I was initially offended by your post because I felt that the first sentence was implying that the Holocaust didn't take place. "Let's just assume..." makes it sound as though you're presenting something counterfactual. If you don't think the Holocaust happened, fine, but that kind of speculation has nothing to do with our focus here at GC. There was no need to use an otherwise well-written post as an opportunity to plant that seed. Notice how your post would've conveyed the same point without the first sentence, or with the first sentence re-worded in a more neutral way. You should've left it out. However, I will ignore that part of your post from here on, and concentrate on what I think was your main point.

Yes, I see a close similarity between the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust, and the treatment of pedophiles today. The answer to your question, "To what extent must one be attracted to lgs to cross the line from 'normalacy' into Pedophilia?" is a legal one. As far as our society is concerned, you cross the line when you break the law. And as we all know, they will continue to change the laws until it becomes practically impossible for anyone with an attraction to children to stay on the right side of it. It's almost that bad already.

The goal of all of this is to force pedophiles to make a decision. Either we can deny who we are and live in the closet, never attempting to gratify our desires in any way (even by looking at non-nude model pictures), or we can go to jail and be registered as sex offenders for the rest of our lives. That is society's ultimatum to us. They will continue to close any avenues by which we can experience our sexuality legally, even alone in the privacy of our own homes. It's a game to them, to figure out what we like and then outlaw it, just because we offend their sensibilities by existing. For some reason, they feel they have the right to deny us our human rights in this way. Probably because they feel their children's "safety," as they conceive of it, is more important than our right to exist and be free. They are wrong. As a child lover, I love and adore children, but I also recognize that they are not the only people worth saving and protecting.

Society only knows how to use children, and the issues surrounding them, as a political ballast to advance whatever agendas appeal to them. Parents can easily be driven into a state of fearful hysteria when it comes to their children's safety. Fear has always been, and will always be, that main strategy that governments use to control their citizens. Taking advantage of children and pedophiles is a good way for politicians to look like they're protecting people's common interests, when in fact what they're doing is blatantly violating the Constitution they took an oath to uphold, and relieving thousands or even millions of people of their basic human rights.

It was no different during the Holocaust, when the Jews were blamed for Germany's defeat in World War I. Of course the German people didn't want to lose another war, and how could they have all these Jews running around freely, when according to the popular opinion they were traitors to the reich? Sub-humans, even? Of course the German people felt better knowing that their government had the "Jewish situation" under control. And by the time the Final Solution was proposed, they had all become so desensitized to the treatment of the Jews, that few objected. By that time, Jews had already been barred from owning businesses. Wealthy Jewish families had already had much of their money and posessions redistributed to Christian Germans. And many, many Jews had already been rounded up and confined in ghettos and forced-labor camps. It was a common occurrence for Jews (who had to wear the yellow star armbands) to be harrassed and attacked on the streets, by German soldiers and civilians alike. All of this was at the behest of Nazi propaganda campaigns designed to portray the Jews as sub-human, anti-German outsiders.

When a country is at war, the people are frightened of the enemy without: the foreign country they're at war with. But they're even more terrified of the perceived enemy within—which is anyone who lives among them, invisibly, and has different beliefs or values. Propaganda throughout history (especially the 20th and 21st Centuries) has sought to control people's perceptions of their enemies, both without and within, in order to keep people in a state of mindless tension where their actions are governed by mob mentality. Why? Simply because it's easier to control a whole mob of unthinking sheeple than it is to control millions of individuals. One way or another, governments have always engineered artificial threats and crises in order to keep people walking the line, whatever that happens to be. Countless people throughout history have been the victims of this power game, and now as child lovers, we've come under the gun. Aside from terrorists, there really aren't that many other groups that it's okay to hate anymore. Most people in the modern, developed world consider bigotry unenlightened, so it wouldn't fly if a government tried to make scapegoats of a racial or religious minority these days. That's at least true in first-world nations like the United States. So obviously their propaganda machines must look elsewhere to find the much-needed "enemy within" that they will use to control the populace.

Terrorists are an excellent candidate, because they are dangerous and unpredictable. But they're more akin to the enemy without, because aside from the rare domestic terrorist like the Unabomber, most of them are from the Arab world. They dress differently, speak a different language, worship a different idea of God, and have strange, exotic names. They aren't "us." What our society needs, in order to maintain the wartime tension, is an enemy within. For the Nazis during World War II, it was the Jews. And today, in the United States (and most of the Western, non-Muslim world), it's pedophiles. It's the natural consequence of years of misinformation and misunderstanding about what a pedophile really is, harnessing the public outrage about child sex and child pornography, and the fact that ego-maniacal opportunists like John Walsh will sell out their own dead children's memories in order to foster an atmosphere of hysterical hatred and fear-mongering.

In Germany, they said the Jews were draining money from the German economy and using it to fund their Zionist interests. They said the Jews had the power to break Germany financially during World War II, and that's why action was needed to take the wealth away from Jewish businesses so that Germany could be secure and victorious in the war. Today they say that pedophiles are destroying children's innocence, and now that gays and lesbians are more-or-less accepted in society, pedophilia represents the last bastion of sexual repression we have left.

Moralists and conservatives of all stripes are determined not to live in a society where "anything goes" sexually, because their own personalities make them fear that kind of moral relativity. Conservative ideology and sexual repression appeal to them because they themselves are shame-based, authoritarian people who need to feel as though there are unbending rules in life, no matter what those rules happen to be. They'd be terrified to live in a world where people could do and like whatever they wanted to, because they are unable to trust themselves. They feel as though, without a strong and unbending set of rules in place to govern something as powerful as sexuality, there would be nothing to compel them (or anyone else) to keep walking the straight and narrow path. They feel as though the only reason why most people are moral is out of fear of divine retribution... because deep down they think that's the only thing that keeps them in check. They have to have faith in external rules and authority, because they are unable to have faith in their own inner goodness and moral compass. They have already had to accept the mainstreaming of homosexuality, over their strenuous objections, and it would just about kill them to have to accept pedophilia on top of it.

And then there's the average parent, brainwashed by news stories about child abductions, kiddy porn rings, and schoolteachers who "care too much." At the same time, they have raised childhood up to this unrealistically happy and innocent time, because of their own psychological problems. Deep down, they hate adulthood so much that they need to "fence off" childhood and turn it into what they think is this safe, happy little "larval stage" where God forbid any adult concerns should intrude. It hasn't been this bad since the Victorian Era. What could that mean, except that most parents are deeply unhappy about being adults, and the only way they can think of to deal with it is to try to "protect" their children from that same disenchantment? I also think they resent their children a great deal, for having what they themselves have lost. But what they don't seem to realize is that the only way to be a happy adult is to have been a happy child, and raising children like little science experiments is not going to make them happy. Children need to be alive, and feel alive, and experience the world outside of the safe little sandbox childhood that parents today have marked out for them. Otherwise they too will be lost when they reach adulthood.

Yes, it involves an element of danger. Not everything should be safe. Knees may get skinned, bones may get broken, but we can't be tearing down the jungle gyms or covering the world in bubble-wrap just to make it all harmless. We can't be keeping children away from loving, caring adults, just because those adults might also have a sexual attraction to them. Newsflash: what reason would an adult have to work with professionally children, or spend lots of quality time with children, unless there was some element of sexual attraction there? Who else spends quality time with children? Parents? Most parents seem to think of their kids as a chore or a burden, something they have to deal with because they gave birth to them. I'm sure that attitude really helps a kid's development. No, when a non-parental adult spends lots of time with kids and is well-liked and loved by kids, you can bet there's some element of sexual attraction going on too. I don't think it's possible for the human being to compartmentalize feelings in such a way that every last element of sexuality is excluded from a relationship as special and close as a mentor/student, or other older friend/ younger friend relationship. And I don't think every element of sexuality should be excluded from those relationships either, because it's part of being alive, and kids need to know what life is, before they're 18 and don't know what the hell they're doing in the world.

But parents are afraid of letting their kids live, because life is not always safe. When parents are told that they can't trust their friends, neighbors, teachers, relatives, etc., then it becomes easier to stop their kids from being alive than to deal with the fear of letting them go. I think it also reflects many parents' doubts about their own fitness as parents. They think their children will get hurt, and the other parents will look at them like, "What was she thinking, letting her daughter spend so much time around that strange man? Personally, I always thought he was a bit weird... she should've known better..." What parent wants to be in that position? So many parents these days, because they lack strong fibre, keep their children cloistered away from the real world and constantly involved in scheduled activities and "playdates" with approved friends. They try to micromanage ever aspect of their child's life in order to minimize the chance that any undesirable element can get in. And that's why pedophiles make the perfect "enemy within" for this new age.

Of course, it's the children who will suffer in the long run, just like it always is. The war is almost upon us, and soon we will all have to fight for our lives, we won't have a choice. But I'm not sure if the outcome matters, or if anything matters, because I feel like the world is in such a poor state that it won't be much longer until the end of everything. North Korea is on the verge of nuclear testing, and Iran is not far behind. The conflict in the Middle East nowhere near a final resolution. George W. Bush and his cronies in charge of the United States for another two years, and who knows who we'll have after that, if we survive that long. I think the world is in for dark times, and I don't just mean about the pedophilia issue, I think it's much more than that. In these final months, we need to remember what's important: the children we love. Love them. Be with them. It's by our actions that we'll be judged. Stand and be true.


Enigma
I love children.