To the editor:

Comedian Gianmarco Soresi has a bit where he nervously explains the technical difference among pedophile, hebephile and ephebophile — diagnostic distinctions psychologists use for abhorrent sexual proclivities — while begging the audience to bear with him because he “has a point.” The punchline: “… the reason we don’t make those distinctions is because it’s very hard to explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.”

Apparently Megyn Kelly missed this obvious reflection when she said of Jeffrey Epstein, “He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls.” After admitting it was still disgusting, she added: “He wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.” Eventually she concluded, “I think there is a difference … between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

Most people berated her, but not all. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, defended her in an op-ed claiming the American Academy of Pediatrics supported her “technical” point. But nobody argued she wasn’t technically accurate. And Donohue only deepened the problem: “For too long, the media and the chattering class have said that the Catholic church clergy abuse scandal was due to pedophile priests. Wrong. The data clearly show that the vast majority of priestly victims were male (81 percent) and that 78 percent were postpubescent. Why is this important? Because it means the molesters were homosexuals. When males have sex with males who are postpubescent, that’s called homosexuality, not pedophilia.”

What Donohue seems to be saying is that these priests weren’t pedos, they were ephebophiles — which supposedly isn’t so bad — but worse, in his framing, is that they were (gasp) gay.

His “hot take” is not only morally grotesque but wrong. Adult men who rape boys are not “homosexuals,” or they’d be having sex with adult men; because the boys are under the age of consent, it’s child rape. And colloquially, yes, they are pedophile priests.

It’s true though, there’s a difference between eight and 15; that difference — seven. Outside of math, the difference is rooted in the law and psychology and concerns maturity and agency. An 8-year-old lacks both, while a 15-year-old often thinks they deserve agency because they’re mature, but they really aren’t, making them grooming targets for older men offering the wrong kind of agency. Confused? Let me simplify it. An 8-year-old is a child, and so is a 15-year-old and every 40-year-old’s been both and knows this to be true.

So let’s make a pact, when or if the Epstein files are released, if there are photos (as Trump biographer Michael Wolff claims to have seen in Epstein’s possession) of the president sitting around a pool with topless post-pubescent female children, any of us with Trump-defending family or friends will not allow them to say, “well, at least they weren’t prepubescent girls and Trump’s not gay,” because the line between “technically accurate” and “morally grotesque” isn’t a line worth defending.

J. David Core

Toronto