Despite being a Supreme Court judge, Potter Stewart opined some wise words:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
So it is with many other things, like child abuse:
So we must first acknowledge that the question of what constitutes “child abuse” is culturally derived, and highly contextual. The greatest single problem is both the cause of child abuse, and the aggravation of such abuse through the actions of government. While some things people do are abusive to children, everything the secular state does to children is harmful and abusive. The state is inherently evil.
So the real problem here is the secular state. More to the point, the whole problem of child abuse rests on the mere existence of secular state government. The state is the proximate cause, the primary culprit. Whatever solution we might propose cannot involve the presence of the intrusive state, because the state can do nothing right.
Disassociating one’s self from the left vs right paradigm of American politics and all the mommying a liberal democracy does, can be very liberating. Being a cultural relativist by default releases our hands up from wringing them constantly over the lifestyles of anonymous people half a world away, or even a few towns over. Imagine what you can accomplish in your own life with all that mental energy. It’s something worth experimenting with.