The sexual molestation of children by adults is a serious issue. This is why I was appalled when I discovered a prestigious professor at Johns Hopkins University was an open advocate of -- apologist for – pedophiles and pederasts (adults who have sexual relations with post-pubescent children).
His name is Dr. Fred Berlin and he is involved with the group B4U-ACT. On their website B4U-ACT talk about pedophilia being a mental disorder and that these people need help.
However, at their conference on August 17th in Baltimore, Maryland, where Dr. Berlin was the keynote speaker, it was a different story. The overall theme of the conference was pedophiles are "unfairly stigmatized and demonized" by society and "the majority of pedophiles are gentle and rational."
According to child advocates who attended the conference, Matt Barber, Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action, and Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting law professor at the Liberty University School of Law, about 50 people attended the conference including pedophiles and pederasts. The group even has a politically correct euphemism for these practitioners of deviant sex – Minor-Attracted Persons.
After learning of this I called Dr. Berlin's private practice and his administrative assistant said Dr. Berlin fully agreed with, and supported, the agenda of B4U-ACT.
My next call was to Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences – where Dr. Berlin is a professor. When I spoke with the administrative assistant she was unaware of Dr. Berlin's support of pedophilia but didn't seem very concerned since she didn't ask for my name or number. I disclosed I was very concerned about this and planned to write this column.
Has Johns Hopkins forgotten about the Hippocratic Oath? "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone."–Hippocratic Oath (My emphasis).
Anyone who wishes to give Johns Hopkins University their opinion of Dr Berlin's support of pedophilia should contact his boss Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo, director of the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences department at John's Hopkins:
J. Raymond DePaulo, Jr., M.D.
Henry Phipps Professor and Director
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Phone: 410-955-3130
Psychchair@jhmi.edu
On the group's web site, Dr. Berlin is quoted as saying: "Just as has been the case historically with homosexuality, society is currently addressing the matter of pedophilia with a balance that is far more heavily weighted on the side of criminal justice solutions than on the side of mental health solutions."
Barber and Reisman highlighted some of the statements made during the conference including those of Dr. Berlin.
Does Johns Hopkins Hospital support this agenda?
- Pedophiles are "unfairly stigmatized and demonized" by society.
- There was concern about "vice-laden diagnostic criteria" and "cultural baggage of wrongfulness."
- "We are not required to interfere with or inhibit our child's sexuality."
- "Children are not inherently unable to consent" to sex with an adult.
- "In Western culture sex is taken too seriously."
- "Anglo-American standard on age of consent is new [and 'Puritanical']. In Europe it was always set at 10 or 12. Ages of consent beyond that are relatively new and very strange, especially for boys. They've always been able to have sex at any age."
- An adult's desire to have sex with children is "normative."
- Our society should "maximize individual liberty. … We have a highly moralistic society that is not consistent with liberty."
- "Assuming children are unable to consent lends itself to criminalization and stigmatization."
- "These things are not black and white; there are various shades of gray."
- A consensus belief by both speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that, because it vilifies MAPs, pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973.
- Dr. Fred Berlin acknowledged that it was political activism, similar to that witnessed at the conference, rather than scientific considerations that successfully led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder: The reason "homosexuality was taken out of DSM is that people didn't want the government in the bedroom," he said.
- Dr. Berlin appeared to endorse the politically maligned clinical practice of "reparative therapy" for homosexuals and pedophiles alike, saying, "If someone, for their own reasons, doesn't want to live a homosexual lifestyle, I tell them that it's hard but I'll try to help them."
- The DSM ignores those pedophiles "have feelings of love and romance for children" in the same way adult heterosexuals and homosexuals have romantic feelings for one another.
- "The majority of pedophiles are gentle and rational."
- The DSM should "focus on the needs" of the pedophile, and should have "a minimal focus on social control," rather than obsessing about the "need to protect children."
- Self-described "gay activist" and speaker Jacob Breslow said that children can properly be "the object of our attraction." He further objectified children, suggesting that pedophiles needn't gain consent from a child to have sex with "it" any more than we need consent from a shoe to wear it. He then used graphic, slang language to favorably describe the act of climaxing (ejaculating) "on or with" a child. No one in attendance objected to this explicit depiction of child sexual assault.
Here are a handful of recent news stories regarding the actions of pedophiles and pederasts:
* A former Chicago resident is facing 40 years in federal prison following an international child pornography investigation led by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The convicted child molester broadcast a video of himself having sexual relations with a baby.
* A child daycare owner was sentenced to 25 years in prison for letting her ex-boyfriend sexually abuse and film children -- some of them infants -- in her care in what US District Court Judge Lawrence Stengel called a "sociopathic" child-pornography case.
* Federal agents and prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Professor Lawrence Scott Ward at his office at the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday charging him with involvement with child pornography and having sex with underaged boys.
* An Oregon man who traveled to Africa and videotaped himself engaging in sexual acts with the ten-year-old child of his Kenyan wife has been sentenced to 25 years in prison on child pornography charges.
* US Air Force Tech. Sgt. Erik Dean Rabes, 45, pleaded guilty in January to inducing and enticing a minor to engage in illicit sexual conduct for the purpose of producing child pornography.
* A Joplin, Missouri, man was charged in federal court yesterday with videotaping his sexual abuse of a 4-year-old victim in order to produce child pornography.
(Writer Nathan Tabor is currently Republican Party chairman in Forsyth County, North Carolina and a successful businessman and author.)