i think you're discounting psychology, and i guess this because you put "demonstrable" in quotes. psychological harm is harder to prove than any other disease, but it is real.

I don't deny psychology plays a part in suffering, but I don't think the gov't should have the right to pass blanket laws like the AoC laws against something because SOME people experience emotional/psychological harm, and especially when that harm is often the result of the culture itself. Blanket laws are for situations where harm is synonymous with the crime itself [rape, murder, assualt, theft, vandalism, etc.] and is demonstrably provable in every instance when the crime took place.

adults understand relationships better. they have been exposed to higher education, have read books with insight into relationships, and explored their sexualities variously.

This is the fallacy of conventional wisdom, which holds that adults are necessarily better at understanding relationships (and everything else) simply by virtue of being adults. Wrong. In fact, I'd say that each has their own way of understanding that is neither better nor worse than the other.

Children are more prone to instinct, which is usually right, and all things being equal, they can even be BETTER decision-makers than adults, because they have not yet learned to view the world through a societally-sanctioned set of schemas, many of which are flat wrong. Consider that racism has to be learned--children aren't inherently racist. If you put a black toddler and a white toddler together, they don't reject each other, or if they do, it isn't for some ignorant ideological reason. Likewise, hatred/fear of sex play is a learned behavior, instilled by a culture still largely influenced by superstition.

Likewise, a child, given a set of problems, can often see a solution many adults fail to see because of their own prejudices. Yes, adults have the advantage of a wider knowledge base, but it is arrogant to assume that that makes them better at mastering relationships.

even in adults-only relationships, there are occassional freaks. in an adult-child relationship, the adult would easily overpower the child if s/he were one of the sadists you describe. adults know to dial 911, children are regarded as heros on the news if they do.

Yep, and in situations where freaks are around kids, they usually don't care one iota about the law. In fact, there are many "freaks" who are parents--they need not be attracted to children to hurt them. I'd say the opposite tends to be true. We know that the majority of sex offenders who molest and rape children aren't peds; they're "normal" hets.

The reality is, most of these people probably feel nothing like the kinds of feelings for children that peds do--with us, we grow to love children BECAUSE of our attraction, or maybe the love and desire arises simultaneously, I suppose simularly to the way it does with adult-oriented people (teleiophiles.) With child rapists, they tend to be people motivated by curiosity, the thrill of violating the taboo, or because they have an easy vessel in which to channel sexual frustration, NOT because they are attracted to the child.

And any child with an understanding of numbers and the ability to work a phone knows how to dial 911. Just because they aren't often put in situations where they need to (since usually an adult is on hand to dial it) doesn't mean the majority of them, when they sense an emergency situation, wouldn't do so.

do you really think more than a very, very rare lucky relationship of pedophilia could ever completely work? loving, marital-type pedophilic relationships will never occur on a large-scale basis, ever, this generation or ten from now. the random pedophiles that chance favors, gods bless them, but they are far between.

Absolutely, if we stopped teaching children to believe they are too young and too ignorant to make good decisions (thereby labeling them and causing them to behave according to our expectations.) I've been around far too many children to believe the crap that the antis espouse, and which you apparently have bought hook, line and sinker.

Anyway, who says marital-type relationships are the ideal? That's simply another cultural bias that has nothing to do with reality. Please read these two posts--yes, they are long, but they make many of the same points I'm making here in more detail and provide a scientific & philosophical background for my beliefs:

http://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/337909.htm

http://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/337994.htm

i'm not an anti, but the only pedophiles i'm in favor of are the glorious ones who somehow find complete, free fulfillment, and harm no one. us lessers will swell up in the shadows but probably keep getting stomped down

If you continue to believe that, then you WILL continue to get stomped down. We make our own reality to a point, and the more of us who make reality happen the way we want it to, the more that reality will manifest. The civil rights movement didn't happen because blacks said, "Oh well, we are inferior, just like they say. We don't deserve any rights, and it'll never happen anyway, so let's just give up now."

We will be liberated, but only when we take that liberation into our own hands and believe it. I happen to believe it; based on my understanding of history, nature and humanity, the truth will out. It always does. I used to be a pessimist like you, but I woke up. We will win, and more importantly, the children will win. Good evening.