Gawker: 'Pedophilia Is a Sexual Orientation'

The following headline actually appeared at Gawker Friday: "Born This Way: Sympathy and Science for Those Who Want to Have Sex with Children."

The article, written by Gawker West Coast editor Cord Jefferson, was even worse (emphasis added throughout):

In an ABC News article from 2003, a corrections officer from Los Angeles told reporter Michael S. James that imprisoned pedophiles "usually don't make it" without protective custody. Leslie Walker, a prisoner's rights activist, told James, "[Child sex offenders] are at risk of being murdered, having their food taken, having their cells defecated and urinated in. Their life is truly a living hell." Good, most people will say. But there is a growing number of researchers, many of them out of Canada, whose work suggests that pedophilia is an illness deserving of the public's sympathy the way any brain disorder is. Some of the scientists say pedophilia is a sexual orientation, meaning that it's unchangeable, regardless of how much jail time or beatings or therapy someone is dealt. Others have reason to believe that pedophiles are born that way, and that some of them will suffer through entire lives without hurting a single child. If this research proves to be correct, it should help shape both our public policy and our public attitude, so that we're protecting kids while also protecting pedophiles from angry mobs, cellmates, and themselves.

That bears repeating: "[P]edophilia is an illness deserving of the public's sympathy...pedophilia is a sexual orientation."

Scary stuff. But it got worse:

Currently, there is no significant longitudinal evidence that pedophiles can be made to not be attracted to children, and thus it can be defined as their orientation. And if pedophilia is a sexual orientation, that also means it's futile to send pedophiles to prison in an effort to alter their attractions. Doing so is akin to sending a homosexual child off to a religious-based institution that claims it can "pray the gay away."

Yes, the article really said "it's futile to send pedophiles to prison in an effort to alter their attractions."

But there was still more:

Imagine a world in which admitting your attraction to busty women or tall men led to alienation, jail time, or your murder. Older gay men can probably remember such an era, but nowadays most sexual appetites have been mainstreamed to the point of banality. Pedophiles, for obvious reasons, don't enjoy the same kind of tolerance, and thus it seems as if they may be locked forever in a sexual prison from the moment they're born.

Isn't it a shame that pedophiles "don't enjoy the same kind of tolerance?"

But the worst was still yet to come:

The old adage is that the true mark of a society is how it treats the weakest in its ranks. Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they're also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children. One imagines that if Jesus ever came to Earth, he'd embrace the poor, the blind, the lepers, and, yes, the pedophiles.

Jesus would embrace pedophiles? Not according to Poor Richard's News:

[H]ow ignorent of the Bible can you be if you’re suggesting Jesus would “embrace the pedophiles”?

Matthew 18: 6: “But whoever causes the downfall of one of these little ones who believe in Me—it would be better for him if a heavy millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea!"

Jesus died for the forgiveness of sin, not the embrace of it. The Bible is very clear that while all sins can be forgiven, Jesus never ever embraces the sin itself. He made no bones about the punishment for harming a child.

No matter how preposterous this Gawker editor's views, we learned in the very next sentence how someone could actually think this way.

"As a self-professed 'progressive.'"

That's all you needed to know, isn't it?