I actually have to disagree, if we break down sex to it's most primal level, reproduction, it is entirely equivalent to homosexuality and other orientations. Homosexuality, Beastiality, Pedophilia, all do not lead to reproduction, the person is sexually attractive to some one or some thing that is unable to physically reproduce.
I mean we can all go round and round about what is adult, and what is consent, but at the end of the day it all comes down to our basic primal urges, and for those one or two percent outside the whole that are wired in a different way sexually.
Mind you I am only comparing it because I am detaching our emotion revoltion of a person having sex with a child. Take that away and what do you have? Some one who is physically attracted to a certain set of characteristics that make them unable to breed. How is that honestly different than Homosexuality? Or Bestiality? Or anything else outside of Heterosexual sex?
First, as I will further explain to Celestial Moth below, the descriptor "natural" is a poor indicator of the healthfulness, appropriateness, or legal defensibility of any action or event. If you're going to argue that evolution has left us our urges, you'll have to do so with more modesty and attention to detail. One could say that sex feels good because it was crucial to our reproduction, but that does not mean that only procreation necessarily felt good. Sex might just feel good regardless of who or what one is doing it to (to play off a line from Martin Crane, haha). To argue that because heterosexual sex is the only form of sex that procreates it is therefore the only form of sex acceptable as "normal" is to argue from nature, which of course is generally a very simple, if convincing, fallacy. We know that hetero sex is the only procreating sex, and we may even grant you that procreation is the original
evolutionary point or purpose of sex in general, but you would still be stuck at the "is." Both statements could just as easily be argued historical accounts (descriptive) as normative accounts (prescriptive); neither of those statements provides their own reasoning that non-procreative sex is by any ethical or scientific measure "less than" procreative sex.
Second, this argument that homosexuality is equivalent to pedophilia and all other non-heterosexual orientations/desires by virtue of their shared inability to produce offspring, and that that specifically is the measure by which we should categorize them as mental disorders or not, fails because it does not save heterosexuality from its own trappings; heterosexuals can be attracted to infertile mates, fulfilling the same "no-offspring" criterion as the other orientations and landing heterosexuality in the "mental disorder" pile as well. When your project is to build a category as delicate and consequential as what constitutes a mental or sexual disorder, you won't be successful by trying to use a tool of classification as blunt and unrefined as "inability to produce offspring."
Third, pedophilia is not significantly different from homosexuality only because we have a special emotional concern for children. There is
actual harm caused to children by involvement in premature or one-sided intimate relationships. Protecting them from this harm is not a case of special pleading for children, but rather just another entirely unremarkable instance of the wider standard of protecting any human with rights from preventable harms. Additionally, the implication that things like "what is adult" and "what is consent" are secondary to "whether it is a primal urge" as considerations in "what it all comes down to," which in this context includes in its meanings "what is acceptable sexual behavior," lacks the understanding that the acceptability of sexual desires or behaviors is defined by the ethical and legal statuses of their targets, not their ability to produce offspring. "Ability to produce offspring" is not an ethically relevant category. The evidence of the history of natural selection tells us how things came to be, not whether those things are acceptable or inappropriate, healthy or harmful.
That's a rather grim way to look at things. Imagine that there's a guy who has a crush on you, but you don't like him in return. According to your logic, the guy will eventually rape you and it's only a matter of time.
I'm quoting this because it might just be the single most intelligent and successful point I've ever seen marioguy make. Kudos, marioguy!
A few people here, actually, are employing the outdated metaphor of a hydraulic model of human motivation, in which the 'pressure' of a desire gone unfulfilled 'builds up' to a 'critical mass' at which it violently and unavoidably explodes. This is not how human motivation, desire, or violence works, fortunately, and marioguy here does a good job of illustrating that while refuting the argument Iceberg was making.
Though this statement is very interesting because if one is to consider pedophilia, unnatural, without any moral attachments. Then they would not understand that theirs a chemical deformity and or abnormality within that persons brains in which causes them to have a natural attraction to something that would otherwise be considered unnatural.
Though with this said, if one understands the chemical processes and or things that cause said attraction to anything, like that in which i described, then theirs no way in hell that person could ever consider such people to be and or acting UN-naturally because they were born with that mutation and or abnormality. Which in essence, proves that they are simply being theirselfs and are acting in accordance to how they were born, thus acting naturally no matter how "UN-natural" this may seem.
In addition to the specific arguments against this concept of "natural" being a justification I made to BigLutz above, I need to point out the fallacy of this argument here. In a materialist conception of the universe,
all human tendencies, natures, desires, and personal psychologies can be traced back to a genetic influence to some extent. Anything any person does, then, qualifies as "natural" by your definition, thereby making them simply "being theirselfs" and "acting in accordance to how they were born." And if this conception of natural is enough to exonerate that person from any crimes they may have committed, then anything at all can be legally defended. I'll say again, whether something is "natural" is a poor indicator of its ethical or legal defensibility, especially this particular conception of it.
Arguments from nature are almost always fallacies, and that rule holds for Celestial Moth's and BigLutz's posts here. In addition, when the topic under discussion involves effects on individuals' well-being (either the well-being of oneself or others), you cannot argue any conception of that topic without the ethical (or, if you like, moral) attachments. Pedophilia is a disorder because it is a human psychological variation with the potential to violate the rights of those it targets when put into action and because it can negatively affect the well-being and healthy life functions of both the targets of the desire and the person harboring said desire; not because it's not straight-up white conservative Christian hetero missionary-style status quo, not because we think kids are precious and special, and not because you can't usually impregnate a third grader.