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I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)
I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)
The problem with non-compulsion is that it’s quite gamable. You can convince the public that kids are capable of “wanting” sex with adults (which was a line NAMBLA pushed at one point, and via trans-activity at present) and then the age of consent is pushed downward. Likewise, it’s fairly easy for a determined person to manipulate others into consenting to sex through drugs, alcohol, social or physical pressure.
Kids are undeniably capable of “wanting” sex with adults. Parents, caregivers, and (to a lesser extent) members of society at large have a responsibility for recognizing when kids shouldn't get what they want and preventing them from doing so.
The age of consent for sex has been consistently rising over time and was much lower in the centuries before either NAMBLA or the "trans-activity at present", so I think you'll need a bit of evidence for this claim.
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Oh, I never thought it was anything to do with science but was purely for the "homophobia! bad!" sloganeering. But the thing is, when they're going to be dragging MAP into the spotlight as the new 'homosexuality is not a perversion or mental illness, but it is a disorder, but they can't help it and so should not be persecuted or prosecuted', part of that will be the useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.
And we'll all be expected to forget that this boils down to conversion therapy, which we were all told never works anyway. Because that will be the politically convenient take on it.
I'm sufficiently autistic/OCD on details like this to want them to pick a story and stick to it, and I know that makes me a fool. There is no objective truth, there isn't even any subjective truth, there's just whatever line is the most convenient to get them what they want, and Science has replaced Religion as the moral arbiter and setter of rules for society. "The science is settled" is the secular progressive version of Roma locuta, causa finita est. And "the science" changes according to the whim of the day.
Ugh, I hate useful idiot psychologists. Probably the single most disappointing group of elites in the past 50 years in my personal opinion. The legacy of Freud, Young, Piaget, and so many other brilliant men has been absolutely squandered by the cowardly, stupid, contemptible and frankly just lame breed of psychologist we have nowadays.
At least Peterson is still showing a bit of the potential the field once had. I hope it can be saved before the damage is irreparable, but I'm frankly skeptical. We'd probably be better at this point burning it all down and having Peterson & co. create a new discipline from scratch.
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But MAP not being persecuted or prosecuted is not sufficient to actually enable pederasty. We're quite comfortable with letting people have sexual orientations they can't legally act upon otherwise (the morbidly obese and disfigured, incels, and even the vast majority of MtF-seeking-female), and I'm not convinced that dangling some sliver of hope before those groups ("well, theoretically, if you became really rich and beautiful, you might find someone who will consent, one day... it's not impossible...") makes so much of a practical difference. Why not just defend the line that children can't consent? The virtue-ethicist transference which seeks to bring the hammer down on MAPs and assorted anime lolicons and amounts to "the problem is not that children are subjected to sex by adults, but rather that adults get off on children" is quite counterproductive here because it does in fact turn a problem that's beyond a defensible line (necessity of consent + non-recognition of consent given by children/societal lessers) into one whose only defensible line (society can wield violence to align your beliefs/mental state to norms that are set by the right wing) has already long collapsed.
(I note that uncharitable voices on the left have also long benefited from the natural suspicion that right-wing virtue ethicists also buy into the converse of the virtue-ethicising of pederasty condemnation: i.e. that if the adult is not getting off on the sexual interaction with the child, it is no longer such a big deal, and hence may take a backseat to other preferences. There's a general sense among the left that right-wingers are reticent about state meddling to disrupt abuse which may be motivated by power more than pedophilia, be it intrafamilial or in the "suspiciously sexualised punishment at Jesus camp" class, which inoculates left-wing parents against right-wing think-of-the-children arguments.)
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We probably have to do both, the push has been quite happy to move up to where we abandon and start pushing on the unfortified back lines before we manage to get anywhere.
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