Homosexuals are hardly the first people it's happened to, either. There was this nasty urban legend called the blood libel . . .
That's the one about Jews using the blood of Gentile kids to make ritual pastries, isn't it? I hear it's still alive and kicking in the Middle East (Egypt, Syria,...)
That said...
Nitpicking trigger: activated.
Can a pedophile feel love? Yes. Does love inherently make anything right? No. But is pedophilia still wrong? Yes.
It's an abusive relationship. There's very very rarely a child that isn't affected negatively (None that I've ever heard of, but I leave the possibility there).
Scanning... Common word misuse detected: pedophilia is a sexual orientation/attraction (=thoughts). A sexual relation with a kid (= acts) has many names: statutory rape, child molestation, child abuse, child rape,... but "pedophilia" isn't one of them.
Forcing gay men into heterosexual relationships isn't going to make them straight, and if they were going to molest boys (which is statistically less likely than straight men molesting little girls), being married to a woman isn't going to stop them from that either.
Yeah, actually it would be counter-productive in terms of child protection: forcing those horrible pedogays into heterosexual marriage (which by definition for fundies have spawning as the primary objective) would actually increase their ability to access little boys...
I think the Association for the Humane Treatment of Strawmen should be notified, shouldn't it?
Not "completely heterosexual other than..." but "completely heterosexual" (or "completely homosexual," which is more rare because of the smaller population). Most pedophiles don't specifically target girls or boys, because gender doesn't matter to them---power and control does.
Replace "pedophiles" by "child rapists" (or even simply "rapists") and you're 100% correct.
There was a lengthy debate on pedophilia and child abuse in the forums of the site of one of the French national newspapers (Le Nouvel Observateur, for those who are interested and can read French). To sum it up, the more reasonable/level-headed participants pointed that:
- stricto sensu, pedophilia designs a sexual attraction to children, nothing more nothing less. Law, or at least French law, punishes people for acts, not for what happens in one's skull, especially not when it is something like sexual orientation that isn't a conscious choice: why some people still believe that pedophiles would willingly choose a sexual orientation that can't be acted upon without the pedophile becoming a criminal and risking to harm the kid physically and psychologically is beyond me....
- while a pedophile can be a sexual predator, not all (according to some, most of) child abusers are pedophiles. See Wikipedia
"A perpetrator of child sexual abuse is, despite all medical definitions, commonly assumed to be a pedophile, and referred to as such; however, there may be other motivations for the crime[13] (such as stress, marital problems, or the unavailability of an adult partner[25]), much as adult rape can have non-sexual reasons. Thus, child sexual abuse alone may or may not be an indicator that its perpetrator is a pedophile; most perpetrators of it are in fact not primarily interested in children.
Those who have committed sexual crimes against children, but do not meet the normal diagnosis criteria for pedophilia, are referred to as situational, opportunistic, or regressed offenders, whereas offenders primarily attracted toward children are called structured, preferential, or fixated pedophiles, as their orientation is fixed by the structure of their personality. It is estimated that only 2 to 10 percent of child sexual abuse perpetrators meet the regular criteria for pedophilia. (Kinsey-Report, Lautmann, Brongersma, Groth)."
- some even claimed that genuine child-loving pedophiles were less likely to harm a child (in any way) than "normal" people (let's not even mention fundies here). Of course, that still leaves the pedophiles who simply/primarily lust after kids. A distinction between pedophiles and pedosexuals was proposed to distinguish the two.
- a cause for pedophilia has yet to be identified. Of course, this isn't helped by the fact that most pedophiles are closeted so deep it's a wonder they don't end in Narnia. Faulty methodology also produced flawed results, which have unfortunately often been presented and circulated as reliable science (studying pedophilia using only condemned child molesters, ignoring the possibility of female pedophilia, and so on).
One of the main contributors to the debate (who began studying pedophilia after encountering an episode of child abuse, IIRC) repeteadly stated that there was a huge population of pedophiles living in abstinence, many of them tormented greatly by their sexuality but too scared to look for help (even if competent support and adequately-trained psychiatrists were available, which isn't the case). Considering that according to Wikipedia "at least a quarter of all adult men may have some feelings of sexual arousal in connection with children", one would think that there is a real need for support structures to help pedophiles learn how deal with their sexuality without harming children and without living in misery, but....
