NAMBLA's meaning today - Why be a part of NAMBLA?

Shortly before joining NAMBLA, I encountered a new source of outrage: I heard a report on National Public Radio describing an explosion in the growth of "treatment centers" for so-called "juvenile sex offenders" in Texas. In these centers, teenaged and pre-teen boys are told that any non-normative sexual desires (i.e. anything not approved by the shrinks) on their part are signs of fundamental flaws in their constitution - that they are, deep down inside, damaged people, who must fight their evil impulses eternally, but who will never win the fight against their inborn demons.

The sound of an incarcerated sixteen-year-old describing his own natural erotic feelings as if they were proof of guilt and an inherent defect moved me in a way I cannot describe in words. That this sixteen-year-old was now convinced that his feelings gave license for his emotional torture at the hands of sadistic Nazi-esque doctors (using powerful techniques for which there was and is no evidence of either efficacy or safety), brings me to the point of outrage whenever I think about it.

But the announcer optimistically reported that while there had been "only" 40 such centers in Texas a few years before, there were now hundreds, and if only the funding were approved, there would soon be many hundreds more like them, using the best of those supposedly sophisticated techniques.

source: Article 'NAMBLA's Meaning Today - Why Be a Part of NAMBLA?' by David Miller; nambla.org/meaning.htm; NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 20, No. 2; 2003