Amid Priest/Pope Fuss, Pedophiles Mount New P.R. Campaign: Call Us 'Minor-Attracted Adults'

While major pains in the ass like the Catholic League's Bill Donohue are taking out gay-bashing ads in the Times to counter calls for the pope's scalp, organized pedophiles — the Baltimore-based B4U-ACT — have a specific goal beyond just the peddling of a hare-brained euphemism.

They want their lust decriminalized, so one of their avenues is to convince the nation's psychiatrists to let those who aren't in jail for having sex with kids participate in the current process of revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

And so far there's been practically no publicity about that.

DSM-IV, compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, is the Bible for shrinks, insurance companies, and drug companies, and it's being revised now with an eye toward publication as DSM-5 in 2013 — so pedophiles are lobbying shrinks to decriminalize what's now criminal behavior.

Revising the DSM is a massive undertaking, and scads of "workgroups" and "subworkgroups" of doctors and others have been working for 10 years on individual categories and subcategories.

Mostly out of public view, the process of revising the DSM is contentious. See the working draft for DSM-5 here. Better yet, read Dr. Allen Frances's "Opening Pandora's Box: The 19 Worst Suggestions For DSM-5." Frances chaired the task force for DSM-IV and is the former chair of psychiatry at Duke med school.

As Frances notes, one of the creepiest newly proposed "illnesses" is "paraphilic coercive disorder," a bad concept on many grounds, as he points out.