Poland slowly sinking into inhumanity

This post contains some opinions of mine that I don’t share very often, for the reason of them being quite … anti-norm, so to speak. Read if you like, but if you don’t like what you find, don’t come crying to me. You’ve been warned.

One thing that has me riled up every time I encounter it is people’s continuing, seemingly obtuse, failure to distinguish between sexual deviants, and sexual criminals. Arguably the best example to use here would be with pedophiles. Pedophilia is merely the “sexual attraction to children”, according to dictionaries. It is not the act itself of harming children, molesting/raping them, and so forth. That is not pedophilia; that is, well, molestation/rape, brought on by pedophilia in those cases. Being sexually attracted to kids, and actually acting on those impulses, are two vastly different things. Pedophilia itself is not a crime, any more than it is a crime to be heterosexual, gay, zoophile, or anything else. Reminding me of the great Dumbledore Quote from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: “It is not our abilities who define who we are, but our choices”. Replace “abilities” with “ingrained, uncontrollable^[1] impulses”, and you get the picture.

This may seem like an odd little outburst, only I’m sick and tired of people being castigated, ostracized and demonized, with varying levels of intensity and hatred, for things that they cannot control. You can control your actions, but you cannot control your impulses. They do not go away just because they’re wrong, can cause harm, or because you don’t want them. Being a pedophile is not a choice, and I am getting seriously irked that most people continue to operate under the belief that it is. One doesn’t choose to be attracted to kids, no more than heteros choose to be attracted to the opposite gender, or gays to the same gender, or zoophiles to animals, and so forth. They just are.

What matters, is whether they choose to act or not on these impulses. A pedophile with a good heart who would sooner rape himself (figure of speech) than an innocent kid, is no more dangerous than anyone else who loves kids. Because of this vicious and unfair anti-pedophile climate, innocent people, with urges they neither want nor control, can get seriously hurt.

Such as in Poland, thanks to a new law enforcing castration for pedophiles.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded 'degenerates'. Tusk said he did not believe "one can use the term 'human' for such individuals, such creatures."

"Therefore I don't think protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events," Tusk also said.

Right, they’re not humans. Guess they’re humanoid walking child-rape-machines, then. Yeah, that makes rationalizing this whole ordeal lots easier, dunnit?

The law, which hasn’t yet officially been passed (though the vote is merely a formality at this point, as Tusk’s party holds the majority of the Polish parliament’s 100 seats), will be applied to anyone who is “convicted of raping children under the age of 15 years or a close relative”.

What could possibly go wrong?

Not to mention that punishment treatment measure, as with others that have obviously been thought up out of anger and hatred and with little to no thought behind them, is seriously flawed. Cutting someone’s balls off (an expression I use to also encompass chemical castration, mind you), even if they are a true child molester, does not fix any problems. It means the guy doesn’t produce viable seed anymore. Whoop. Does that mean he still can’t “get it up”? No. Or that he can’t still enjoy raping children, even if he doesn’t have the “luxury” of ejaculating properly? No.

This “treatment” makes that old error of assuming that rapists rape out of sexual lust. Of course, this is true for some of them. But, in the vast majority of rape cases, the rapist himself (or, sometimes, herself) has admitted that sexual pleasure actually takes a secondary role in the act; that what they really crave, and enjoy, from these acts, is the control, knowing that they’re forcing their will, their frustrations, their domination, upon a victim who can’t fight back. This has little to do with their libido, and more out of frustration, self-loathing, and so forth. Castrating them would lessen these feelings and the risks, of course, but it would never eliminate them. Some people really do just enjoy perpetrating such horrid acts, and their production of sperm (and testosterone) is quasi-irrelevent.

This measure is yet another example of why I hate long-term-slash-permanent punishments (conducted under the guise of “treatments”) for convicts of any crime, such as chemical castration, or execution, or anything else I’m just not thinking of right now. It’s only to be expected that every now and then, an innocent person will be falsely convicted and will suffer the punishment of crimes they never did, or likely would have, committed. You can’t take these things back. The only reasonable punishments are those that are intended to change one’s behavior, not alter one’s physical or mental status permanently.

A pedophile who hasn’t done anything wrong is not a criminal, and quite frankly, I abhor anyone who claims otherwise. If you’ve done nothing wrong, regardless or who or what you are, then you’ve done nothing wrong. Punishing someone for a crime they did not and would not commit … Seriously, what can possibly be justified in such thinking?

[1] By “controlling their urges”, I mean that they cannot choose whether they feel their sexual impulses towards children or not, no more than you or I can feel our “normal” impulses towards people of the (relatively) same age as ours.

(via Pharyngula)
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