A Columbia Professor Speaks At A Pedophile Conference

The conference in question was not a gathering of rogue scholars, business leaders, or real estate brokers. Instead, it focused on attempts to normalize and affirm pedophilia. As is often the case with organized groups advocating such controversial ideas, they do not operate openly and transparently. Their agenda is typically shrouded in deception; this conference was no exception.

It has been said that "A rose by any other name is still a rose," and that idiom applies to this situation. The individuals involved in this troubling matter refer to their acceptance of pedophilia as "affirmative MAP therapy." This framework is explicitly modeled after LGBT-affirmative therapy, to validate the attraction that some individuals have towards minors and integrating that attraction into their identity.

Don't be misled by the term "Minor-Attracted Persons" (MAPs). This past weekend, the Ohio conference held by the group B4U-ACT encouraged attendees to "train mental health providers in affirmative MAP therapy." This approach aims to help clients accept their "age of attraction" as an intrinsic and valid part of their identity.

According to the City Journal:

The organization discourages clinicians from diagnosing clients with Pedophilic Disorder and instead claims that pedophilia is a “sexual age orientation.”

B4U-ACT repeatedly compares pedophilia with homosexuality, likening the stigma gay people once faced to the “oppression” experienced by pedophiles.

This is a misleading comparison: unlike adults in same-sex relationships, children can never consent to sex with adults. Equating these fundamentally different forms of sexual conduct erases the moral and legal distinction between adult relationships and child victimization.

The group nevertheless casts pedophilia in a sympathetic light. Its materials describe pedophilic feelings as a form of “romantic affection” and a “desire for friendship,” and claim that pedophiles often seek to “protect children and make them happy….” under the influence of progressive activism, groups like B4U-ACT are recasting pedophilic attraction as something to be accepted rather than contained. In doing so, they risk collapsing critical moral distinctions and shifting the focus away from the safety and well-being of children, the population most in need of protection.

B4U-ACT was founded in 2003 by Russell Dick and Michael Melsheimer. Melsheimer had previously served as a director at the YMCA and spent four years in federal prison for aggravated sexual assault involving children. Dick was a former director of social work at the Springfield Hospital Center. Melsheimer died in July 2010 at the age of 79.

These two sickos met in 1993, when Melsheimer relocated to Maryland to seek mental health services from Dr. Fred Berlin. He aimed to live authentically and productively as an openly identified MAP (Minor Attracted Person). During his volunteer work at a state psychiatric hospital, he met Russell Dick, who was then a social worker at the facility. Russell later became the Director of Social Work.

As their friendship deepened, they created a non-profit organization that tried to promote understanding and humane treatment of minor-attracted people (MAPs) within the mental health field. In 2002, Melsheimer initiated a one-person campaign that consistently challenged the Maryland Mental Hygiene Administration (as it was known at the time) to identify a single mental health practitioner or agency in the state that publicly offered services to “people like me” before they broke the law.

His relentless annoyance led to a small annual grant from the state to establish and maintain B4U-ACT, create a hotline connecting MAPs with therapists in Maryland, and sponsor workshops for mental health practitioners. Melsheimer also successfully obtained the organization's 501(c)(3) status from the IRS.

This conference demonstrates once again that the left has not only lost touch with reality but also struggles to understand the concepts of right and wrong. They can label pedophilia with any term they choose in an attempt to divert attention from its true horror, but that does not change the fact that any desire to engage in sexual acts with children is wrong!

Why is Columbia University allowing someone with these beliefs to remain employed there? What this individual is teaching young minds is troubling, yet he and others like him, who seek to undermine youthful innocence, are being given a platform to do so.

The left celebrates the fact that they have forced society to tolerate the myth that a man can become a woman and vice versa, which, in truth, justifies the allowance of mental illness and physical mutilation. Now they want to force society to accept yet another depraved lie and to place our children in further physical peril.

Democrats love this chaos. They have gone after the minds of our young, and now they want to legalize the pursuit of their bodies. Sitting back and doing nothing about this kind of debauchery is paramount to accepting it. It’s time for Conservatives to get pissed and take the gloves off.

This is unbelievably wrong, and anyone of sound mind knows it. Those who don’t cannot be allowed to dictate normalcy. Reasoning with the left is futile; it takes action to stop this type of relentless attack. Columbia can do its part by firing the mentally disturbed Nadav Antebi-Gruszka before he destroys the rational thought processes of any more trusting young students.