I am sympathetic to someone diligent about not acting on their attraction to children. I’m attracted to adult women. I didn’t choose to be. I just am. I can’t imagine how much it’d suck if people wanted to kill me because I liked women. So in that sense, I feel bad for people attracted to kids who take steps to never, ever act on it. That would be a tough life to live.
OTOH this guy claims to have “non-sexual” pictures of naked children on his website. Damned if I’m going to click through to see if his idea of non-sexual is the same as mine. Someone advocating pedophilia while collecting pictures of naked children is beyond the pale. That’s acting on it. I cannot and will not tolerate, let alone accept, that action.
First of all, thank you, thank you for being sympathetic and understanding. That is more than what most of the general population provides.
For the second paragraph, I agree with you personally. While I can think of the nudism counterargument ("nudity should not be sexual"), it is true that in current society, nudity is unfortunately sexual, and the collection part of it makes it suspicious that it is a sexual endeavor (e.g. even in the nudism community, a "collection of nudist pictures" is often suspected to be porn [and thus not genuinely nudist], especially if it is sold, even if the pictures were non-sexual). Therefore, I agree with you that I believe this was likely a sexual act by the author, even though the pictures themselves may not actually be sexual (as the nudist community has experienced).
If we assume that it was sexual, then to make the jump to conclude that it was intolerable, we can actually depend on what the anti-contact (a stronger version of non-contact) minor attraction community says. They are, of course, strongly against it as well, on the grounds that the production (and therefore the encouragement of production) of CSAM harms children. [1] Therefore, please know that I agree with you, and in fact, anti-contact MAPs and anti-contact pedophiles agree with you too. None of these groups want to harm children, and in fact, resources are provided in the groups to report and prevent child abuse and CSAM.
Note that there are of course some counterarguments. For instance, Aaron Swartz said: "This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won't make the abuse go away. We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed." [2]. But that's a separate argument, not related to anti-contact or non-contact MAPs, which was what I was focusing on in my original comment.
OTOH this guy claims to have “non-sexual” pictures of naked children on his website. Damned if I’m going to click through to see if his idea of non-sexual is the same as mine. Someone advocating pedophilia while collecting pictures of naked children is beyond the pale. That’s acting on it. I cannot and will not tolerate, let alone accept, that action.