kengr

"Can't ever" and "can't now" are not the same thing.

And you'll note I said that we can't and shouldn't treat them as animals, because they're not. But.

What is the humane thing to do with people who are suffering from a currently incurable disease that compels them to harm others? They cannot be allowed to rejoin human society without supervision. It is unjust to restrict what materials everyone else may read, view, listen to on the grounds that it might set them off. They need to be kept away from that class of persons they are compelled to harm (children, women, elderly people, whatever group it is) and monitored professionally. Perhaps they can lead useful lives; this would be a goodness.

Some of them would no doubt choose suicide over a perpetually monitored existence. I am not an advocate of euthanasia personally, especially not in cases where an unconscious patient can't ask for it, but if we're going to allow doctors to do in their patients (um, did I mention I'm more conservative than most of Shadow's readers? well you probably figured that out by now), I think that paedophilia is definitely one of those currently incurable diseases that interferes with one's quality of life to a sufficient degree that persons who suffer from it might prefer euthanasia.

I don't think that I would choose that.

But I have no idea what it is like to be a paedophile. My sexual orientation is really boring; I prefer to have a single partner of the opposite sex (or at least an opposing gender--I have had at least one terrific crush on an FTM, but he was a man to me) no more than ten years younger or fifteen years older than me. (The number of years older or younger has varied with my age. When I was 14 I only wanted older guys; when I was in my mid thirties I preferred younger men; but at no point during my sexual life have I ever preferred anyone under age except when I myself was within 4 years of that age.)

And I am also one of those people who does not want to have the plug pulled on me, period. As long as people think I might be in there I want them to let me live. If they later do an autopsy and discover that my skull was full of fluid, well, so be it, I certainly wasn't suffering. If I had any incurable disease, I'd stick around as long as I could in the hope of a cure.

YMMV.