects the idea for the same reason he rejects a supernatural designer: you're still left with the problem of where the designer came from. It's a hypothetical for the sake of discussion --something that happens all the time in science.

So what did Stein do? He pressed the meme, "LOL, Dawkins hates God so much he'd rather believe that aliens created life on Earth!" This was picked up by the religious and non-religious right and chanted over and over until it became reality.

So I expect that "Dawkins is a pedo defender!" will likewise get repeated over and over until that becomes reality. Because that is how the anti-science tribe rolls.

People who are here discussing ( arguing) about Dawkins are not anti- science because of concern about what Dawkins said and what he meant by it.
We can talk about this without being lumped in with religious conservatives, surely.

Intelligent Anon poster is intelligent.

What Dawkins wrote is abundantly clear to me.
Perhaps because i suspended my own personal judgement and bias just long enough to read his eloquent and personal story in somewhat traumatic and painful detail. As has been previously mentioned back in this thread, Dawkins is basically giving testimony if you will to his own personal encounter with abuse when he was a child.
It is his account. It is also his life, as an educated, adult man.
He is more than entitled to write about it however he sees fit, whether some critics want to alter, and distort his very coherent, clear and reasonable account of a life experience he had, and which he has made an important aspect of his life's work -- Namely, to help others.

I truly think that some people really get a perverted turn on when it comes to personal stories like this, and are quite insensitive and yeah, unprofessional as well as thoughtless when either - \
A) doubting that the author is sincere.
B) that any of his clear opinions should be modified to whatever conditions that make you feel at ease and comfortable. you know, don't wanna say anything about that elephant in the room, lest we may make someone think and that may give them and the innocent kid both a major headache.

Van Allen doesn't get it out of willful ignorance. (and a certain person who is into stopping pedofilia agrees with this guy. see a pattern, here? clue: it is not healthy.)

NO, lets have some creep spend how many pages in this thread going on about the exact specifications which would satisfy his morbid schadenfreude to know how it is exacty in every gross detail how an innocent buttocks and even possibly genatalia were fondled by a perverted dirty old man, who was a trusted schoolteacher.
Sure, go on.

VanAllen wanted an example of Dawkins bending over backwards to be fair to a point he rejects --the "steelman argument." The Expelled interview was the first thing that came to my mind. That example should not imply that you are a creationist. So no worries from me there.

Dawkins is not pro-pedo. In fact, he's pro-child welfare just about more than anything else. But there will be weeks maybe months of "OMG Dawkins is defending pedos!" in the media.

Just look at this over-the-top black PR: