Academics, psychologists expanding LGBT argument to ‘minor-attracted persons’
First Published: 01/02/2014
NEW YORK – The underlying assumption that has led to the increasing legitimization of same-sex marriage is now fueling a growing effort in academic circles to mainstream pedophilia.
Once considered taboo, psychologists are beginning to walk down the same path LGBT activists established more than 50 years ago, insisting that pedophilia is an inborn “sexual orientation,” not a learned sexual behavior.
If people are born with a sexual attraction to minors, the argument goes, their “orientation” should be accepted as normative and not stigmatized.
James Cantor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the Law and Mental Health Program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a large mental health and teaching hospital in Canada and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, is regarded internationally as a leading “sexologist” studying pedophilia.
Cantor says his research concludes pedophiles share distinct characteristics of “brain wiring.” He contends some 1 to 5 percent of all men are predisposed to be primarily sexually attracted to children.
In a New York Times report on Cantor’s work Dec. 22, reporter Laura Kane noted pedophilia “has been widely viewed as a psychological disorder triggered by early childhood trauma.”
However, many experts now, she wrote, “see it as a biologically rooted condition that does not change – like a sexual orientation – thanks largely to a decade of research by Dr. James Cantor at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.”
Last fall, the American Psychological Association caused an uproar when the latest edition of its vaunted Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called pedophilia a “sexual orientation.”
After inquiries from news organizations, the APA issued a “correction” stating “sexual orientation” is not a term “used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder.”
In a speech at a meeting of the Association for the Treatment of Sex Abusers, Cantor traced the idea that pedophilia is a characteristic of the brain to the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist.
Krafft-Ebing’s defining book, “Psychopathia Sexualis,” first published in 1886, defined various sexual practices, including homosexuality, bisexuality and pedophilia, as pathologies determined by a mental state that ultimately traced to a brain disorder.
Cantor rejects Krafft-Ebing’s moral judgment and defines various “paraphilia” behaviors as sexual inclinations caused by observable differences in brain structures and functioning, which he calls “brain wiring.”
Cantor’s research team at the Kurt Freund Phallometric Lab conducts experiments with convicted sex offenders. The men are shown nude images of children and adults of various sexes, while a device measures blood flow to their penises, the Times report said.
The method, called phallometry, was invented by Freund in the 1950s. Cantor said it accurately measures sexual interests in 90 percent of men.
Cantor has found pedophiles are shorter, on average, and are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous. Their IQs are about 10 to 15 points lower, and they are more prone to childhood head injuries, a characteristic Cantor attributes to an inborn clumsiness.
Cantor finds that pedophiles are overwhelmingly men, about one-third of whom prefer boys, about one-third prefer girls and one-third are attracted to both.
In an interview with the Canadian show “The Agenda” on the channel TVO, Cantor said pedophilia is not a psychological disorder of something “that went wrong in their parenting,” but a biological disorder such that “there’s something in the brain of a pedophile that is different from what’s in the brain of a non-pedophile.”
In the interview, Cantor declared: “No one chooses to be attracted to adults, no one chooses to be attracted to children, affirming “you either are wired that way or you are not.”
He also notes that people attracted to minors aren’t all necessarily molesters.
Cantor argued: “We will be able to make much more contact with these people (pedophiles) when we indicate to them that we know they didn’t choose this, we know they had no opportunity to select what they are going to be attracted to, the best we can do in therapy is to manage their sexual interests.”
He asserted: “Nobody has ever developed a therapy that’s capable of changing somebody’s sexual interests.”
Normalizing immorality
Normalizing what traditional psychology had regarded as a sexual pathology was a key strategy driving the research of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute into “sexual variations,” WND commentator Judith Reisman wrote in her 2010 book “Sexual Sabotage”.
“Our laws are no longer based on Judeo-Christian morality, but on Kinsey’s immoral ‘morality’: an adulterous, fornicating, aborting, pornography-addicted, masturbating, impotent, sadistic, masochistic, bisexual, homosexual, exhibitionist, voyeuristic, and child-sexual-abusive world,” she wrote.
“These truths are difficult to accept, yet crucial. Americans must come to understand what has gone wrong and how we changed from a family-oriented and flawed but honorable country to a sex-obsessed and violent one.”
“Believe it or not, even child sexual abuse, rape, and incest (which its apologists euphemistically now call ‘adult-child-sex’ and ‘intergenerational sex’) are slowly but surely gaining respectability,” Kupelian wrote.
Kupelian noted that many people “think having sex with children is a good thing,” pointing to 100,000 websites at the time offering illegal child pornography. Worldwide, at the time, child porn generated $3 billion in annual revenues.
As WND reported, a book published in 2005 featured multiple Ph.D. “experts” claiming that sex with children “can benefit” boys and even serve a “mentoring function.”
Two days after WND exclusively reported on the new book, the publishing company announced it was canceling the book in light of the public outcry the story prompted.
The book, “Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West” featured “scholarly” treatises by mostly Ph.D. academics who praised earlier civilizations – particularly Greece and Rome – for the role homosexuality played in their cultures.
In a chapter titled “Pederasty: An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and Empirical Data,” Bruce Rind, Ph.D., lauded the rampant child molestation that reportedly occurred in those societies, at one point citing evolution as supporting a pro-pedophilia worldview.
APA reversal
Rind brought unfavorable publicity to the American Psychological Association in 1999 when the organization published in its official peer-reviewed journal, APA Bulletin, a report disputing the harmfulness of child molestation.
Titled “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples,” the report by Rind and others claimed child sexual abuse could be harmless and beneficial.
When, last fall, the APA reversed its controversial designation of pedophilia as a “sexual orientation” after fierce opposition, it said the text of its new manual should read “sexual interest,” instead.
“In fact,” the statement said, “APA considers pedophilic disorder a ‘paraphilia,’ not a ‘sexual orientation.’”
It added: “APA stands firmly behind efforts to criminally prosecute those who sexually abuse and exploit children and adolescents. We also support continued efforts to develop treatments for those with pedophilic disorder with the goal of preventing future acts of abuse.”
In October, WND columnist Matt Barber wrote about efforts by progressives to roll back laws against pedophilia.
He featured the case of Kaitlyn Hunt, a 19-year-old convicted of sexually assaulting a minor, a 14-year-old girl, who, nevertheless, became a cause célèbre among “gay rights” activists.
Barber recalled that two years earlier, he attended a conference by the pedophile group B4U-ACT.
Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, opening with: “I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.”
Among the assertions made at the conference were that pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society, children “are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with an adult and an adult’s desire to have sex with children is “normative.”
Barber said a consensus belief by both speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that, because it vilifies “minor-attracted persons,” pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973.
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