Conference aims to normalize pedophilia

Daily Caller ^ | 08/15/11 | John Rossomando

[freespirited]

If a small group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have their way at a conference this week, pedophiles themselves could play a role in removing pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s bible of mental illnesses — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), set to undergo a significant revision by 2013. Critics warn that their success could lead to the decriminalization of pedophilia.

The August 17 Baltimore conference is sponsored by B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile mental health professionals and sympathetic activists. According to the conference brochure, the event will examine “ways in which minor-attracted persons [pedophiles] can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process” and how the popular perceptions of pedophiles can be reframed to encourage tolerance.

Researchers from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois will be among the panelists at the conference.

B4U-ACT has been active attacking the APA’s definition of pedophilia in the run up to the conference, denouncing its description of “minor-attracted persons” as “inaccurate” and “misleading” because the current DSM links pedophilia with criminality.

“It is based on data from prison studies, which completely ignore the existence of those who are law-abiding,” said Howard Kline, science director of B4U-ACT, in a July 25, 2011 press release. “The proposed new diagnostic criteria specify ages and frequencies with no scientific basis whatsoever.”

The press release announced a letter the group sent to the APA criticizing its approach, and inviting its leaders to participate in the August 17 conference. “The DSM should meet a higher standard than that,” Kline continued. “We can help them, because we are the people they are writing about.”

APA spokeswoman Erin Connors told The Daily Caller in an emailed statement that her organization was not participating in the conference and would not comment on its aims.

Child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting professor at Liberty University’s School of Law, said the conference is part of a strategy to condition people into accepting pedophiles.

“The first thing they do is to get the public to divest from thinking of what the offender does criminally, to thinking of the offender’s emotional state, to think of him as thinking of his emotional state, [and] to empathize and sympathize,” Reisman said. “You don’t change the nation in one fell swoop; you have to change it by conditioing. The aim is to get them [pedophiles] out of prison.”

According to Reisman, empirical data show that pedophiles typically molest many children before finally being caught.

“The data on paroled pedophiles confirms these predators repeat their crimes against children and are known to have escalated them even to murder,” Reisman said.

Several speakers at the August 17 conference, including B4U-ACT director of operations Dr. Richard Kramer and conference keynote speaker Dr. Fred Berlin, of the Johns Hopkins University, have actively opposed sex offender notification laws.

“What purpose does calling someone a ‘pervert’ or ‘predator’ serve anyway, other than to express contempt and hatred?” Kramer wrote in a March 14, 2009 blog entry on the website ReformSexOffenderLaws.org. “How is this productive? It certainly doesn’t protect children. I would urge all SO [sex offender] activists to listen to their own message: Stop buying into and promoting false stereotypes. Stop demonizing a whole class of people, and start learning the facts.”

Berlin has similarly compared society’s reaction to pedophilia to that of homosexuality prior to the landmark 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision that decriminalized sodomy.

B4U-ACT’s own website puts Berlin’s views front and center. “Just as has been the case historically with homosexuality,” he writes, “society is currently addressing the matter of pedophilia with a balance that is far more heavily weighted on the side of criminal justice solutions than on the side of mental health solutions.”

Berlin’s opposition to, and even noncompliance with, Maryland’s sex offender notification law drew scrutiny from former Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran in the early 1990s.

In 1990 The Baltimore Sun reported that Berlin refused to report pedophiles under his care who were actively molesting children.

“His empathy was with the pedophile and the pederast, not with the child victim,” Reisman told TheDC. “He refused to report the criminal to law enforcement because he said they were in treatment.

“Taxpayers pay for treatment and they are molesting kids. They go out to Berlin, and he gets paid by us [the taxpayers] for therapy.”

Reisman also claims that mental health practitioners like Berlin want to place pedophilia on a par with neuroses or clinical depression, and counsel pedophiles rather than incarcerate them.

“The scientific defense of pedophiles follows on the natural outgrowth of … [Alfred Kinsey’s] 1948 book ‘Sexual Behavior of the Human Male’ where he describes the rapes of infants and children, as would any pedophile, as ‘orgasmic,’” Reisman said.

Reisman warns that declassifying pedophilia as a mental illness could result in the repeal of child-protection statutes because the law always follows the input of psychiatry. She points to psychiatry’s normalization of sadomasochism, exhibitionism, and homosexuality as precedents.

“[I]t has been carried from the university to the law, going back to Kinsey,” Reisman said.

And other conference panelists such as Jacob Breslow, a graduate student in gender research at the London School of Economics, plan to discuss how political activists can exploit removing pedophilia from the next edition of the DSM for their own ends.

“Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can better understand Minor Attracted Persons,” Breslow writes in a summary of his upcoming August 17 presentation.

“This understanding may displace the stigma, fear and objection that is naturalized as being attached to Minor Attracted Persons and may alter the terms by which non-normative sexualities are known. Dr. Fred Berlin could not be reached for comment.

[freespirited]

I'm speechless.

[blueunicorn6]

They took out homosexuality. “It’s just about love.”

[ETL]

Obama's "Safe School Czar" would be delighted!

Obama's "Safe School Czar" Kevin
"use a condom" Jennings
__________________________________________________________

From the Washington Times...

EDITORIAL: At the president's pleasure
'Safe school czar' encouraged child sex with an older man
September 28, 2009

A teacher was told by a 15-year-old high school sophomore that he was having homosexual sex with an "older man." At the very least, statutory rape occurred. Fox News reported that the teacher violated a state law requiring that he report the abuse. That former teacher, Kevin Jennings, is President Obama's "safe school czar". It's getting hard to keep track of all of this president's problematic appointments. Clearly, the process for vetting White House employees has broken down.

In this one case in which Mr. Jennings had a real chance to protect a young boy from a sexual predator, he not only failed to do what the law required but actually encouraged the relationship.

According to Mr. Jennings' own description in a new audiotape discovered by Fox News, the 15-year-old boy met the "older man" in a "bus station bathroom" and was taken to the older man's home that night. When some details about the case became public, Mr. Jennings threatened to sue another teacher who called his failure to report the statutory rape "unethical." Mr. Jennings' defenders asserted that there was no evidence that he was aware the student had sex with the older man.

However, the new audiotape contradicts this claim. In 2000, Mr. Jennings gave a talk to the Iowa chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an advocacy group that promotes homosexuality in schools. On the tape, Mr. Jennings recollected that he told the student to make sure "to use a condom" when he was with the older man. That he actively encouraged the relationship is reinforced by Mr. Jennings' own description in his 1994 book, "One Teacher in 10." In that account, the teacher boasts how he allayed the student's concerns about the relationship to such a degree that the 15-year-old "left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated."

Mr. Jennings' denials about these events reveal a lack of remorse. He has not admitted that he made mistakes in this case, and he now refuses to answer any questions about the scandal. Don't forget, this is a presidential appointee we're talking about. Mr. Obama should make clear what his standards are for public servants serving at the pleasure of the president. Encouraging and covering up man-boy sexual activity are serious offenses. The White House should force Mr. Jennings to come clean.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/28/at-the-presidents-pleasure/
__________________________________________________________

[Mr Ramsbotham]

The DSM is BS; pseudoscience at best, at worst a criminal conspiracy.

[MizSterious]

Outrage. This cannot stand.

[null and void]

“It is based on data from prison studies, which completely ignore the existence of those who are law-abiding,”

Like completely law abiding illegal aliens?

Something about inmates and asylums comes to mind, but I can't quite remember it...

[SatinDoll]

Pedophilia and homosexuality are, like nymphomania, personality disorders manifesting as sexual compulsions.

Psychiatry has wimped out. They no longer want to define “normal”. It means accepting the concept of morality, what is “right” and “wrong”.

[pallis]

Pedophilia is just a form of homosexuality, and it wasn’t that long ago when the homosexuals were assuring us that the homosexual agenda wouldn’t lead us down the road towards normalizing more sexual perversion. Homosexuality is a world of lies.

[andy58-in-nh]

Perhaps I’m just a silly, old-fashioned and narrow-minded kinda guy who clings to “outdated notions” of what’s “normal” and what’s right or wrong, but I’ll tell you what: if one of these perverts ever touches my kids, I will blow holes in them so large there won’t be enough left to bury. Got that, perverts?

[Tex-Con-Man]

I’m wearing my shocked face...

[Carry_Okie]

If a small group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have their way at a conference this week, pedophiles themselves could play a role in removing pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s bible of mental illnesses...

The sexual, social, and criminal dysfunction arising from rampant pedophilia would be a financial bonanza for the APA membership. This is yet another reason why we need to decouple the armed monopoly of state licensing from the medical domain. Allowing morality be the province of medicine instead of churches gave the Cultural Marxists their most powerful weapon with which to destroy the nation; it is the foundation for the destruction of childhood education.

[rlmorel]

I am too. I cannot even get my head around the concept that people would think that sexual activities with an infant would be acceptable.

They may not say this here, but it is fair. Okay. You think sex with 16 year olds is fine. How about 15? Yes? How about 14? 13? 12? No? Okay, what is the difference between a 13 year old and a 12 year old? I suspect they would not balk at all until at the very minimum the age of six. Just a gut feeling. If you say “Okay, what is the difference between a 7 and 6 year old? Why do you draw the line there?”

This is beyond appalling. It is sick, sick, sick. If we, as a society, cannot deal with people like this in a uniform, united manner, we are lost, completely lost.

I just cannot believe this.

[null and void]

Even mohammed drew the line at 9...

[<1/1,000,000th%]

“It is based on data from prison studies, which completely ignore the existence of those who are law-abiding,” said Howard Kline, science director of B4U-ACT,...

How can you be a law-abiding pedophile?

[wagglebee]

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[Tex-Con-Man]

Pedophilia is just a form of homosexuality...

Your comments diminish the enormous, sometimes generational, damage heterosexual pedophilia does to our society. Regardless of the orientation, pedophilia is about evil predators.

[Chipper]

My undergrad degree was in Psychology/Sociology, and I worked for 5 years at a Psychiatric Hospital. I left the field because of what was happening in it, and that was 15 years ago. There are a lot of people working in that field that are on the wrong side of the lines taped on the floor, if you know what I mean.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

It's a slippery slope to limitless depravity. The more socially acceptable and superficially more attractive forms of sexual immorality serve to open the door to all sorts of evil.

[ArrogantBustard]

How can you be a law-abiding pedophile?

It's not illegal to want to bugger children. It's also not illegal to want to rob banks.

[fwdude]

Unimaginable.