What I'm saying is that we cannot allow the fact that this is a tendency within certain people to be an excuse not to fulfill our obligations to protect victims.
As has already been stated - and demonstrated - in this thread, the pedophile is confronted with a choice: either to engage their desires or to suppress them. Engaging them leads to exploitive behavior. But if he chooses to suppress them, he's going to need support in doing so. In stating this, I was not arguing that they are constantly under the influence of their desires, any more than I am as a heterosexual. But the advantage that I have is that, even while I do suppress my attractions, I can take comfort knowing that perhaps one day I can find someone who is going to fulfill that part of my life. And no, I am not speaking strictly on a sexual level here. But the pedophile who chooses to resist his temptations must accept the reality that this desire cannot be rightly fulfilled.
Despite the popular theories of today, I'm still not convinced that sexual orientation is hard-wired into us. Granted, genetics and other medical details may influence, but there are so many factors of our personality that are brought about by both physiology and our environment. I do not believe we are puppets of our genes. To argue such is essentially to say that pedophiles MUST ultimately engage in exploitive behavior, in which case we have one of two responses to make: (1) to completely eliminate them from our society, or (2) to simply let them do what they want, despite the ways they might harm others.
This thread is not about homosexuality, and I do not intend to let this conversation go that way. As has been stated numerous times on this thread already, the chief difference between a homosexual and a pedophile is that the pedophile can only engage in sexual behavior by exploitive means, such as child porn or molestation, whereas, under the eyes of the law, homosexuality is practiced between consenting adults.
My point was this: as our society continues to gorge itself on its sexual appetites, there will become fewer and fewer barriers that people are unwilling to cross. The problem is that now, even as those barriers continue to be broken down, no one is willing anymore to say, "That's enough. No further." Take pornography, for example. The only reason the stuff exists is to feed lust. But if you point this out to people, they start ranting about the First Amendment. We spoke of advertising earlier, and how advertisers feed our sexual appetites in order to sell us stuff we don't really need. My point, going off of what Lahi was saying, is this: maybe it's time that we as a society started taking some responsibility. Instead of either blaming or condoning pedophilia, maybe it's high time we took a look at ourselves and asked, "In what ways are we part of the problem, and in what ways can we help it?"
Yes, we human beings are sexual creatures, and yes, to some degree we are hard-wired to be. But there have been times in our history when we have been much more responsible about sexuality. And unless we're going to say that the genetic code itself is changing us back into unthinking beasts, then perhaps we should start reclaiming that responsibility.
And the question is still before you: what would you do if you were confronted with pedophilia? What if someone came to you and said, "I find myself sexually attracted to children"? I answered that question myself above. I now pose it to you.
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Get your own freaking minds out of the gutter, people!