because stallman can never fucking shut up about anything.

Non-pedophile who thinks pedophilia is bad checking in here, who also has autism and is not great at shutting up. The fastest way to make that happen is to make me worry I’m going to get a ton of harsh blowback, which shuts me up in real life, and online causes me to post and then delete immediately. Now I am going to answer in general because I do not know much about the Stallman-specific case:

1. Just Fundamentally Not Get how bad it is.

I have several personal life circumstances that would predispose me to not Fundamentally Getting It. I had to learn through seeing online comments about people wanting to torture pedophiles that I had better pretend to Get It, and only learned why it was so especially bad compared to other violations of a person by calmer online explanations and/or survivor accounts.

2. Willingness to be loud about unpopular opinions

If you are all about authenticity, expressing yourself, if you feel you are super smart actually and the masses are wrong and you are unfairly demonized for your perspective (and not always totally fed by delusions of grandeur, see the many folks who had to critical think their way out of cults or majority-bigoted environments, great way to come out with convictions about using what your brain tells you and going against the popular grain if you think you are right and have actual experience being demonized for saying something unpopular), and you do not Get It, you are not going to pretend to Get It the way I did to avoid social censure. You will speak your very unpopular perspective.

3. Siding with the outsider

The type of person who sees a group near-universally shat on, so they go to actually hear them out instead of shitting too. Double points if the person has a history of being in a group that was shat on. (Former) outcasts often give benefit of the doubt to fellow outcasts.

And it’s sometimes difficult to tell who’s being persecuted for being weird, with lots of stories invented on why their innocent weirdness is harmful actually (D&D satanic panic probably gave some bullies a feeling of moral justification for picking on nerds playing it), from the people who are rightfully excluded from parties because they are harmful dicks. If you do not fundamentally Get It or did not have someone really convince you why it’s wrong and just see society shitting on a group… And sadly, we only ever hear about charming assholes who escape punishment and successfully DARVO so their victims are excluded from social spaces instead, which only adds to both victim hurt and willingness to hear out someone who might be a harmful dick who should stay excluded. And if you manage to think you are standing up for the unfairly persecuted weirdo and you have Bullet Point 2 going for you…

Also going to add the people trying to be conscious of avoiding being the bigot today who regrets their bigotry 50 years from now. Pedophiles often draw false equivalencies between themselves and LGBTQ+ folk. Yep, both cannot choose their attractions and get told their attractions are harmful. Only one of those groups consistently puts their “partner” in trauma therapy for years (or some other adverse effect) whenever the attraction is acted upon. But I completely sympathize with growing up seeing LGBTQ+ people mocked and “evidence” of their “harmful lifestyle” brought up, then seeing the sea change in attitudes and being shown how those people should not be mocked and do not actually have harmful lifestyles; and wondering if maybe you are being falsely led down a similar path of hatred against an ultimately-harmless people. The problem is in this case they actually aren’t harmless and getting them into therapy to help them not act on their urges actually would be a useful harm reduction instead of nonsense.

And—feeding back into the “constantly shat on” thing—trying to look for a solution to decrease pedophilic harm to children that does not involve trying to make pedophiles suffer or counts as defending pedophilia to some, because for those who do Fundamentally Get It it’s really just that revolting and gross. Those trying to discuss solutions that do not involve instant death penalty might get exhausted of the “kill 'em all” comments and become more sympathetic.

4. Enjoying nitpicking and edge cases, failing to consider the happy path and if pointing out the edge cases is even wise

Conflating the issue is the stuff that might technically be pedophilia but in practice nobody has issue with: high school seniors, classmates, both freely choosing to have sex with a 3 month age gap where one is 18 and one is 17. This could be statutory rape because one’s an adult, one’s a minor. (Some states have Romeo and Juliet laws to cover this kind of thing specifically so this situation can happen without slapping age-peer minors with the label of “pedophile,” but as far as I know not all do.)

People like me who love to wank on technicalities would get all in the weeds with “are we really going to say minors can never consent, because if so then we have to charge all the 18-year-olds who did not coerce their 17-year-old partner into sex with rape because that partner was a minor”. But socially we can’t do this because to outsiders, wanting to get into the weeds (because you’re trying to tease out where actual social boundaries and common formulations of them clash, perhaps an “actually” type very interested in small exceptions to the rule, which I’d imagine would be a pretty useful skill when dealing with computers; or because you’re a late teenager seeing “minors can’t consent” online and getting worried about if you/your friends will catch a statutory rape charge for non-coercive sex between a 17-year-old and 18-year-old—I think there are a few news stories about such charges actually happening!) looks a lot like the folks who get into the weeds (because they are creepy 30-year-olds who want to play legalistic word games to be able to groom a 13-year-old into sex). I know that social rule and am intentionally breaking it to answer the question hoping you’ll take me in good faith; some non-pedophiles do not know that rule. Or just choose to flout the convention and taboo: see bullet point 2. And banned discussion topics tend not to fly well with “information wants to be free” people, and there is always the spite of “you said I could not, watch me do it anyways”.

And sometimes people wanking on technicalities get buried in the weeds so bad they forget to just actually say “pedophilia is bad; adults should not have sex with minors”.