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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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