You may have heard buzz on the internet that a long-fought battle by pedophiles and their psychoanalysts, who desire their demented compulsions be normalized by society as an alternative lifestyle, is again catching steam given the current political environment and the rabid political correctness that’s accompanying it. Reports assert that pedophiles are demanding the same rights as homosexuals, arguing that pedophilia is not a perversion, but rather a sexual orientation. (Go here and here to read the sick attempts at rationalizing child rape.)

Now before I share my take on that, I’d like to relate a story about a girl I once knew:

Until about the age of seven, she lived in a small city in California. It was a time, in the late 1960’s, when kids walked home from school unattended. It was an era where kids would stay gone, playing in the neighborhood all day, until evening came, a father’s familiar whistle being the signal to come home for dinner. We didn’t worry about monsters.

The little girl lived one house down, and directly across the street from, the neighborhood city park. She played there most days, often with her older brother in tow. One day, as she spun herself into dizziness on one of those twirling, jungle-gym, nausea-inducing contraptions, a man approached her and asked where the men’s room was. She thought this was an odd question, since she could see the small, cinder-block building directly behind him. Nonetheless, she skipped over to the building and pointed, saying, “It’s right here!” The man thanked her and, before going inside, asked that she wait for him just outside the entrance. She guessed he didn’t want to get lost.

A few moments later, the man, whom the little girl thought very tall from her five-year-old perspective, reappeared. But the little girl, who’d been waiting, proud that she was helping an adult, became instantly frightened.

Standing before her was the same man, but now, from the waist down, he was naked. She began to shake, too frightened to scream. After a few moments, he said, “Have you ever seen one this big?”

Summoning courage, she ran away to find her brother, who was still somewhere in the park, never looking back. And never telling anyone.

Fast forward.

The little girl is now a young lady of sixteen. Every day she walks home from school through a boarded-up section of military housing on the naval base where she lives with her mom.

One day, while walking the same path home she always takes, she hears a rustling in the trees. She turns her head to the left, and sees a black man standing there. He’s staring at her, his shirt unbuttoned, naked from the waist down. Her heart starts to race. She wants to run, but she’s afraid that if she does, he’ll chase her. So she hurries her pace, walking as fast as she can, eyes forward, until she finally arrives home, breathless. She tells her mother of the man, and her mother calls the police. They arrive soon after, place her in the rear of their car, and drive around, looking for the man. But they never find him. She will see him once more, even after altering her route, before she moves away with her mother. And for years and years later, she will compulsively check, and recheck, every closet and every door’s lock in the house before she sleeps, making certain the boogeyman is not inside.

I know this girl’s story well. I remember what happened to her, and how frightened she was, like it was yesterday. I know, and I remember, because the girl was me. The five-year-old and sixteen-year-old me was unprepared for what happened to her. She didn’t know what to do when confronted by evil. But the forty-nine-year-old me wishes she’d been there. Because I can tell you, with absolute certainty, what I’d have done. And it would have been tragic for the one of us whose name is not “me.”

Pedophiles‘—and I’m talking the perverts like those in park bathrooms and lurking in bushes, not sexually curious adolescents—rates of recidivism are unpredictable. But they are not your garden variety criminals. I submit that they are very different: They cannot be counseled into change; they cannot be educated into healthy relationships; they cannot be punished into reform. They will never—I repeat, NEVER—be normal. They will always have the compulsion to prey upon children, and they will never stop. NEVER. Like this deviant:

Whatever your opinion is on homosexuality, it is irrefutable that gay sex, just as heterosexual sex, happens between two consenting adults. Not so for pedophiles. It’s not love; it’s child rape. Pedophiles prey upon children, who do not have the capacity to consent, nor far-too-often the capability to resist. And pedophiles rely on that to do what they do.

We tell our children that monsters aren’t real. But that’s a lie. I know. Because I’ve seen them. Pedophiles are the fiends of society, routinely and mercilessly destroying lives. I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in karma. What comes around, goes around. The two demons who preyed upon my innocence are burning in hell somewhere. Monsters who hunt our innocent children deserve what they get. And I submit, without apology, that what they deserve is not normalization and understanding, but nothing less than a bullet, right between the eyes.