Pedophilia as a ’sexual orientation’?
Pedophilia is another “sexual orientation,” comparable to heterosexuality or homosexuality, according to expert testimony recently presented to the Canadian Parliament.
The issue at hand was a bill that would either increase penalties or impose mandatory sentences on sexual offenders whose victims are children.
According to a report at LifeSiteNews, Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem, a psychologist and retired professor at the University of Montreal and one of the expert witnesses, told members of parliament, “True pedophiles have an exclusive preference for children, which is the same as having a sexual orientation.” The other expert, Dr. Vernon Quinsey, a professor emeritus of psychology at Queen’s University in Ontario, added, “There is no evidence that this sort of preference can be changed through treatment or anything else. . . . It’s not necessarily that they need to change their sexual orientation; they need to learn to control themselves, with our help.
Member of Parliament Marc Lemay had this reaction to the testimony: “In my opinion, society and no one around this table will accept pedophilia, even if it is a sexual orientation. . . . I recall a period, not too long ago, when homosexuality was treated as an illness. It is now accepted, society has accepted it. . . . I cannot imagine pedophilia being accepted in 2011.”
The report raises many issues. First the good news. Legislators to our north are learning that there is no quick fix for pedophiles. Hopefully that will inform their decision-making on how to deal with them.
Now the not-so-good news. While I believe the doctors testifying were trying to make the point that pedophilia is a serious, perhaps untreatable, condition, calling it another “sexual orientation” undermines that point.
Lemay’s reaction is telling. Right now it may be impossible to imagine society accepting pedophilia. A generation ago it would have been impossible to imagine abortion on demand, or elementary school children being taught about homosexuality. And if you don’t think there are people out there trying to push this as an agenda, then I guess you’ve never heard of the North American Man Boy Love Association.
Here’s how that group describes itself on its website: “As never before, our society is beginning to recognize the value and richness of human diversity. . . . Man/boy love is exceptional only for the degree to which it is still misunderstood in cultures derived from Northwestern Europe. . . . [Man/boy] relationships do not harm anyone, and often entail many benefits for both man and boy.”
Showing posts with label NAMBLA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NAMBLA. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Reparations -- what the Hay??
A Gazette reader named "carrotcakeman" who claims I "hate" him made the accusation that I get my information from "gay hate" websites. But actually, I pull my information from "pro gay" websites; I prefer to use their own statements to bolster my own. The following was taken directly from http://www.nambla.org/sosconference1994.htm.
Harry made the following statement to a press conference on June 24, 1994, in the former Stonewall Inn on Sheridan Square in New York, site of the riots that launched the modern gay movement in June 1969. The press conference was called to announce the Spirit of Stonewall (SOS) contingent in the Stonewall 25 march two days later. It was moderated by SOS co-organizer and indefatigable activist Bill Dobbs. Other participants were Christine Martin, sex educator and documentary filmmaker; Glenda Orgasm (aka Glenn Belverio), drag queen activist and filmmaker; Scott O’Hara, editor and publisher of Steam magazine; Val Langmuir of Feminists Against Censorship (London); Julia Smedley, member of Stonewall Now; and Charley Shively of Fag Rag and professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
This statement was transcribed from a videotape of the press conference. A much shorter version—which omits any mention of NAMBLA or SOS, as well as the entire last half of the statement and the first paragraph—appeared inRadically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Harry Hay, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 303. These omissions seem odd in view of the fact that Harry read from a written text. The truncated version also used capital letters for words such as “Brothers and Sisters” and “Queers,” a convention that is not followed here since this complete version is not based on a written text.
Sir Julian Huxley, the great English biologist, said, at the beginning of this century, no negative trait—and, as you know, a negative trait is one that does not reproduce itself—no negative trait ever appears, and reappears, millennia after millennia after millennia, unless it in some way serves the survival of that species. We gays and lesbians may embody, or have discovered, some things that you folks desperately need to know about.
I’m here today as a survivor, as well as the founder of the first ongoing gay organization in the United States, the Mattachine Society, first formed in 1950 in Los Angeles, and now, naturally, a member of SOS, the Spirit of Stonewall, because things we discovered about ourselves and principles we developed in 1950 to ‘53 are now being trashed by queers who don’t know their own history, all over the place.
We decided from the beginning that, first, because we were still discovering our parameters, we wouldn’t censure each other. If people like NAMBLA self-identify themselves to me as gays and lesbians, I accept them as brothers and sisters with love.
Second, when we decided to rejoin the social or political mainstream again, we would integrate as the group we saw ourselves to be, complete with our own set of values, or we would not integrate at all.
And third, we would no longer permit any heteros—nationally or internationally, individually or collectively—to tell us who we are, what persons our groups should or should not consist of. We assert our right to self-determination, we assert our right to collective self-definition. We queers will decide for ourselves who our members should be.
Members of SOS, notably NAMBLA, have been accused of child molestation. Insofar as child molestation is concerned, the most common form is the sexual coercion by which gay and lesbian children are bedeviled into hetero identities and behaviors. And this is practiced daily by the whole national and international hetero community—parents, family, teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, not to overlook U.S. senators and pooh-bah media.
This outrageous coercion of gay kids into hetero identities and behaviors against their wills is not only sexually abusive, it is spiritually devastating rape, because the child unbeknowingly is being led into developing self-loathing at the same time. For this gigantic criminal trespass against not only today’s children but against all of us also—all of us—since childhood, from the queers my age of 82 down through all the generations of queers assembled here in New York, to the gay kids still being bedeviled by sexual coercion against their wills, we the international gay and lesbian people here this week should unite to sue the whole guilty heterosexual community lock, stock, and barrel to within an inch of their lives, and for every nickel they’ve got, as a beginning of compensation. And while we’re at it, we should request our first-class citizenship as well. This could be the class-action suit of the century.
______________________________
This statement was transcribed from a videotape of the press conference. A much shorter version—which omits any mention of NAMBLA or SOS, as well as the entire last half of the statement and the first paragraph—appeared inRadically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Harry Hay, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 303. These omissions seem odd in view of the fact that Harry read from a written text. The truncated version also used capital letters for words such as “Brothers and Sisters” and “Queers,” a convention that is not followed here since this complete version is not based on a written text.
_______________________________
I’m here today as a survivor, as well as the founder of the first ongoing gay organization in the United States, the Mattachine Society, first formed in 1950 in Los Angeles, and now, naturally, a member of SOS, the Spirit of Stonewall, because things we discovered about ourselves and principles we developed in 1950 to ‘53 are now being trashed by queers who don’t know their own history, all over the place.
We decided from the beginning that, first, because we were still discovering our parameters, we wouldn’t censure each other. If people like NAMBLA self-identify themselves to me as gays and lesbians, I accept them as brothers and sisters with love.
Second, when we decided to rejoin the social or political mainstream again, we would integrate as the group we saw ourselves to be, complete with our own set of values, or we would not integrate at all.
And third, we would no longer permit any heteros—nationally or internationally, individually or collectively—to tell us who we are, what persons our groups should or should not consist of. We assert our right to self-determination, we assert our right to collective self-definition. We queers will decide for ourselves who our members should be.
Members of SOS, notably NAMBLA, have been accused of child molestation. Insofar as child molestation is concerned, the most common form is the sexual coercion by which gay and lesbian children are bedeviled into hetero identities and behaviors. And this is practiced daily by the whole national and international hetero community—parents, family, teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, not to overlook U.S. senators and pooh-bah media.
This outrageous coercion of gay kids into hetero identities and behaviors against their wills is not only sexually abusive, it is spiritually devastating rape, because the child unbeknowingly is being led into developing self-loathing at the same time. For this gigantic criminal trespass against not only today’s children but against all of us also—all of us—since childhood, from the queers my age of 82 down through all the generations of queers assembled here in New York, to the gay kids still being bedeviled by sexual coercion against their wills, we the international gay and lesbian people here this week should unite to sue the whole guilty heterosexual community lock, stock, and barrel to within an inch of their lives, and for every nickel they’ve got, as a beginning of compensation. And while we’re at it, we should request our first-class citizenship as well. This could be the class-action suit of the century.
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