The media never tire of chiding the Catholic Church for not responding strongly enough to allegations of the sexual abuse of minors, yet there seems to be no interest in reporting on attempts to legitimate pedophilia. Recently, many in the mental health profession seeking to normalize pedophilia met in Baltimore, an event that the media ignored.
B4U-ACT, the driving force behind this movement, wants to reconceptualize our thinking about what they politely call “Minor-Attracted Persons.” If they had it their way, sex between adults and minors would no longer be taboo, and pedophilia would no longer be listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). So where is the outrage, specifically from those who are fixated on priestly sexual abuse?
Although the media showed no interest in covering the event, luckily attorney Matt Barber, Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action, and Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting law professor at Liberty University School of Law, decided to attend. Below are their highlights from the conference:
• Pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society.
• An adult’s desire to have sex with children is “normative.”
• “Assuming children are unable to consent lends itself to criminalization and stigmatization.”
• “These things are not black and white; there are various shades of gray.”
• A consensus belief by speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973.
• The DSM ignores that pedophiles “have feelings of love and romance for children” in the same way adults have romantic feelings for one another.
• “The majority of pedophiles are gentle and rational.”
• The DSM should “focus on the needs” of the pedophile, and should have “a minimal focus on social control,” rather than obsessing about the “need to protect children.”
To top things off, a gay activist said that children can properly be “the object of our attraction.” He suggested that pedophiles needn’t gain consent from a child to have sex any more than we need consent from a shoe to wear it. He then used graphic language to describe performing a sex act on a child. No one in attendance objected.
Put this first-hand account of the B4U-ACT conference with our account of the recent SNAP conference from the September Catalyst, and what emerges is a two-pronged attack: the pedophilia-friendly psychiatrists want to undermine traditional standards of morality, and SNAP (and its allies) want to undermine its most prominent voice, namely the Catholic Church.
To say they represent twin devils is to understate the issue.
