Hi, Ethan!! Miss me? :-) That was a rhetorical question, you don't have to answer LOL! Anyway, I eagerly anticipated your response, so let's get the ball rolling, shall we?

Regret may happen at any age, but there are some dramatic gradients with age.

This is proven by what scientific evidence? This sounds like it can be yet another belief attributed to the alleged frailty of youth, much as similar beliefs in the past held that women are more vulnerable to emotional traumas than males.

Prepubescents are just very rarely interested in sexual activity, and if they are it's more a curiosity than passion.

Prepubescents are often interested in sexual play, but they do this in the strictest of privacy, because they know the consequences of being caught or even suspected. One of the codes for this activity is called "playing doctor" (remember that?), and a code term wouldn't have become as popular as it did if prepubescents weren't doing it often, and having a need to "cover" for it under a more innocuous type of activity.

And curiosity for sexual play clearly denotes a type of sexual interest, even if admittedly of a lesser intensity than adolescent and adult sexuality (for instance, I don't believe that large numbers of prepubescents actually seek out full intercourse). If simple curiosity about the human body was all that motivated this form of intimate play, then they would spend as much time examining the interior of each others' mouths, and ear lobes, and fingers, and eyelids, etc., than they would each others' genitals and other "private" areas. The belief that prepubescents are primarily asexual beings is just that: A belief, even if a very emotionally charged and potent one.

Young teens may have an intense desire, but they can easily wait a few years for sexual activity with little harm (or do it with peers -- laws restricting sex between kids of similar age are insane).

There is a huge difference between choosing to wait a few years, or however long, for sexual activity than being legally mandated to wait. That is a big decision backed up by use of force or threatened force via the legal system to make for any person. Adults could likewise go their entire lives for sexual activity with little sign of physical harm, but since they have their full civil rights, most people no longer feel comfortable about imposing this upon them via law.

On the other hand, sexuality is so important to adults that it trumps risks.

If sexuality wasn't important to younger people, they wouldn't engage in it so often, or frequently be monitored by adults in our sex-paranoid society. These statements of yours seem based on a belief culled from the fact that the youth culture synthetically created for underagers by the adults who control the industry usually produce movies and TV shows that do not feature frank explorations of their sexual desires, and the fact that young teens and prepubescents avoid discussing these feelings with adults for very good reason. These deliberately sanitized depictions of youths produced by the adult industry under very strict rules enables a form of very naive wishful thinking that is passed off as fact.

Secondly, you clearly propose making these statements for younger people, without consulting them, and knowing full well they could only reveal the truth at great risk of losing what little personal freedom they are allowed by the various forms of adult authority that control them. It makes as much logical sense as white people in the pre-Civil War era claiming that it's "obvious that learning to read and write isn't important to black people" when they knew full well that any black person caught trying to learn, or expressing open interest in learning, did so at their peril.

Finally, saying that it's "too important" to adults to legally suppress sounds like an underhanded way of admitting that it would be too difficult to try to strictly regulate this right since they have the full measure of their civil rights, whereas underagers do not. If you truly believed--deep down, that is--that underage youths didn't consider sexual activity important, then you and other anti-choicers wouldn't perceive such a strong need to monitor them and punish them when they do express themselves sexually, and make up so many rationalizations that it's necessary "for their own good" to do this. Just sayin'...

Also, young teens are in general much less good at discerning intentions of their potential partners.

This is an ageist remark and assumption that takes no consideration of individual levels of life experience into account, including the fact that many adults have proven perpetually bad at discerning the motives of others. What it comes down to is that adults are always given the benefit of the doubt because they have the legal rights to resist encroachments on their sexual choices, whereas younger people under 18 do not. Legal rights, or the lack thereof, take the place in this mindset of "presumed inherent competence" or the presumed lack thereof... both based on strictly arbitrary factors.

Society doesn't like the idea of other adults conspiring to help their kids do things against the parents' wishes.

Yes, because currently society is very gerontocentric and adult-dominated, and parents are given almost full legal power over their kids as long as they are under 18. So of course, society as it present stands has a vested interest in resisting any form of emancipation movement that seeks to remove power from a specific group. Past emancipation movements have likewise faced heavy resistance by any group who enjoyed privileged positions by a certain form of inequality for the same reasons.

(Radical youth libbers dismiss this, of course, but that's a separate discussion.)

Most of them do not, in fact dismiss this at all, as I noted above. The ranks of youth libbers do include many parents, however, foremost among them being Dr. Robert Epstein, who created the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adulthood and authored "The Myth of the Teen Brain" essay for Scientific American Mind, and the popular book The Case Against Adolescence and its update Teen 2.0.

Secret sexual activity is a special case of that. If all adult-child sexual activity required uncoerced prior consent of both parents, indisputable child sex abuse would be down dramatically -- and so would all adult-child sex.

Parents and others who have the most direct control over kids are those who perpetrate the most frequent degree of all forms of abuse against kids, including sexual. But since your primary concern is protection of the status quo, it becomes necessary for you to downplay or ignore this very important fact. Individuals who are are actually pro-youth, such as Judith Levine and Robert Epstein, do not ignore this glaring fact.

Age of consent laws are good for protecting young teens from indisputable rape. A girl or boy doesn't have to prove lack of consent -- if she says it was undesired and everyone agrees that sex took place, that's the end of the story.

The rules requiring evidence to be presented before a conviction can occur is a very important part of democratic jurisprudence, especially as America defines it. Forcing younger people not to make a decision for sexual activity, and knowingly punishing adults who are likely innocent of coerced sexual activity, is admitting outright that it's better to throw innocent people in jail then to risk the chance of a guilty person not getting convicted right away because evidence is required to convict. That is purely draconian, and it requires a highly emotionally charge exception like this to get so many people to support it, since it's well known that strong emotions trump logical thought or considerations. It also serves to protect parental control over the bodies of their children, and as noted above, most groups are very reluctant to give up the privilege of being able to treat another group as their de facto property.

This is a black eye to the important rules of the penal code under democracy that requires evidence before charges can stick. It's also not protecting people, but rather protecting a very strict type of custom that trumps freedom of choice, and a type of decorum that spares mainstream sensibilities from having to tolerate a type of activity that they consider to go against the culturally "proper" relations between younger and older people.

This knowledge deters rapists.

A person is not a rapist unless they coerce someone to have sex against their will, and by definition a rapist cares nothing for the law. What these laws actually deter is consensual relationships between people of disparate age groups by declaring any adult who has such consensual relations with a younger person to be a "rapist" by default. In other words, it makes "rapists" out of people who didn't engage in an act of force or coercion to obtain sexual activity.

Further, the AoC laws rob younger people of freedom of choice and are an important component in controlling and restricting their sexual activity and expression thereof.

On the other hand, teens should not be coerced into saying they were against something if they weren't, and as long as they say they consented, prosecutors should use discretion and not pursue a case.

Granted. But requiring no evidence if they say otherwise will cause many of the less scrupulous among them to try using extortion and blackmail against innocent adults who refuses to do as they demand, or whom they dislike personally. You need to read Roger Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State to learn the real life case of a personal nature that caused Lancaster to speak out against this hysteria.

We sweet, loving pedophiles in GirlChat think of wonderful relationships.

The opportunity to pursue mutually beneficial relationships is indeed what the pro-choicers yearn for. The anti-choicers, in contrast, think of nothing but negative and abusive scenarios, which is why I noted that laws or assumptions based on cynical distrust of other people are inherently draconian and not conducive to a society that ultimately prefers freedom of choice. Pro-choicers likewise accept the possibility of nuance and different outcomes from such relationships; we do not, however, believe that negative outcomes of mutually consensual relationships would be so disastrous and destructive that large numbers of youths, or even small numbers, would be devastated beyond mental repair over such relationships any more often than they are when relationships with peers do not turn out to be beneficial.

The world is in fact full of men (pedophile or not) with much sleazier intentions leading to more sordid realities.

Believing that such individuals hide behind every street corner, or reside in at least one house on any given neighborhood block, is the foundation of the current moral panic, and produces much hysteria that justifies a huge array of draconian laws.

We believe legally empowered and well educated youths are fully capable of identifying and avoiding--as well as even effectively opposing--such individuals in their midst. Further, we believe that the community--including the many caring MAPs that exist within it--are likewise fully capable of identifying such individuals and aiding in their opposition. Do you think the many good people in our community would be tolerant of those who are genuinely predatory against youths in our midst? No, we would be among the best protectors of younger people in a better world, rather than presumed to be their greatest potential source of harm.

The law can't tell them apart, so it has a strong motivation to prohibit all.

And again, willfully using legal force against innocent people to make certain that the guilty get indicted, and taking away the freedom of any group of people for alleged "protection," is the antitheses of democratic freedom and civil liberties. Such pre-emptive legal actions and assumptions are nothing but destructive to the foundation of a free society. Moreover, they are simply excuses to control others and maintain a specific status quo, not "protecting" anyone from any demonstrable harm. In the final analysis, it makes as much logical sense as assuming all other nations are our enemies based on the claim that we can't tell which ones are harboring sinister intentions towards us and which ones aren't, thus promoting war against all of them "just in case."