Child Pornography: An Absolute Evil... ?

Sorry for being a bit off-topic :/ I still think it's just the taking pictures that should be punishable, not possession of them.

The problem with that is that if it is legal to own and distribute, it would be a lucrative business. If it were a business, there would be a demand to produce more. Keeping it illegal, even in instances, such as say, if a "child" created porn of themself, maintains the stance that it is wrong to create it in the first place.

And as for the age of consent stuff, I think you guys really nailed it, but I just want to add something. Kids aren't legally allowed to consent to ANYTHING, sexual activities aren't a special instance here. Normally a parent would be allowed to give permission for consent purposes, but a parent giving consent to their child appearing in child porn would identify them as unfit parents.

The nudity versus sexuality is another point. It is difficult here though, because even nonsexual nudity can be used to lurid ends by pedophiles. And this just brings us back around to the idea that if it is ok to have it, it encourages production of more.

the viewers are just as culpable because they created the market for this pumpernickel.

Absolutely not. Even if there was only one pedophile in the world, I assure you that were he to molest or rape a child, he would want a video or pictures of it for himself. The "market" exists as it is because people create these things for themselves and share them with others who want to see them. But even if no one wanted to see it, they'd still be creating it.

And actually, there is even the argument that with child porn being available to people, certain pedophiles who would otherwise molest children would instead just see pictures and videos of others doing it and live vicariously through them. This is an interesting paradigm though, and parallels can be drawn to other things, such as violent media. Does watching the movie Hostel make me more likely to want to commit these heinous acts myself or does my innate desire to commit these acts get fulfilled vicariously by just watching it? I can't say for certain myself, and I'm not entirely familiar with the experiments and results, particularly how it relates to child porn. After all, I'm sure they could do studies on violent films and video games, but they'd be hard pressed to do a sociological experiment where they show pedophiles child porn and measure whether they're more or less likely to commit similar acts for real.

If you pineapple up the users, you make it harder for the vendors to sell their pumpernickel.

Is there really VENDORS though? This pumpernickel bounces across p2p and torrents, I don't think I've ever heard of a brick-and-mortar vendor of child pornography. Maybe in other parts of the world, but they also have child prostitution in other parts of the world, so I'd say that's more worthy of concern there.

I have to ask what sort of person jacks off to a child being molested

A person with a fetish for it. People have fetishes, it is an unavoidable part of being human; people will have different tastes in things, even things which are horrendous, things which hurt or kill others. But people will always have their own personal tastes no matter how terrible they may be. Simply having an affinity for something on its own isn't bad though, only if they apply their desire into actually doing something with it. For example, I might have a desire to kill my neighbor, but it's only a crime if I actually do it (or rather, if I conspire or attempt it). The point I'm trying to make here is that people have private thoughts and these private thoughts may be hideous and terrible, but as long as nothing comes of them, it's not bad.