"HARTKITT" JOINS RICK TO SLAM PL ON THE "EPIDEMIC" OF PEDOPHILIA AMONG PEDIATRICIANS AND PRIESTS!/PL RESPONDS!

Here's Hartkitt:

I see Rick got here before me but that's because I've been mulling over in my mind how to best comment on this post for several days.

First of all, I was surprised to see you jumping on the STRANGER DANGER!! CHILD MOLESTER IN EVERY CORNER!!! band wagon. The article you quote is so absolutely typical of the fear-mongering smoke and mirrors that characterizes this kind of story. "DOZENS!!" "At least 20!!!" Well, I went and did the numbers. There are approximately 85,000 pediatricians in this country and 70 million children (sources US census and American Academy of Pediatrics). Twenty pediatricians represents a miniscule percentage of the total number of pediatricians. It's so small that it's hard to say that there's any kind of correlation between "pediatrician" and "pedophile." Chance could account for that number of pediatricians being pedophiles (or pedophiles being pediatricians.) In fact, it might be that such a small fraction is LESS than other professions.

If "dozens" of those 70 million children were molested by their pediatricians that's still such a tiny percentage as to not even be calculable by my simple desktop calculator. The statistical reality is that children are most likely to be sexually molested (and beaten and murdered for that matter; I've looked this one up before) by their immediate family members. By a vast margine. So I'm with Rick on this one. We're not going to go around herding kids into giant institutions to protect them from their families and neither should we be treating our pediatricians with suspicion as a general rule.

Essentially, I think it's a bit careless to impugn pediatricians on this front, not to mention intellectually mushy.

AND here's my point on sexual repression: my personal theory is that our society is obsessed with the image of the mysterious child molester somewhere Out There because of, yes, repressed sexual feeling. Pardon my lack of the correct technical words here but by projecting ones own sexual feelings outwards onto shadowed figures in the environment one can pretend not to have those feelings oneself. In addition, those sexual feelings can be indulged surrepticiously by obsessively following news stories of evil day care workers even while hiding behind the pose of tut-tutting the moral weakness of those molesters. Having your cake and eating it to on the sexual feelings front.

And the society as a whole can excuse itself for sexualizing younger and younger children in the way they are dressed and the way they appear in "the media" by patting itself on the back over vigorously hunting down and condemning "real" child molesters.

FINALLY, I get to expound that theory in public :D

Here's PL:

Okay, HK! I hear you! And I agree with much of what you are saying, in a very lucid way, I might add. But I also hear something in the article I referenced, that there is more happening than what just that one study referred to, and something more than just the heinous case of the Bradley perpetrator, something that makes sense. Perhaps one of us can do the research. In any case, glad to have you and Rick hitting me up!