"Where does our behavior come from? To take a scientific approach we must concede that everything has causes."

To AKA Smith. Working in the IT field, and knowing a little bit about AI, I can safely safe that there is no scientific explanation for free will, creativity, or conscious decision making. No scientific study has ever adequately answered or even theorized as to why humans possess those abilities, but it has come to the attention of biologists that all life forms possess those abilities, just at much more rudimentary levels. The best explanations and theories regarding free will, creativity, and conscious decision making have come professors and students of chaos theory, but their explanations and theories confuse the issues even more. The short answer is, we don't know what causes free will, creativity, and conscious decision making, and rational minds never will.

However, as a parent, poker player, chess player, and middle management employee, I have become quite good at predicting how people will behave, but I am never right all of the time, and nobody ever will be. Genetic does explain a lot, but analysis of DNA will never be a particularly effective tool to predict how people are going to behavior. At best DNA analysis can serve as a tool to predict illnesses, but as everyone who is afflicted with a genetic disease knows, genetics can be fought. And not all diseases are caused by genetics. Pedophilia for example, I believe, is caused by environment and early childhood development, and there is evidence to support that theory (you and I are in agreement on that one).

One aspect of justice that you are omitting, is that convictions are not laid down to assign fault (fault is reserved for civil courts). Convictions are given to state that the evidence shows that a crime was actually committed, and that the jury knows, without a shadow of doubt, who committed the crime. It is usually societies responsibility to have predetermined the fair range of punishment that a convicted individual be given, and it's the judge's responsibility to give a specific punishment to the accused that has been convicted before him (or her if the case may be). I am in agreement with you that perhaps the convicted individual's enablers (or abusers and trainers as you put it) should also be put on trial, if possible. But something still has to be done about the man or woman that was convicted. If we do nothing, then we have no justice, and if we show unfair leniency, then justice is unfair. It is literally a case by case basis, and the system will never be perfect, but no system ever will be. The best we can do is study matters further, and continue to increase our understanding to make better more educated decisions.

As is with everything that lives, society is in a state of growth, and growth is always well served by trial and error in conjunction with education and learning.

"Our societal trend seems to be if we want something "fixed now", we will legislate a law for it and now people will stop doing the particular action, because of course it is against the law."

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe that the Matthew Shepard Act creates any new laws. It just establishes that acts of violence motivated by hatred towards someone’s gender, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability can be prosecuted as a hate crime. It also indirectly creates the frame work that civil right’s lawyers can use to bring civil suits against hate groups that are responsible for encouraging, financing, motivating, or supporting criminals that committed acts of violence that are motivated by their hatred toward people’s gender, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disabilities.

In the past decades civil right's lawyers have done a very effective job of going after hate group's money, by suing them for all of their assets, and those civil right's lawyer were in no small part aided by the legislation that established acts of violence motivated by hatred of a race or a religion as hate crimes. Hence why "Focus on the Family," which is a homophobic hate group responsible for encouraging a lot of violence that has been committed against gays, is scared sh*tless of the Matthew Shepard Act.

"I love watching America die."

I take it you are not an American?

Yes, cultural and social cannibalism does appear to be an American trait.

For many "E Pluribus Unum" has little meaning, but for most of us it is still our motto. Its the reason why I decided to serve.