The Elephant in the Bath-House
<p>Mary Eberstadt&#8217;s <cite>Weekly Standard</cite> article <a href="http://24.104.35.12/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/344fsdzu.asp"><br />
The Elephant in the Sacristy</a> shines a strong light on facts that<br />
will discomfit many of the politically correct.  I don&#8217;t completely<br />
agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn <a href="http://www.amywelborn.blogspot.com/2002_06_01_amywelborn_archive.html#77501086">argues</a>, Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the<br />
doctrine of celibacy in creating an ingrown, perfervid, and corrupt sexual<br />
culture among priests, and too easy on the culture of secrecy and denial<br />
within which priestly abuse flourished.</p>
<p>I would go further than Ms. Eberstadt or Ms. Welborn; I think this<br />
scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex,<br />
sin, guilt, and authority.  This is not an accidental corruption of<br />
the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of<br />
Communism.  Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences<br />
can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by<br />
those ideas and exploiters of them.  There is a causal chain that<br />
connects loathsome creatures like the &#8220;Reverend&#8221; Paul Shanley directly<br />
back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a<br />
chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and<br />
Wilhelm Reich.  I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to<br />
authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses<br />
like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.</p>
<p>One need not, however, attack the essentials of Catholic doctrine<br />
to agree with Ms. Eberstadt&#8217;s main point: that the dominant media<br />
culture seems bent on obscuring a central fact about the pattern of<br />
crimes &#8212; which is that they are predominently homosexual abuse by<br />
priests with a history of homosexual activity. Cases of priestly abuse<br />
of females of any age are rare (though at least one horrifying tale of<br />
multiple priests cooperating in the abuse of a teenage girl has<br />
surfaced from California).  The overwhelming majority of the cases<br />
involve either pederasty (homosexual acts with post-pubescent boys and<br />
young men) or homosexual pedophilia with pre-pubescent boys as young<br />
as six years old. Yet you would be hard-put to deduce this from most<br />
of the vague accounts in the U.S. media, which traffic in terms that<br />
seem designed to obscure the gender and age of the victims and the<br />
homosexual orientation of almost all the abusers.  Why is that?</p>
<p>Apparently, because one of the rules of the U.S.&#8217;s dominant media<br />
culture is that Homosexuals Are Not To Be Stigmatized (I think it&#8217;s<br />
carved in stone right next to &#8220;Environmentalists are Saints&#8221; and &#8220;Gun<br />
Owners are Redneck Nut-Jobs&#8221;).  Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan<br />
famously noted this rule in connection with the <a href="http://www.tnr.com/040201/trb040201.html">Jesse Dirkhising<br />
murder</a>.  We are not supposed to think of either Jesse&#8217;s murderers<br />
or abusive priests as homosexuals; that might reflect badly on a<br />
journalistically-protected class by associating it with criminal<br />
behavior.</p>
<p>But more than that; the truth the dominant media culture really<br />
doesn&#8217;t want to go near is that pederasty has never been a marked or<br />
unusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright<br />
pedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community.</p>
<p>The public spin of gay activist groups like Queer Nation is that<br />
most male homosexual behavior is <em>androphilia</em>, adult-to-adult<br />
sex between people of comparable ages.  And indeed, gay historians <a href="http://gayhistory.com/rev2/words/pederasty.htm">agree</a> with<br />
anthropologists that in the modern West, androphilia is more common<br />
relative to pederasty and homosexual pedophilia than has been<br />
historically normal.  But another way of putting this is that in most<br />
other cultures and times, pederasty and pedophilia have been more<br />
common forms of homosexuality than androphilia.</p>
<p>Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern<br />
homosexuals.  The `twink&#8217; or compliant teenage boy (usually blond,<br />
usually muscled, depicted in the first dewy flush of postpubescence)<br />
is the standard fantasy object of gay porn. By contrast, I learned<br />
from <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#109">recent<br />
research</a> that the archetypal fantasy object of straight porn is a<br />
fully-developed (indeed, usually over-developed) woman in her early<br />
twenties.  And a couple of different lines of evidence (including<br />
surveys conducted within the gay population by gays) lead to the<br />
conclusion that older homosexuals actually pursue boys quite a bit<br />
more frequently than either older lesbians or older heterosexual men<br />
pursue girls.</p>
<p>Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort<br />
that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more<br />
common. And in absolute terms it is &#8212; but only because there are<br />
twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay<br />
men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male<br />
homosexuality range between 1% and 4%).  Per capita among gays,<br />
pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of<br />
between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe &#8212;<br />
and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating<br />
pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events<br />
everywhere.</p>
<p>If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is<br />
the elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia<br />
connection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No<br />
amount of denying it&#8217;s there is going to make the beast go away.</p>
<p>But homosexual activists don&#8217;t want straights to see the elephant,<br />
and no wonder.  One of the most persistent themes to show up in<br />
hostility towards homosexuals is the fear that they will recruit<br />
impressionable boys who might otherwise have grown up straight.  Thus<br />
their insistance for straight consumption that homosexuality is an<br />
inborn orientation, not a choice.  Thus also their insistance that the<br />
gay life is all about androphilia, none of that pederasty or<br />
pedophilia stuff going on here.  And thus, they&#8217;d rather not have<br />
anyone thinking about the fact that most priestly abuse is in fact<br />
classically pederastic and pedophilic behavior by men who behave as<br />
homosexuals and identify themselves as gay.</p>
<p>That there is a pattern in the national media of political<br />
correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim&#8217; groups isn&#8217;t<br />
news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups.  But<br />
get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the <cite>New York<br />
Times</cite> recently said &#8220;literally three-quarters of the people<br />
deciding what&#8217;s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals&#8221;.<br />
There you have it in plain English; gays run the &#8220;newspaper of<br />
record&#8221;.  Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group &#8212; not<br />
merely admitting but outright <em>asserting</em>, as a matter of<br />
pride, that the <cite>Times</cite> engages in gay-friendly spin<br />
control.  And it has already been well established by statistical<br />
content studies that the national media tend to follow where they&#8217;re<br />
led by the <cite>Times</cite> and a handful of other prestige<br />
newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.</p>
<p>The expected next step in this sequence would be for me to start<br />
screaming about the evil of it all and demand that Something Be Done.<br />
If I were a conservative, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d do.  But in fact it&#8217;s not<br />
self-evident that this particular disinformation campaign is worth<br />
anybody&#8217;s time to be concerned about, except as yet another example of<br />
wearily predictable bias in the dominant media culture.  Whether it is<br />
or not depends upon one&#8217;s value judgment about consensual pederasty<br />
and pedophilia.</p>
<p>NAMBLA and its sympathizers in the rest of the gay community think<br />
they&#8217;re engaged in a worthy campaign for sexual liberation.  If they<br />
are right, then the anti-antigay spin on the priestly-abuse scandal is<br />
arguably analogous to what pro-civil-rights sympathizers in the early<br />
1960s might have done if there had been a long string of incidents of<br />
incidents of black men seducing white women, both parties violating<br />
the miscegenation laws still on the books in many states at that<br />
time.</p>
<p>The pro-spin argument would have run like this: interracial sex is<br />
taboo for no good reason, so soft-pedaling the race of the people involved<br />
as much as possible is a justifiable form of <em>suppressio veri</em> &#8212;<br />
not outright lying but being economical with the truth.  Our readers will<br />
be able to deduce the whole truth if they put in even a little effort, but<br />
be needn&#8217;t pave the road for them.  By doing this, we will avoid inflaming<br />
racial bigotry and advance the worthy cause of civil rights.</p>
<p>For this analogy to hold good, we need two preconditions.  First,<br />
we must believe that almost all the pederasty/pedophilia between<br />
priests and boys has been voluntary. Second, we must believe that<br />
consensual pederasty and pedophilia are not, in fact, harmful to the<br />
boys involved.  Intellectual honesty (and, I&#8217;ll admit, a low delight<br />
on my part in watching prudes and cultural conservatives turn purple<br />
with indignation) demands that we not dismiss this case without<br />
looking at the evidence.</p>
<p>The modern West condemns pederasty and pedophilia. Our cultural<br />
ancestors did not always do so; among the Athenian Greeks consensual<br />
pederastic relationships were praised and thought to be a good deal<br />
for both parties.  Pederasty is socially normal in Afghanistan and<br />
other parts of the Islamic world; pederasty and pedophilia are also<br />
un-tabooed in parts of Southeast Asia and in Japan.  Where pederasty<br />
and pedophilia are not taboo, the boys who participate in it<br />
frequently grow up to form normal heterosexual relationships and marry.<br />
In fact, it&#8217;s the modern West&#8217;s hard separation between straights<br />
who <em>never</em> have sex with other males and gays who<br />
<em>never</em> have sex with females that is anthropologically<br />
exceptional.</p>
<p>Of course, the fact that pederasty and pedophilia have been an<br />
approved practice in other cultures does not automatically mean we<br />
should give them a nod.  Cannibalism, slavery and infanticide have<br />
been approved practices too.  But the anthropological evidence doesn&#8217;t<br />
suggest that boys who have voluntary sex with men automatically turn<br />
into traumatized basket cases; indeed some present-day cultures agree<br />
with the ancient Greeks that such liaisons are good for the maturation<br />
of boys.  There are real secondary risks, starting with the fact that<br />
anal sex is a much more effective vector of venereal diseases such as<br />
AIDS than is vaginal sex &#8212; but given a cultural context that doesn&#8217;t<br />
stigmatize the behavior, clear evidence that consensual pederasty and<br />
pedophilia are intrinsically damaging is remarkably hard to find.</p>
<p>Accordingly, NAMBLA may well be right on one level when they argue<br />
that what matters is not so much which tab A gets put into which slot<br />
B, but whether the behavior was coerced or consensual.  According to<br />
this argument, the elephant in the bath-house can be lived with &#8212;<br />
might even be a friendly beast &#8212; if it&#8217;s docile-tempered and won&#8217;t<br />
give the tusk to unconsenting parties.</p>
<p>Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who<br />
wind up determining what&#8217;s on the front page of the <cite>New York<br />
Times</cite> and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know<br />
these facts.  How surprising would it be if they interpreted most<br />
victims&#8217; charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false<br />
consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing<br />
culture?  By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the<br />
accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and<br />
political interests while believing &#8212; perhaps quite sincerely &#8212; that<br />
they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.</p>
<p>The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is<br />
right, coercion matters a <em>lot</em>.  As Ms. Eberstadt<br />
reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become<br />
broken, dysfunctional people.  They show up in disproportionate numbers<br />
in drug and alcohol rehab.  They have a high rate of involvement in<br />
violent crime.  Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,<br />
perpetuating the damage across generations.</p>
<p>Voltaire once said &#8220;In nature there are no rewards or punishments,<br />
only consequences&#8221;.  Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in<br />
the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence.  The mores of gay bath-house<br />
culture turned out to be broken in the way that ultimately matters; a<br />
lot of people died horribly as a result of them.</p>
<p>It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA<br />
are almost equally ugly.  If a climate of `enlightened&#8217; tolerance for<br />
consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at<br />
which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay<br />
liberationists will not (and <em>should</em> not) soon be forgiven.<br />
The homosexual gatekeepers at the <cite>Times</cite> may be making<br />
themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous<br />
crimes.</p>
<p>And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal.<br />
Because a theme that keeps recurring in <a href="http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2002-06-13/feature.html/1/index.html"><br />
histories</a> of the worst abusers is that they were trained in<br />
seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with<br />
gay-liberationist subculture.  Reading accounts of students at one<br />
notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising<br />
gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not<br />
been an important enabler of priestly abuse.</p>
<p>Now it&#8217;s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly<br />
the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape.  It is very clear<br />
that pederasts and pedophiles in the priesthood have routinely used<br />
their authority over Catholic boys not merely to seduce them, but to<br />
coerce and rape them.  In a few cases the rape has been overt and<br />
physical, but in most cases it has been a subtler and arguably more<br />
damaging rape of the victim&#8217;s mind and self.</p>
<p>The single most revolting image I have carried away from the<br />
priestly-abuse scandal is victims&#8217; accounts of priests solemnly<br />
blessing them after sex. That is using the child&#8217;s religious feelings<br />
and respect for authority to make him complicit in the abuse.  If I<br />
believed in hell, I would wish for the priests who perpetrated this<br />
kind of soul-rape to fry in it for eternity.</p>
<p>And we must <em>call</em> it rape; do otherwise is to suppose that<br />
most of the thousands of known victims wanted to be sodomized.  Even<br />
if we discard the victims&#8217; and witnesses&#8217; reports, this is highly<br />
unlikely; there were simply too many victims.  Some priests had sex<br />
with <em>hundreds</em> of boys, far too many to fit into the 1-4%<br />
cohort of homosexual orientation in the population they had access to.<br />
And we are not entitled to dismiss the victims&#8217; protests in any case,<br />
not given the corollary evidence that the trauma of abuse reverberated<br />
through the victims&#8217; lives, continuing to damage them years and<br />
decades afterwards.  Comforting gay-lib delusions about false<br />
consciousness won&#8217;t wash here.</p>
<p>Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would<br />
have been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than<br />
cohabitation.  Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights<br />
proponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a<br />
particular propensity to rape white women.  The analogous question,<br />
whether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is<br />
precisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media<br />
don&#8217;t want anyone to examine &#8212; and precisely the question that the<br />
priestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s easy to sympathize with gay activists&#8217; fears that opening this<br />
question will expose them to a firestorm of prejudice from people<br />
who will prejudge the answer out of anti-gay bigotry.  But the<br />
pattern of homosexual abuse by the Catholic priesthood has been so<br />
egregious and so longstanding that we need to understand the relative<br />
weight of <em>all</em> the causes that produced it &#8212; whether those<br />
causes are specific to Catholicism or more general.</p>
<p>Are gay men biologically or psychologically prone to rape boys at a<br />
level that makes a gay man even without a known history of abuse into<br />
a bad risk around boys?  Does queer culture encourage a tendency to<br />
rape in gay men who are put in authority over boys?</p>
<p>Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts<br />
of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters?  And here we are<br />
with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics.  After the<br />
numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes<br />
revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your<br />
humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply<br />
because it&#8217;s being raised by unpleasant conservatives.</p>
<p>The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality.  To the<br />
extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are<br />
normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys<br />
may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known<br />
predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze.  One wouldn&#8217;t<br />
have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional<br />
rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best<br />
avoided for everyone&#8217;s sake.</p>
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