Ex-gays on a homosexual support board.

There's no reason that a support board for gays would be particularly welcoming to someone (gay or not) who stated that it is wrong for gay men to have sex with other men, and that they should focus on achieving tolerance for gay men who admit their attraction is wrong.

There's no reason why we should be particularly friendly to bigots who assert that intergenerational sex should be punished by jailtime.

That said, we've always been willing to debate with anti-contact people on the board, and to offer them support regarding their attractions should they need it. As much as I'm mad at you (and I am mad at you, for reasons which go far beyond your sexual politics), I wouldn't hesitate to offer you a place to stay if your attractions were to land you out on the street.

What we're not willing to do is to have the same arguments ad infinitum with people who simply will not be convinced with logic or fact. I'm perfectly willing to discuss how children *should* be protected by the law when it comes to sex. I'm willing to debate the relative competencies of different-aged children, and the essential role of education in protecting young people. But I simply can't argue against unfalsifiable claims like the idea that we can't get rid of the age of consent because of the slightest *possibility* that it would lead to an epidemic of child abuse. There is no evidence that can disprove a possibility.

Part of the stated purpose for this board, the reason for its existence, as Dante recently reminded us, is to:

work vigorously for the emancipation, empowerment, and positive education of youths everywhere.

That is why we won't accept weak arguments in favour of the status quo. Age of consent laws are unacceptable from a rights standpoint -- the rights of young people and MAAs -- and so an anti-contact stance is always going to meet with hostility, especially when it consistently fails to make a strong case as to why fundamental rights should be curtailed. The default position in a free society *is* emancipation. It doesn't matter what prevailing social attitudes say, particularly when they are largely unsupported by science.

Where I agree with you is that our positions on intergenerational sex should be more nuanced. We shouldn't talk about 3 year olds, 7 year olds and 12 year olds as if they were the same. We should be open to strong anti-exploitation laws, especially for young children. But when anti-contact arguments start with the status-quo AOC as their starting point, there isn't room for such subtlety, and so the argument becomes framed in absolute terms. When the opposing position unjustly denies basic rights, then the only possible response is to affirm those rights in the strongest possible terms.