B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile activists and mental health professionals, is behind the August 17 conference, which will include panelists from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois.
B4U-ACT science director Howard Kline has criticized the definition of pedophilia by the American Psychological Association, describing its treatment of “minor-attracted persons” as “inaccurate” and “misleading.”
“It is based on data from prison studies, which completely ignore the existence of those who are law-abiding,” Kline said in a July 25 press release. “The proposed new diagnostic criteria specify ages and frequencies with no scientific basis whatsoever.” 
“The Diagnostic and Statistical of Mental Disorders (DSM) should meet a higher standard than that,” he added. “We can help them, because we are the people they are writing about.”
On their website B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the “stigma” attached to pedophilia, observing: “No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.” The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents.
In their press release B4U-ACT announced a letter the group has sent to the APA criticizing its classification of the mental illness.
In an interview with LifeSiteNews (LSN), Liberty University Visiting Professor of Law Judith Reisman, an expert on sexual ethics and pornography, criticized the Baltimore conference, saying, “This has been on the agenda for decades.”
“I first met up with what I had come to call ‘The Academic Pedophile Lobby’ in 1977 at The British Psychological Society Conference on Love and Attraction, Swansea, Wales,” she said. “I delivered a research paper on child pornography in Playboy 1954-1977.”
“Other conference academicians, some hired by pornographers, presented ‘scientific’ papers advocating the legalization of child pornography, prostitution and an end to age of consent,” she said. “They promoted their ‘scientific’ claims for early childhood sexuality to lawmakers and fellow academicians via both legitimate and pornographic media.”
“The DSM is typical of this degeneracy since they already had lightened the diagnosis of pedophilia as to make it almost meaningless, requiring that the pedophile be ‘bothered’ by his and her abuse of children and so on,” Reisman said. “We now have women and children sexually violating children as well as men. This will continue to spiral down into, well, we’d have to say the abyss of hell, unless we retrieve our laws, our mass media and our schools.”
As previously reported by LSN, similar lobbying, then by homosexual activists, led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 in the DSM. As a result of the DSM declassification, debate regarding homosexuality and the many documented harms associated with the homosexual lifestyle has been all but shut down in academic psychological circles.