i don't think there's any reason comments will become uncivil.
on a site where so many stories about teenage boys are written, responses should be very careful. (though there is a distinction here: attraction to pubescent males is called ephebophilia and, judging by the popularity of these stories and how some of them have a sexual component-especially on nifty-, is quite rampant here.)
at any rate: i don't think anyone can point the mental-illness finger, and i don't think anyone should try to either.
first of all: america is notorious for over-classifying mental illness, which has an effect on the sufferer or (as it unfortunately sometimes is) the non-sufferer wrongly-diagnosed. a diagnosis as sufferer/non-sufferer in this case would not help anything. what's important is that society doesn't accept it and that those acting on these desires will be punished. by important, i don't mean i'm casting some moral judgment; i mean as far as managing this tendency goes, whether it's an illness or not will not change its legal status.
second of all: discussions about homosexuality have only shown how little people know about sexuality, including homosexuals themselves. because homosexuality gets so much more exposure than pedophilia and we still engage in sloppy discussions about it, we're not even nearly equipped to handle pedophilia. my suspicion: that age is just another coordinate of sexual orientation. (consider: the cougar phenomenon (not the tiger phenomenon XD)). nature/nurture isn't of interest to me here.
third: if it becomes diagnosed as a mental illness, there will be efforts to "fix" it. while this has obvious benefits for both the pedophile and the children in his environment, something sounds strange to me about a society that has the power to diagnose a desire as the product of illness, and then to engineer other desires into that person. scary!
that's all for me. again: i don't see anyone from this community becoming uncivil. there's no reason to.