This is the English version of Inga Spriņģe’s opinion piece for Norway’s newspaper Dagbladet on why should they care about being called paedophiles.
A couple of years ago an article on Facebook, shared widely by several of my educated, urbanite, latte-drinking friends, captured my attention. Under the headline “Democracy with the flavour of paedophilia”, a famous Latvian children doctor-anesthetist who on a daily basis faces grossly injured children whose parents has been negligent, was ranting about the rotten, decadent Western Europe ruining family values. He singled out Norway as the worst example of that – stating that the Norwegian education minister promotes introductory lessons about incest in the primary schools “because incest is a social norm in Norway”.