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