Re: The Draft Argument for 12+

"By criminalizing only sex with children, and not with teens, you give pedohebephiles a huge motivation to only have sex with teens and avoid sex with young children." Again, I don't know the truth of that, but either way the weakness of the argument remains. Why would anyone so concerned about "harm" towards minors throw 12-year-olds under the bus even if it did save the 11-year-olds? "I think hatred of MAPs and feelings of 'grossness' about teen sex... are bigger drivers." These are merely ancillary side effects. People demonize pedophiles because of the harm they are believed to cause. There may always be a certain minority of the population with such a strongly conservative personality that anything non-normative freaks them out. These are not the people we need to bother persuading. "Idiocy is a useful trait. Historically and in the present, societies have needed people who will perform menial or dangerous tasks that are necessary for the survival of the group." The fact that it's so easy to make up a story justifying group selection for any trait should be reason enough for you to be more skeptical. The 1970 Freund & Costell study you cite looks interesting, but it was not a study of homosexuals. The title of the study itself claims it was a sample of "nondeviant" males. There may have been some homosexuals in the sample, but that's not clear and you certainly can't conclude that gays prefer male adults less frequently than both adolescents and preadolescents when drawing from the general population.