The Real Scandal

It is no wonder that there has been so lukewarm a response to the Pope’s apology for child abuse in Australia. There or in any other Western country, he should have said that he was indeed profoundly sorry that priests had had sex with teenage boys, but at the same time that they had at least broken what they knew to be the rules, and that Catholic priests are now the only category of men who run the slightest risk of prosecution for such acts.

That is the real scandal.

Over here, from Queer As Folk through Shameless (which in the last series featured incest between teenage half-brothers as a gigantic joke) to Clapham Junction, sex between men and teenage boys is glorified. We treat as a national treasure Peter Tatchell, a militant campaigner for the age of consent to be lowered to 14, which, had it been in force, would have legalised well over ninety per cent of the offences committed by Catholic priests.

And Tatchell is but a faithful representative of the movement that originated in the early 1970s the idea, which has no prior history whatever and remains unknown in great swathes of the world, that persons, rather than simply acts, are homosexual, and that a predilection for such acts constitutes an identity comparable to class, ethnicity or even sex (which is written into every cell of the body).

That was and is a movement of, by, for and about those who sexually abuse teenage boys. It began several years after our own humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. Many of its pioneering figures abused teenage boys to their dying days, and the rest still do so to this very day. Every time that you see one of those rainbow flags, or anything like that, then remember that that is what it represents.

Yet that is now the by far the richest and most powerful lobby group in several countries, including this one, where it absolutely may not be gainsaid on any issue.

That is the real scandal.