I don’t understand this objection to parental responsibility. Are parents supposed to just give birth to children and throw them into the streets to fend for themselves? No, because they wouldn’t survive.

I'm not sure where Danny is getting this from. We have always been very big on parental responsibility. What we on the pro-choice side have opposed is parental power, not parental love, guidance, and responsibility. Everyone who chooses to bring a child into the world has a responsibility to care for them, yet too many of them treat being caregivers as instead being an act of kindness that their children owe them for.

So if we grant that parents do have some responsibility for the wellbeing of their children, where does this responsibility end?

It ends with having full control over their lives on a personal level, and denying them the right to seek out information, education, and support to aid them in becoming the architects of their own existence, without being denied the right to be treated as autonomous beings rather than the personal property of their parents. There is a big difference between responsibility and power, as being a caregiver does not dictate removing someone else's autonomy and forcing your own ideology upon them. Furthermore, this type of power too often puts them at the mercy of individuals who are not good people, are mentally ill (as was the case with my parents), or have serious flaws such as substance addiction, engagement in criminal activity, racist attitudes, or severe anger management issues.

Do Neo-Nazi parents have the inherent right to raise their kids to be Neo-Nazis themselves, and to punish them as disobedient if they should try to break away from that and make friends with people of all races? Think about things like this, Mr. Whittaker, as these are by no means extreme examples.

And who gets to decides where it ends?

The children themselves, and no one else. And the state, if it should exist, should support this rather than oppose it or seek their own degree of control.

Should it be the parents who have both a emotional and genetic interest in the flourishing of their children?

"Flourishing" is too often a feel-good euphemism for control and upbringing as parents alone see fit, regardless of what the child may want. A genetic relation should not be seen as the equivalent of a biological ownership tag. Kids are autonomous individuals, whether parents or the state like it or not. Yes, parents have a strong emotional investment in their kids, but this can manifest in both good and bad ways, and when it manifests negatively, it can do so in the form of an extreme selfish insistence with disallowing their kids to form any emotional bonds with peers and/or adults outside the immediate family unit.

Or should it be pedophiles, who just want to have sex with them?

First of all, MAPs seek no control over the autonomy of kids. They would come and go in our lives as they pleased, and dictate opinions and conditions to us as they individually saw fit.

Further, arguing that we "just want to have sex with them" (again, the manipulative implication of penetration that is most often not there!) is a very disingenuous and frankly cruel dismissal of the emotional and social side of MAP attraction bases. Mr. Whittaker's dismissal of the full personhood of "minors" causes him to insist that MAPs couldn't possibly see kids as worthy romantic partners, but only as "objects" to glean sexual gratification from.

If only he could see and be willing to understand the saga of Rainbowloom and his obvious complex romantic love for a girl despite having to refrain from the sexual side entirely, as described in recent months here on GC. That represents an important case study making it clear that MAPs take kids very seriously as full romantic partners when attraction blooms between them, and we by no means see them as objects instead of people. But a society that refuses to recognize kids as full human beings refuses to understand this, and can only focus on the lurid sexual aspects that they, not us, are obsessed with.

I also find it interesting that the same people mocking me for suggesting a power imbalance between pedophiles and children in the context of a sexual relationship, suddenly consider power imbalances a serious issue when it comes to parents acting as a barrier to the people you’re trying to have sex with.

He assumes the fact that one of the two hypothetical partners is an adult automatically constitutes an inherent power imbalance. This is because in his understanding, adults are supposed to have total power over kids, and be nothing more to them than authority figures outside of the caregiving aspect.

He needs to read the work of Paul Okami, who breaks this down and makes it quite clear that it's virtually impossible for any type of romantic relationship to exist without one partner having some degree of advantage over another -- whether it's in the form of physical strength, greater attractiveness, more money, a greater status in society, greater intelligence, more cunning, a more charming personality, etc. Also, the fact that MAPs have a full romantic attraction to youths often grant our hypothetical young paramours a huge degree of power over our feelings and emotions, and the assumption that those feelings on our end cannot exist constitutes a very serious lack of understanding about the MAP attraction bases. Willful misunderstanding due to emotional and political reasons does not result in wise policy decisions, to say the least.

How convenient, and utterly hypocritical that that pedophiles are so quick to recognize the “adultist” (the attempt by pedophiles to appropriate this term is comedy gold by the way) power of parents, but refuse to recognize their own, and the inevitable problems that arise from it.

Considering how we do not seek power over kids, and considering a power differential in either partner's favor is not something we typically seek, Danny is engaging in assumptions based on societal ignorance. He is also presuming that kids automatically give deference to adults simply for being adults, which is certainly not the case regarding adults who have no "authorized" connection to systems of authority in their lives (e.g., the home, school, daycare center). Instead, we oppose adult power over kids, but this is overlooked by non-choice detractors since "power" is the main factor they see between adults and kids.

Also, the word "adultist" was conceived by the youth liberation movement, not the MAP community, and the former is unconnected to the latter. The two cannot work together at the present time because of all the political problems that would entail for both. Nevertheless, the commentators were using the word precisely as Non-MAP youth libbers use it, so its use was actually accuracy gold rather than the comedic version of the glittering element.

I’m sorry, but this child liberation nonsense is a non-starter for me.

It's nonsense for Danny in the same sense that the black, women's, and gay emancipation movements of the pass were non-starters for the majority of the general public in past eras. Progressive ideas almost always go through a radical period where they are heavily opposed by the status quo, since people tend to fear change, and fear the loss of existing power structures that many benefited from.

It’s smacks of little more than horny men clutching at disingenuous political abstractions in a lame attempt to legitimise their attempts to wrestle innocent, naive children from the protection of their parents for the sole purpose of ejaculating inside them.

Note the continued use of emotionally manipulative descriptions that tell us more about the teleophiliac obsession with penetration (made clear in all porno films they spend billions of dollars on annually) than it does anything about the MAP attraction bases. Note the continued refusal to see the MAP attraction bases in their full complexity, instead focusing on lurid, perverse sexual imaginings designed to evoke extreme scenarios in the imagination of readers. And notice how control over kids--something MAPs do not typically seek--is euphemistically referred to as "protection." The liberal Nanny State initiatives repeatedly do the same thing, including justifying repressive laws on adult sex workers.

Notice the use of other manipulative words like "wrestle," which is intended to imply in the minds of readers the use of force or "rough" sexual acts by MAPs on kids. And note his use of the word "naive," which is an adultist term clearly defined by youth liberationists as such long before MAPs adopted the descriptor -- this despite the rampant ignorance and bad decisions routinely made by adults in politics, business, personal matters, etc. It devalues the potential of kids and shows them an utter lack of respect while purporting to simply be "acknowledging reality." Sort of like the excuses used to denigrate the intellectual potential of black people and women in the past, during the era when white men considered them mentally and/or emotionally deficient as a rule.

How charitable of you all. And what terrible parents we are those of us who’d rather our children focus on activities that didn’t involve them being drenched in semen and saliva.

Need I again reiterate the use of negative and lurid emotional word usage to evoke the worst imagery in the imaginations of readers? And is it charitable to call kids naive as a whole rather than consider them on a case-by-case basis, and to also consider how they might be if once again allowed to reach their full potential in place of a standardized time table decided entirely by adult authority figures?

That some of you even attempt to dress up the desire to exchange bodily fluids with minors as some sort of charitable concern for the well-being and political liberation of children in general is precisely why discussions with pedophiles and the rest of society haven’t, can’t, and won’t even get off the starting blocks.

Translation: Sexuality is evil, and it taints everything it's associated with. If an aspect of sexual desire is part of the component, then it must imply nothing more than that, and extreme selfishness on the part of the group promoting it. And there is no way any adult can have actual respect for kids, or consider them worthy as relationship partners, so it has to be this!

And what Mr. Whittaker said about this never getting off the starting blocks is the same thing once said about miscegenation and open acceptance of gay relationships never being accepted by society. But since liberals of today have the benefit of looking back at that era only in a retroactive sense, they feel safe insisting there can be no parallel. Let's see what their descendants 50 years from now are saying. Then again, liberals of today do not say much about the fact that their predecessors during the 1950s were outright against gay liberation and the liberation of women from the kitchen.

You can’t even seem to be honest with yourselves about the true nature of your motivations, so how can you ever expect the rest of society to ever take you seriously?

Mr. Whittaker's emotional distress and societally indoctrinated social instincts are forcing him to make very broad assumptions here about our motivations. He can only see children and young teens from the standpoint of a teleiophiliac authority standpoint, as inferiors who need to be controlled by adults in order to be "protected," and that sexuality is to them what sunlight is to a vampire. They must be purged of all sexuality, and adults who are attracted to them in that manner are to be considered vile perverse ghouls who cannot possibly respect them as full human beings, since he has been conditioned not to think of them as fully realized human beings, but rather the equivalent of living china dolls.

Danny simply cannot see beyond that, and it pains his sensibilities too hard to try. So, he doesn't try. Instead, he lashes out angrily when he is confronted with these assaults on his comfort bubble. He is also mindful that trying to understand too much might get him into serious professional trouble, since he well knows we do not live in a world where we can speak out mind about everything. Especially since he's a well-read man who is likely very aware of what happened to the once seemingly invincible Milo Yiannopoulus when he dared to publicly admit that he had a mesophiliac experience with an adult clergyman at the "tender" age of 13 which he enjoyed and looked back fondly on. After the former darling of the alt-right did that, no manner of desperate apologizing and back-pedaling managed to save his formerly lucrative career when his friends on the Right joined his detractors on the Left in bashing him into oblivion for daring to go against the party line on this super-emotionally charged topic.

Hence, I need to consider all of this when engaging with Danny's words and state of mind, even if I cannot agree.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to any possible responses! As a reminder, please make them here and not on Tom's blog, because he is pretty burned out with moderating thousands of words over the past few days and has requested that this topic be given a rest over there for now.