You must confess your own vested interests in order to be scrupulously honest about this, Dakota. This is nothing personal, everyone needs to do this symmetrically once we start scratching down to the ad-hominem level of questioning people's objectivity and motivation. But I warn you, speculating about other people's interests can't be done in a cosy way. Everyone likes to think that other people are biased but that we ourselves are basically incorruptible. And really, gentlemanly conversation presumes people are at least attempting to be objective and it doesn't stoop to the the Marxian depths of raising vested intellectual interests. But the 20th century, whether you like Marcuse and Foucault or not, was all about interest-exhumation, wasn't it? So we are not so genteel any more.

I can see now that relatively conservative Christianity is very attractive to conscientious boylovers. Believing that God forbids sex between males helps to build a wall against the possibility of getting into pedophilic trouble, and also against agonizing over it, turning to porn and so on. And I do think that the Lord has always been willing to help people who wished to be, as the Catholic church put it, brides of Christ rather than getting involved in conventional relationships. Sexuality is a gift from God, but only one of many aspects of God's great generosity.

My revelation of the month, in my own mind, is that this pedophilic-self-control factor must go far beyond this site. The 15-20 active members here can only be the tiniest tip of the iceberg of the number of people who cleave to conservative Christianity (in part) as their fortress against their own homo-pedophilia, and in some cases as their best available access to God's love as a consolation for their lost conventional romantic love.

The feminist-inspired revelations of the 80s, where thousands upon thousands of adults revealed they'd been subject to unwanted sexual interference as kids, shows that the urge to have sex with children is by no means rare. It is quite ubiquitous. And the very reference I gave in the quote that started this shows that under conducive circumstances, indefinite numbers of what we conceive of as heterosexual males will go for the active role in sex with boys 9 - 17. Certainly more than half the male population would happily become involved. Put them in an all-male prison, and essentially all would partake.

The viewpoint against gay relationships in conservative Christianity may derive a non-trivial component of its support from the efforts of people to control their cross-generational homosexual impulses. This is something that supporters of the gay movement never think of. Completely unintentionally and accidentally, we threaten to open a Pandora's box of unwanted sexuality for some people who either can't ever find conventional romantic satisfaction in this world, or are forced to sit lifelong on a powderkeg of unwanted sexual/romantic impulses. Our legitimacy is fearful. We have no effective answer to people who have undertaken this retrenchment against us.

There may be, too, be some jealousy directed towards people who HAVE had conventional romantic relationships, a tendency to dismiss such things as sour grapes anyways. Anything resembling one's own frustrated aspirations would come under greatest suspicion as not really being valid love. A camel could more easily pass through the eye of a needle than a sexual gay relationship meet the proof-criteria of being loving (qua agape) in nature. Not that a conservative Christian would ever be likely to state any definite, testable proof-criteria.

My own completely naive viewpoint is that rather than harping on my interests here, I am just trying to be, as it were, the lawyer for genuine love. Not for gay love, in particular; this is just one beam of the house - but the house that is divided against itself cannot stand. I think quite simply that if the love I've experienced isn't full-blown love, then there is nothing much to love. You know the line: "if this be error and upon me proved, then I never writ nor no man ever loved."

I always suppressed the idea in my own thoughts that some members of Christendom might prefer authority, control, order and structure to love, even in the best reading of the word love. It has struck me to wonder if control, especially social control, has become an idol placed far above the love that was supposed to be all of the law and the prophets.

That thought strikes me as paranoid - I don't think I'll advance it as a vested interest - though I have had some discussions recently that caused it to rear its head up again in my mind.

Just to be clear, though, I argue against these thoughts with myself on my own time, and I mistrust the lot of them. The human heart is immensely complex and it's a grave error to underestimate the goodness of anyone.

I think the best of everyone here.

And that's not just policy. It's from the heart.