It’s short and sweet, but I hope folks remember next December to nominate Barbara O’Brien’s “Identifying Evil” for the next Koufax awards.

Evil’s on a lot of minds today, as the fallout of Tom Delay’s resignation lingers and a Homeland Security official is arrested for soliciting sex with a minor via the Internets.

Well of course any sentient being not given to pedophilia would agree that pedophilia’s evil.

I found this comment especially important:

Most of these guys are hard-wired differently. Their true, at-the-core sexual attraction is, for some reason, aimed at children. It’s not an act, for the most part it’s not evil, it’s where nature, for some reason, has pointed them. They are fully aware of what society thinks of them, and they loathe themselves for it - still - sexual attraction is powerful, and a fact of life. Almost all of the cases I saw were fondling cases.

I’m a heterosexual male - some others here are homosexual males and females. We’re the lucky ones. Our sexual inclinations are to one degree or another acceptable. Can you imagine what life would be like if your natural attraction was toward children? I don’t understand it - don’t even pretend to - but I know what I saw - and for the most part it was human beings being human. I think back often to a case where I had a kid who was 18, and had fondled a boy of about 8 yrs. The pain, disgust, and as I said, self-loathing present in that kid was hard to see - I hope that today he is all right - I hope that he is still alive and hasn’t taken his own life.

With that point, does it become non-evil, just an aberration of nature? If the force is desire to get some jollies, and you loathe yourself for a built-in desire to make it with children, is it really evil motivating the abuse?

And this comment, about all the other victims related to the child abused, also raises great points. As does this comment and this one, too. And this.

There are numerous considerations: we shouldn’t judge too soon before proof is presented and does it matter if tyhe victim is 14 vs. 13? (I recall, when I was a teen, hearing that a 14 year old could get married in New Hampshire without parental consent). Some argue we don’t do enough to protect kids as a society. Others wrestle with how one can keep their kids safe.

Ultimately, that last is the only dilemma we’re really trying to solve. How to protect the kids.

My answer: we can do more, but the bottom line is we can’t guarantee our kids will be safe from sexual come-ons from adults attracted to them. Can any of us guarantee our marriages will work, our jobs won’t be outsourced, we won’t get cancer?

So what can we do better? Educate our young, honestly. How many parents leave sex ed to schools and know exactly what their schools are teaching? How about making it essential that you’ll go over critical matters like this with your kids no matter what the schools are doing?

And of course, we assume that, even if we do so with our own kids, there’s lots of messed up families who won’t. What do we do for those kids? Public service spots during children’s programming? Again, perfect protection evades us, and seems further away for the kids down the street.

Look, I worked with mentally damaged folks in a state institution. I revulsed, internally with the pedophiles. But I was working with folks then known as “mentally retarded.” Should they face punishments for an evil they can’t even recognize?

Later, a friend of mine transferred to a different institution and worked with sex offenders, where all manner of ‘aversion therapy’ was tried. My friend’s verdict: pedophiles can’t be cured. Like alcoholics, some achieve ’sobriety’ by self-restraint. Most don’t. There’s a caveat: a lobotomy works.

My friend wanted me to apply there. I couldn’t. For all my tolerance, I find pedophilia too disgusting.

Perhaps some day, pinpoint brain microsurgery might lead to a correction. Of course, on that day, a host of potential abuses to normal brains will arise with that Pandora’s Box opened.

For now, open, honest dialogue with our kids, and closer oversight of sex ed at their schools are good places to start. Keeping computers in living areas of the house, instead of private rooms, also improves the odds of limiting access to kids responding with naivete.

As for the pedophiles, first I hope we can eliminate partisan biases a bit. I think the Homeland Security guy was probably a political appointee, but that doesn’t make it automatic that he was a Republican. I’ll have to see the science before I’ll carge that Republicans produce more pedophiles than Dems, or vice-versa. Our kids matter too much to pursue divisiveness instead of solutions.

Second, since the level of abuse, and ages of kids vary, there is no one-size-fits-all-thumbscrews to twist. I think 5 years minimum in prison and 2 years with a tracking device on an ankle afterward (with restrictions like ‘no computer usage’ besides) would be reasonable minimum for a first offense.

Second offense? Life imprisonment, no parole. Or accept the lobotomy.

We’ll never catch them all. But we can catch far more and take them out of society, until science offers a way to alter the impulse if it is an instinctive desire that can be erased.

Sure, it’s easy to say they’re sickos, let’s dismember them. I’d be sympathetic if a parent did that, if they got to the offender first. But I can’t consent to state brutality no matter how repulsed I am, without surrendering myself to another evil out of vengeance. Protection, not revenge, is my goal as a parent and for our society.

Honesty, communication, precautions and smart legislation that protects the vulnerable and exiles the offenders. I’m a partisan for that. Party affiliation is a side issue that wastes energy better spent just making the kids safer.