The left's idea of normal sexual behavior in America and Europe these days would shame a Federico Fellini movie. We have been subjected to lectures about tolerating every variation: Transgender, non-binary, eco-sexual, three-spirit genderqueer, geosexual, and probably planktonsexual.
Of course, there's a key distinction to be noted. Adults - perhaps specifying "mature" or "competent" may be a bridge too far in discussing these people - can diddle as they please, and as long as they don't disturb their neighbors or impede traffic, there really isn't much response required besides head-shaking and maybe some eye-rolling.
But when a group wants to involve children, that's another thing entirely. Christina Buttons, an investigative reporter for the Manhattan Institute, brings us the tale of a Maryland-based group that wants to normalize "minor-attracted persons." In other words: Pedophiles.
An alarming new movement insists that sexual attraction to minors is not a psychiatric disorder to be managed but an identity to be affirmed. Leading this effort is B4U-ACT, a Maryland-based organization founded in 2003 to support pedophiles, or as they call them, “Minor-Attracted Persons” (MAPs). From May 2 through May 4, 2025, the group will host a conference in Ohio to train mental-health providers in “affirmative MAP therapy,” which seeks to help clients accept their “age of attraction” as an intrinsic and valid part of their identity. This approach abandons clinicians’ traditional risk-management focus when treating pedophiles and raises serious concerns about public safety.
"Serious concerns about public safety" may be something of an understatement. We're talking people who are sexually attracted to children. Children.
The group believes that attempts to alter pedophilic desires are not just ineffective but unethical, and it insists that efforts to reduce patients’ attraction to children through “reconditioning methods” or sex-drive-reducing drugs are harmful—drawing direct comparisons to conversion therapy for homosexuality. The organization discourages clinicians from diagnosing clients with Pedophilic Disorder and instead claims that pedophilia is a “sexual age orientation.”
Founded by social worker Russell Dick and convicted child sex offender Michael Melsheimer, B4U-ACT includes pedophiles in its working group and invokes the activist slogan “nothing about us without us,” arguing that pedophiles should help shape therapeutic models. Though the group states on its website that it does not endorse sexual contact between adults and minors, individuals familiar with B4U-ACT note that its language around consent is worryingly ambiguous, allegedly referring to so-called “willing” children.
It's hard to understand people like this; as the late, great Paul Harvey used to say, "If you could understand them, we'd have to worry about you." But we can understand the implications of the agenda these people are pushing, and it's orders of magnitude more concerning than the various other "identities" identified above.
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Why? Because children can't give consent.
This comes from the same line of argument that excuses permanent, life-altering, and debilitating medical treatments and surgeries carried out on kids in the name of "gender affirmation." It ignores, utterly and totally, the problem of children's inability to give informed consent to a medical procedure or to consent to sexual activity. It's a dangerous and outrageous notion.
Now, we should note that the "...don't endorse sexual contact between adults and minors." I'm inclined to point and shout, "Poppycock!" But, of course, we can't prove a negative; they have made the correct statement in their public information to avoid legal troubles.
Their call to be included in public discourse around pedophilia, of course, is utter drivel and goo. We don't include muggers in a discussion about street crime, we don't include rapists in a discussion of sexual predators, and we must not include pedophiles in a discussion of pedophila. These people need psychiatric treatment, not to be part of the discussion as to what's to be done with people who prey on children. And that, mind you, is what we are talking about here; even if we are to be charitable and concede that their mandatory disclaimer is honestly presented, then these are people who, at the very least, have the desire to prey on children.
These people are not activists. They are predators, or at least potential predators, and they should be dealt with as such.
Christina Buttons puts it very succinctly in her conclusion:
Therapy is not meant to validate every feeling or affirm every identity claim. Its purpose is to help individuals confront harmful impulses, not weave them into their sense of self. Yet under the influence of progressive activism, groups like B4U-ACT are recasting pedophilic attraction as something to be accepted rather than contained. In doing so, they risk collapsing critical moral distinctions and shifting the focus away from the safety and well-being of children—the population most in need of protection.
And that's the key to the whole thing: Collapsing moral distinctions and endangering children. That's the problem with the "trans kids" agenda, and that's the problem with normalizing pedophilia.
