FROM THE ARCHIVES--THE RAINBOW SIGN:

Psychiatric Association Debates Lifting Pedophilia Taboo (Lawrence Morahan, June 11, 2003, CNSNews.com)

In a step critics charge could result in decriminalizing sexual contact between adults and children, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently sponsored a symposium in which participants discussed the removal of pedophilia from an upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.

Psychiatrists attending an annual APA convention May 19 in San Francisco proposed removing several long-recognized categories of mental illness - including pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism and sadomasochism - from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Most of the mental illnesses being considered for removal are known as "paraphilias."

Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented conferees with a paper entitled "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal."

People whose sexual interests are atypical, culturally forbidden or religiously proscribed should not necessarily be labeled mentally ill, they argued.Different societies stigmatize different sexual behaviors, and since the existing research could not distinguish people with paraphilias from so-called "normophilics," there is no reason to diagnose paraphilics as either a distinct group or psychologically unhealthy, Moser and Kleinplatz stated.

The combination of moral relativism and increased life expectancy has created a unique problem for modern man: we now live long enough that the things we find most reprehensible come to be socially acceptable in our own lifetimes. In a few years people will spit the term "paedophobe" at us with the same venom as they now use the term "homophobe" and we''ll be considered aberrant for thinking that sex between adults and children is evil. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 25, 2003 2:19 PM