Parenting & Family Quote by Barney Frank

Frank’s sentence is doing the hard, unglamorous work of boundary-drawing in a political culture that often prefers insinuation to specificity. The key move is the insistence on an “absolute, deep gap” between adult consent and the sexual abuse of children. That phrasing isn’t just moral clarity; it’s tactical. “Absolute” shuts down the slippery rhetorical move where opponents blur categories to smear someone by proximity. “Deep gap” signals that the divide isn’t merely legalistic or prudish, but foundational.

The syntax also reveals a politician’s instinct for coalition: “which people may like or dislike” concedes discomfort without validating it as a governing principle. He’s carving out space for pluralism - you can disapprove, but your disapproval doesn’t justify collapsing consenting adult intimacy into criminal harm. That’s a liberal argument framed in plain language, calibrated for voters who might be uneasy but not eager to be cruel.

Then Frank tightens the lens on power: “physically impose” and “misuse their authority.” He’s not describing sex so much as coercion. The subtext is a critique of institutions - families, schools, churches, and yes, politics - that protect adults who exploit asymmetry. Abuse is defined here as force plus hierarchy, not as taboo.

Context matters: Frank, a prominent gay congressman who lived through decades when homosexuality was routinely equated with predation, is implicitly rebutting an old insinuation. He’s refusing the moral panic frame and replacing it with a consent-and-power frame, where the real scandal is not nonconformity but domination.