Fun Facts

Some people who professed outrage at the treatment of Ilya Shapiro at Georgetown will also defend Professor Stephen Kershnar of SUNY Fredonia, as a matter of principle.

Some.

— RadicalLeftLunaticHat (@Popehat) February 3, 2022

"Fredonia" was a self-proclaimed free republic near present day Nacogdoches, Texas. (It was during the time of the Texas Revolution. It wasn’t long before the very idea of it was abandoned.)  The Marx Brothers performed in Nacogdoches in 1912 (or was it 1916? Opinions vary.) as a musical act. The story goes that the show was interrupted by reports of rampaging mule outside the Opera House, and when the audience returned the brothers turned to ad libbing comic material (because, you know, mule. Small town life in East Texas hasn’t changed all that much.). The line the town remembers (I went to school there) is: “Nacogdoches is full of naked roaches.” Small town East Texas: the audience loved it.  The Marx Brothers were launched.

21 (or 17?) years later, "Freedonia" was the country of Rufus T. Firefly.  Is it because they remembered Nacogdoches?  Or because they'd heard of Fredonia, New York?

People in Nacogdoches insist it was due to them.  Who am I to argue?  (Besides, the people of Fredonia, NY objected to the name of the country, in 1933.  They said it would hurt their city's reputation.  The Marx Brothers told them to change the name of their city, so it wouldn't hurt the reputation of their film.)

I wonder how the good citizens of Fredonia feel about Professor Kershnar?

Professor Stephen Kershnar, who teaches libertarian philosophy and applied ethics at SUNY Fredonia, was filmed questioning whether pedophilia was in fact unethical.

“Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine that she’s a willing participant,” Kershnar says in the viral clip shared on Twitter by Libs of TikTok.

“A very standard, very widely held view is that there’s something deeply wrong about this — and it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized,” Kershnar continues.

“It’s not obvious to me that it’s in fact wrong. I think this is a mistake. And I think exploring that why it’s a mistake will tell us not only things about adult/sex and statutory rape and also fundamental principles of morality,” the professor adds in his jaw-dropping comments.

Honestly, it's an argument I'm willing to engage, and a better application of academic freedom than Ilya Shapiro's tweet.  But Kershnar doesn't do himself any favors with this obviously delicate topic:

In the clips, Kershnar goes on to say: “One is even if you are looking for a threshold. Let’s say there’s a threshold. I’m making this number up, but let’s say it’s at age 8. Still, that tells you that some adult sex is permissible.

“Second, the notion that it’s wrong even with a 1-year-old is not quite obvious to me,” he says.

“There are reports in some cultures of grandmas fellating their baby boys to calm them down if they’re colicky,” the professor continues, according to the Post Millennial. “I don’t know if this is true but this is sort of widely reported as occurring in at least a foreign culture — and it working, that the grandmas believe that this actually works,” Kershnar continues. 

That stuff about 1 year olds and grandmothers is internet level stuff; and not in a good way.  The rest, as an ethical examination, fails to provide any agency, or take into account any trauma/psychic damage, to the hypotethetical child.  An ethic that doesn’t take account of the humanity and agency of the subjects of its hypotheticals is not much of an ethic. And even granting his grandmother argument arguendo, there's a world of difference between a random adult and a child's grandmother.  It's pretty clear to me he's just trying to make a NAMBLA argument.  It's pretty clear, also, that's not an argument that holds up to any scrutiny, because he hasn't given it any.  There is, for example, a generally recognized difference between willingly playing kickball, and willingly engaging in sex with an adult:

“They might think that children can’t be willing things in general. It’s an odd view in that they seem to will things all the time. They will participation in kickball. They will showing up and participating in bar mitzvah lessons, bat mitzvah lessons,” he says.

“You might think that, well, maybe there’s something distinct about sex that they can’t really understand it. It’s not clear to me that what they’re not getting at is consent,” Kershnar goes on.

And the distinction between willing the one and willing the other is certainly one that can be understood ethically. In other words, my problem is not with the Professor's topic; it's with how bad his argument is.

According to Kershnar’s LinkedIn page, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School in 1991 and has been working for SUNY for more than 23 years.

Why'd he have to be a lawyer? I mean, as well as a dumbass:

The Libs of Tiktok also posted an abstract in which Kershnar allegedly wrote that “it is morally permissible and should be legally permissible for state and private professional schools to discriminate against women.”

He allegedly added: “More specifically, I argue that such schools may discount womens [sic] applications to the degree that they are likely to produce less than male counterparts.”

I have to say this guy is not much of an ethicist. I would wonder how this guy has an academic position.  Then I remember some of the people I went to graduate school with.

And yes I realize I appear to be less consistent than we can expect Matt Gaetz to be:

To be fair I'm sure Matt Gaetz will be consistent

— RadicalLeftLunaticHat (@Popehat) February 3, 2022

But I stand by my mantra: Change the facts, change the outcome. Although my consistent stance is: neither incident has produced an argument I find in the least worth entertaining, much less agreeing with.