'trying to convince an average person'

I don't think you can. And that precludes legalization before normalization. I do possibly see a road forward in persuading some of the more thoughtful "conservative" intellectuals (I'm thinking of people like Harrington) to re-examine their reflexive view that "pedophilia" is the end-point of what they see as the danger -- even the evil -- that results when society veers ever farther from norms, "normophobia" as Harrington put it. The evidence is on our side, and all it takes is cursory examination of the historical, artistic, literary, and anthropological record to see this (joined now by the statistically robust data crunching that scholars like Rind are doing). The conservatives already understand: -- that the current "normophobia" is a disaster for children, most particularly boys. -- that it isn't much better for women, a small subset of upper and middle class Western women excepted. -- that the destruction of male spaces, particularly male spaces for boys (choirs/scouts/fraternities/) has been terrible for boys (Harrington explicitly acknowledges this in her recent book Feminism Against Progress) -- that the only place we can look for guidance in how to extricate ourselves from the contemporary morass is in the historical record. And if they start looking at the historical record, they're going to find examples -- lots of them -- of pederasty -- healthy pederasty, not just exploitative pederasty. Unless, of course, they have inherited blinders that have trained them not to see it. ("Omit. A reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.") It only takes one step -- taking off those blinders -- to see the role, the essential role, that pederasty played in human flourishing. But that's a huge step and almost impossible for most of these people. Because it brings you face to face with the erotic, the sexual, the nature of desire. And the conservatives recoil at dealing with that -- most of them anyway. JRR Tolkien in his famous letter to his son, wrote QUOTE Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that – even those brought up ‘in the Church’. UNQUOTE Conservative intellectuals engage in a kind of double-tbink -- they perceive at the edge of consciousness that the man/boy erotic bond plays a role -- a crucial role -- in cementing the male group (particularly a group whose underlying purpose lies in initiation/socialization) but it's such a horrifying thought that they shove it aside. They are aware (their own lives teach them) of the peril of the erotic and are conscious of just how much sheer effort of will is involved in disciplining eros -- see the Tolkien letter. Again, at the edge of consciousness, they sense just how easy man-boy sex can be when stripped of all the social prohibitions -- that ease stemming from the nature of the male sex drive and the absence of any fear of pregnancy. It really scares them. So they are on board with the strictest repression of any overt expression of the man/boy erotic bond, where they play right into the progressive/"woke" playbook - the disruption of male spaces and the male life journey. Without articulating it to themselves, the conservatives simply cannot -- or will not -- see that there is a counterpart to Tolkien's description of Christian marriage in the man/boy bond. L.A. below described the counterpart commandment perfectly; the BL should act as if he is going to be the best man at his yf's wedding. Does that mean mortification/disciplining of the sexual drive? Of course it does. But if pressed, most conservatives don't think it's possible. So we arrive at the refusal to take the step I noted above. (This is not a conscious refusal, by the way.) I don't know how to get around it; it's made harder by the collapse of classical education (our educated forbears had at least read the Phaedrus; how many of even the most enlightened conservative intellectuals today have read it and wrestled with it?) If there is a path forward -- and even if there is one, I suspect it is long and circuitous -- it leads through a revival of classical, religious, and literary education (widened with an exposure to the great texts of the East -- the Ramayana shedding of an incandescent light on the male life journey; the Tale of Genji's incomparable exploration of the nature of male sexual desire and what that does to women (not to mention the novel's explicit acknowledgement of the hotness of boys), and of course Saikaku rubbing the reader's face in the allure of pederasty for both men and boys) -- and perhaps,as I've mentioned before, some of what is going on in east and southeast Asia which can be interpreted partly as a covert protest against Western "normophobic" cultural imperialism. SR