The movement to gradually destigmatize all social deviancies continues apace. For better or worse, we've come a long way from The Scarlet Letter.
I myself am a clinger. I cling to my antique cultural traditions, morals, codes, and religion as my life's foundations, and I lack the wisdom to opine about whether the destigmatizing of adultery, abortion, pornography, promiscuity, divorce (can anybody remember when divorce was socially shameful?), homosexuality, gay marriage, gay child-rearing, LGBTQ and whatever, prostitution, fetishes, many crimes, drug abuse, overtly antisocial behaviors (see all of the defenses of the UK's rioters), single motherhood, etc. is for the best or not. It certainly does represent a socio-cultural shift which some consider decadent. The notion of destigmatizing crime, for sure, seems like a big problem to me but there are significant subcultures even in the US who do.
The social acceptance of many of these behaviors seems to me to be part of the "therapeutic culture" which I, as an MD and practicing psychotherapist, find to be close to insane in its assumption that all would be perfect humans if not for inner conflict or external traumata. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who I had the pleasure of talking to several times, defined many such things as "definining deviancy down."
Already, Moslem polygamy is sort-of overlooked in Western nations, and I see no fairness in not overlooking it in traditionalist Mormon families - or in anybody else who wants to do it. That's my Libertarian side speaking rather than my more personal, moralistic and Christian side.
Currently, the American Psychiatric Association has, under consideration, a proposal to de-pathologize Pedophilia. Why anybody in the general public cares very much about the opinion of this APA committee is beyond me, but many do. I doubt that they will have the political cojones to actually do that but, to get a little multicultural here, we have to bear in mind that pedophilia has been and continues to be culturally accepted in many cultures and subcultures - most famously, historically, amongst European royalty, the Greeks and Romans, the Moslems, and Africans, and currently amongst some Asian cultures and many Moslem ones. Prepubescent girls are for rent everywhere in south Asia. As a commonly-defined crime, pedophilia is found everywhere in the world.
Bonobo monkeys do it all, so it must be OK. Human fantasy and psychic reality may not be too different from Bonobo behavior.
In my opinion, pedophilia is not so much of a disease in itself as it is a crime - in our culture. It is a very good idea not to commit crimes even though supposedly everybody does, wittingly or unwittingly. In my field of Psychoanalysis, we still define culturally-deviant sexual behaviors as polymorphous-perverse or plain perverse, but even we - the supposed truth-tellers about the human heart - are subject to taboo PC pressures. It is interesting to see how taboos change, but never go away: now it seems that PC defines the taboos.
I remember a gay patient, years ago, who reported to me with some alarm that he had been dancing with a lady at a wedding and found himself feeling aroused and attracted to her. I joked with him that now he was revealing himself, in modern cultural terms, to have a real perversion.
