SACRAMENTO, CA - Ideas rule the world, as Victor Hugo noted. Some have stood the test of time, which, unfortunately, has no power to prevent bad ideas from appearing. Neither does professional status.

One of the summer's major news stories has been the brutal murders of Danielle van Dam and Samantha Runnion. While the families of the victims are distressed enough, they should know that it is becoming fashionable to say that those who commit such crimes are not responsible for their actions.

"Pedophilia is not a voluntary choice." That is the view of Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins University. If not a voluntary choice, then what? Says Dr. Berlin: "People discover that they are inflicted with this abnormality."

By this logic, no individual made a choice to abduct, abuse, and murder Danielle van Dam or Samantha Runnion. Rather the perpetrators were simply afflicted with an abnormality capable of imparting the deviousness required to gain the confidence of vulnerable children, the will to abduct and sexually abuse them, the violence to murder them, and the stealth to conceal the crime and take evasive action.

Dr. Berlin is working from the medical model of human behavior. In this view, people are not independent moral agents making choices between right and wrong. Rather, it's all a question of afflictions and syndromes. These, not voluntary moral choices, prompt some people to act in certain ways.

Consider also the view of clinical psychologist and Brown University professor Paula J. Caplan:

For a start, there is no such thing as "intelligence." "Intelligence" is what is called a construct, not corresponding to something real and easily identified, like a table, but rather a concept whose meaning depends on who is defining it, and why.

This amazing statement would come as a surprise to Pascal, Madame Curie, Einstein, and Sidney Hook. While intelligence tests may be inexact, to say that intelligence itself is a mere construct, a matter of opinion and manipulation, is to back-flip out of rational discourse. Intelligence is real and cannot be eliminated by dismissive quotation marks and passive voice verbs, hallmarks of politically correct argument.

Intelligence "is called" a construct only by those of the deconstructionist cult, which holds that just about everything, including truth and morality, has no real existence but is simply constructed by white males to oppress women and minorities.

Note that these bad ideas did not emerge from obscurity but from those purporting to engage in science at prestigious universities. But bad ideas seldom remain quarantined in the faculty lounge. Those in public policy, law enforcement, and particularly the judicial system, should evaluate ideas on their merits, not based on the reputation of the campus from which they emerge. The press should also be more skeptical, and ask the hard questions.

The trouble with the modern world, as Jean Cocteau said, is that stupidity has begun to think. That accounts for the procession of bad ideas from the academy. This makes the restatement of the obvious the first duty of honest people, as George Orwell wrote.

For a start, pedophiles are dangerous criminals not victims of an affliction. Intelligence is real, not a construct. Use it wisely.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.