Warning: Contains frank discussion of disturbing sexual acts.

See also: Predators With Ph.D.s

A reincarnation of the Emperor Tiberius exists in the state of Delaware in the form of one Dr. Earl Bradley, a pediatrician from Lewes, Sussex County, who was recently convicted of sexually abusing his young patients, mostly toddlers.

For those unfamiliar with the odious Tiberius' depravity, Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars remains a primary source of information and proof that the exclamation "Lord, what beastly fellows these Romans were!" is spot-on.  Suetonius, a hardened sophisticate who had seen it all, hesitated to describe the utter degradation of the ruler of the ancient world.  But sorry as the chronicler was to go into the hideous details of the emperor's perversions, he wrote about them nonetheless, saying of the vile ruler, who had retired to the island of Capri in order to enjoy his perversions in private:  

He acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or be told, let alone believe. For example, he trained little boys (whom he termed tiddlers [minnows]) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles. Unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction.

When the old lecher got tired of the little ones who tickled his fancy, he threw them off the cliffs of Capri onto the rocks and into the sea.

DelawareOnline, among other new outlets, chronicled the obscene delights of the Tiberius of Lewes, Delaware, vividly detailing some of the abuse Bradley handed out to his tiny, helpless patients.  Evidence of the doctor's degeneracy was confirmed by Bradley's homemade videos showing him sexually assaulting his patients.  Attorney General Beau Biden said the victims were caught on more than 13 hours of video recordings, some dating back to 1998, that were seized from Bradley's office and home. 

The videos were horrifyingly graphic, showing that in some cases the doctor had nearly suffocated some of his victims by performing oral sex on the toddlers until they passed out, their faces, according to one policeman's report, turning "ashen grey."  He then performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  Infants as young as three months were subjected to this treatment.

Evidently, though there had been previous police investigations of Bradley and tales of his suspicious behavior for years, no investigations from the attorney general's office were forthcoming until a two-year-old girl whom Bradley had lured into the basement room of his office with candy told her mother that the doctor had hurt her.

Dr. Bradley's behavior is illustrative of the sort of things a pedophile does to his victims, including sometimes killing the child he rapes, sodomizes, or performs oral sex on; and it is why the American public holds such people in odium.  Pedophilia is not a matter of innocent hugs and kisses, or thanking heaven for little girls, or just plain loving kids in general, but of perversions so frightful that to put words to them scorches the page and makes angels weep.

As prominent twentieth-century theologian C.S. Lewis said when writing about sexual perversions, "I am sorry to go into all these details, but I must."

Knowing what it is pedophiles actually do is the reason there are severe restrictions on their movements, on where they live and where they may walk among the rest of society.  Such perversions have so distorted their souls that the likelihood of cure is quite low while the reversion to their vile practices remains quite high.  That is because, as Lewis remarked, "perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful."

Regardless of the horrors attendant to pedophilia, it appears that Delaware's chapter of the ACLU feels called to defend pedophiles, who have been championed by that august body of lawyers in previous cases, most notably the defense of NAMBLA, the organization devoted to the decriminalization of sex with underage boys.

As Fox News and other outlets reported, sex offenders living in a safe house in Sussex County face eviction and relocation because a day care center was opened next door.  The ACLU, along with Daniel Wolcott, who represents the sex offenders, stated:

The safe house has been there for a number of years and has been accepting registered sex offenders who are prohibited from living within 500 feet of a school.

Kathleen MacRae, director of Delaware's ACLU, opined that the proposed eviction of the sex offenders seemed "very unfair and very rushed by the city."

She also felt that a day care center might not qualify as a "school" under state law and cited the difficulties of the men, who are finding it hard to find a place to stay.  Not to be outdone, Delaware's primary newspaper, The News Journal, opined that the eviction of the sex offenders was "punitive" and "vindictive."

In the meantime, in addition to defending the pedophiles' right to live in the ironically named "Harriet Tubman" safe house next to toddlers, the ACLU is busily ensuring that our children have access to porn whenever they wish, claiming that schools must stop blocking kids' access to pornography lest their juvenile rights be violated.  Result: the happy playground for pedophiles on the internet is to remain open for business in the nation's public schools and libraries.

Just as ominously, for the children of Delaware and the nation, pedophiles are looking to the American Psychiatric Association to decriminalize pedophilia, citing therapy rather than jail time as the more appropriate means of reforming pedophiles.  They also want their condition to be renamed "attraction to minors."  Evidently therapeutic time on the psychiatrist's couch will do more than a stiff jail sentence to reform pedophiles.  Their victims don't seem to be a consideration.

B4U-ACT is a group of pro-pedophilia mental health professionals and activists who agree with child molesters' desire to decriminalize pedophilia.  The B4U-Act website classifies pedophilia simply as another sexual orientation, and it criticizes the "stigma" associated with pedophilia.  "No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children and adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction towards adults is unknown."

Of course.  We understand.

Amid all the newspeak concerning pedophiles, one group of people is suspiciously and glaringly absent: namely, the 100 or so toddlers and infants Dr. Bradley raped, sodomized, and performed oral sex on.

One can only wonder what the ACLU and B4U-ACT would do in the case of Tiberius, who, though supremely resistant to even a modicum of sexual restraint, apparently, according the APA's proposed new definitions of pedophilia as "attraction to minors," could have been sweet-talked out of his proclivities -- if they were even categorized as "vile." 

According to Suetonius, the people of Rome, no strangers to cruelty and depravity, were not inclined toward such an indulgent view.  The writer relates that, hearing of the death of the hated tyrant:

The people were so much elated at his death, that when they first heard the news, they ran up and down the city, some crying out, 'Away with Tiberius to the Tiber;' others exclaiming, 'May the earth, the common mother of mankind, and the infernal gods, allow him no abode in death, but amongst the wicked.' Others threatened his body with the hook and the Gemonian stairs, their indignation at his former cruelty being increased by a recent atrocity. [...] As soon as his corpse was begun to be moved from Misenum, many cried out for its being carried to Atella and being half burnt there in the amphitheatre.

Some of us, possibly soon to be classified among the mentally aberrant because of our anger and rage against monsters like Bradley, have yet to be persuaded that "attraction to minors" is merely a variety of sexual impulses that can and should be explained away by sexual predators, all the while ignoring the victims and the outraged American public.

The wicked strut freely about when what is vile is honored in the land.

Fay Voshell is a writer from Wilmington, DE.  She was selected as one of the Delaware GOP's "Winning Women," Class of 2008.  Ms. Voshell holds an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where she was awarded the Charles Hodge Prize for excellence in systematic theology.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.