Sometimes disruption is good, sometimes it's bad

Sometimes, disruption is good. For example, if the status quo is creating real victims, it may take a disruption to change that.

Today's fear-society status quo is creating real victims out of men who are falsely accused of molestation, the families and employers of those falsely accused, men who decline to care for children for fear of false accusations, and children and society as a result of these men opting out of being good citizens.

Changing the fear-society carries some social cost but it is feasible and the benefits are tremendous. Even the most paranoid parent should realize that his child is safer in a society where men are not afraid to be good citizens than in today's society, even if there will be a few more pedophiles among the ranks of teachers and Scout leaders.

However, disruptive change for disruptive change is not good and generally carries a high social cost. Those who advocate "legalize child sex now" need to ask themselves: Who are the current victims, what is the social cost of achieving your goal, and is there an intermediate goal that can be reached at an acceptably-low social cost while greatly reducing the number of victims?

In addition to those victims mentioned above, any society that prohibits children and teens from having sex is going to victimize both the children and teens and their willing partners. Any society that tells children and teens "you can have sex, but only with people your own age" is victimizing children and teens who wish to have sex with older people and their willing partners.

Whether or not trying to change society to achieve this goal is worth doing depends on the cost-benefit analysis. I haven't done a full analysis yet, but the cost of doing such a thing looks to be exceedingly high, much higher than the payoff. The cost of doing this "in my lifetime" may even exceed the resources available: The "other side" has a vast untapped well of human capital to counter any serious effort to change minds this radically, and they will tap it if the project goes forward at any speed faster than "glacial." Barring some other major disruptive event like WWIII that this project can piggy-back on, this project is doomed to failure unless it resets its timeline to "in the lifetime of my grandchildren's grandchildren" or longer.

Changing society's attitude on this issue in my lifetime is about as likely as Martin Luther changing the Pope's mind in his lifetime after nailing up his 95 Theses. It didn't happen. It was centuries before the Roman Catholic Church took his complaints seriously.