A couple of weeks ago qtns made a post making some of the same points which had occurred to me in the hours prior to reading it. ( Telepathy? Perhaps. )

But at the time I really was under the weather and didn't want to spend as much time in the hostile landscape created by the Anti imagination. However.......

Let's say I accept the unrelenting barrage of negativity and groundless suspicion emanating from Ethan?

Where does it lead?

Children don't need us.

Our motives cannot be extricated from our selfish interests.

Radicalism will provoke backlash.

The Pedo in a girl's life, if found out, will be a source of iatrogenic harm to her.

If all these ( and more ) are true, then why be out? Why be out at all? Even anonymously over the internet?

Children don't need us. They aren't marching on Washington en masse demanding access. But nor are adults. There are no hordes of neighbors, parents, spouses, siblings saying that they want us to come out.

Heck, they don't even propose a stereotypical "benefit" as they have with every other minority. You want a black athlete or musician, a Jewish accountant &tc. Without the gays who would design our clothing or be our interior decorators?

No, society knows that there is no benefit in us coming out.

So why would we, other than a selfish need to argue that they should accept us?

We know that our sexuality is a defect. A misfiring of the impulse that allows adults to reproduce. But why should we make our burden their burden when they aren't the ones who are broken? They have demonstrated that they have no interest in shouldering our burden. Nor should we selfishly put them at risk of a potential criminal investigation by revealing our identities if we truly are law-abiding.

We have no special insights. In fact, our bias in favor of selfish self-justification will just make and peer support suspect. Others already believe that our online communications only embolden each other. We should leave the outreach for the professionals who are unbiased Non MHPs who have no selfish stake in arguing for social acceptance over basic mental hygiene.

And do those of us who are law abiding have special access to some hidden knowledge about those who might molest children which makes us better than the experts? No. In fact our selfish need for acceptance will bias any statement we might say about the topic in one direction or the other.

If any of the Nons do happen to hold views which are less harsh or which might demolish the myth of us as monsters, our duty is to recuse ourselves from the topic so that they aren't tainted by any backlash for advocating a "Pedo's opinion."

And, since there is much good we could do in our communities which would only be questioned or repudiated should we be outed, even anonymous online communications are just too risky.

I have been trying to figure out how one can accept all the arguments designed to silence the pro-choice and come to ANYTHING like an activist stance on the issues that Ethan wants to agitate for; or even any stance in support of merely coming out as an anonymous nick. But for the life of me I can't.

Sure, there are the occasional ungrounded speculations about what presently illegal activities the Nons secretly endorse and what ones go too far. Of course any BS artist can claim that they have a better understanding of what the public will approve of and what will provoke. But when it comes to the slurs about selfishness and the argumentum ad populum which are ever and always hauled out, they don't address the content, only the Pedo status of the one making the argument.

At which point it is being an out Pedo that makes all other arguments or benefits into a liability.

Of course I haven't swallowed the Koolaid and can see many good reasons to be open about my sexuality in a variety of contexts. But those reasons also force me to refrain from invoking slurs about my detractors that depend on the myth-derived notions that Pedos cannot be trusted.

Dante