NY Times column says pedophiles deserve civil rights and should not be treated as criminals

(NaturalNews) Sure, The New York Times published it, but that doesn’t make it an official endorsement of pedophilia. This deserves to be parsed. It was published in the Op-Ed section, which is open to outside experts, such as Rutgers University law professor Margo Kaplen, for editorial opinions.

According to Op-Ed author Margo Kaplan, pedophilia is defined by the (uh-oh) psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as an “intense and recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, and a disorder if it causes a person ‘marked distress or interpersonal difficulty’ or if the person acts on his interests.”

Margo claims that around half of child molesters are not actually attracted sexually to children, and many pedophiles who don’t act out their attractions consider sex with prepubescent children morally repulsive. In all fairness to Margo, she feels that individuals who don’t act out on their secret desires deserve civil rights protection.

But that begs the question, if such secret desires aren’t acted on, what’s the problem? Why not simply withhold those desires? Why make a big fuss and create websites such as Virtuous Pedophiles that serve as a forum to promote their rightful places in society without discrimination? If people don’t know, they can’t discriminate. Maybe that’s too simple a solution for most.

Sexual crimes against children and teenagers

When a pedophile acts on his interest — seems it’s usually a guy — then it’s child molestation, basically raping a child. Rape on any person, prepubescent, pubescent or fully mature, is a crime. That should be the distinction. The age of the person could determine the seriousness of the crime.

Although the term pedophile is used with for adults having sex with minors, the term hebephileis more accurate when it involves pubescent or maybe even post-pubescent teens.

But the narrow definitions of pedophilia or hebephilia don’t include the extent of sexually aggressive crimes committed against teenagers, which are mostly homosexual assaults. They have been the torrid stuff of media reports on Catholic priests, upon whom accountability has often been exercised as relocating accused priests to other parishes.

Then there was the famous case at Penn State where assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was tried and convicted of sexually assaulting boys within a Penn State University charity called the Second Mile Foundation, founded mostly by Jerry Sandusky. This charity was involved with helping boys who were troubled or underprivileged by getting them into good physical shape.

At times, Sandusky would bring one of the boys on campus and do those things he was accused of. Nevertheless, he maintained that he wasn’t a pedophile. Okay then, he was just a homosexual predator and molester of selected young teenage males.

Penn State football players who had committed rule violations were often assigned as mentors for the Second Mile as community service to stay and play with the team. Now, after Sandusky’s arrest, there are further allegations calling for an investigation of what may have been a “pedophile ring” with the Second Mile involving a very wealthy and prominent unnamed person.

This type of activity has extended to even higher places among US and UK government officials, with what are called pedophile prostitution rings, often with kids whose faces appeared on milk cartons as missing children. In other words — children kidnapped as sex slaves whose services are offered to the perverted among the high and mighty elites.

Now for something less murky

Seems like women, often teachers, are getting into the act with high school males. Though heavily penalized for their actions, one could hardly call their activities as aggressive actions on helpless victims. Seems more like consensual sex.

We live in a sex-crazy society that uses soft pornography to attract attention in so many ways that titillate more than necessary. During this author’s high school years in the late 1950s, some of us wanted to become “sexual victims” of certain female teachers. Never happened though.

Punishing adults for having consensual sex with post-pubescent minors who want to engage sexually may be inappropriate, but no victim should be no crime.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.nytimes.com

http://dailycaller.com

http://www.virped.org

http://www.dailymail.co.uk