There is no call whatever for any sort of apology from everyone, or even from anyone, who has rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski.
Nor from Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who ran the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was passing resolutions in support of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, and when it was publishing calls to legalise and destigmatise sex between adults and children.
Nor from Peter Tatchell, who would lower the age of consent of 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused.
Nor from Stephen Fry, author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus, both of which glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church.
Nor from successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel Four, in its dramatic output a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts.
Nor from Germaine Greer, author of The Boy, a book-length celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male by both men and women.
Nor from Richard Dawkins, who in The God Delusion describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”.
Nor from Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and who has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels.
Nor from the numerous Social Services Departments that ran homes in which, at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests - and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it - such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged.
Nor from the Police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards; as with their non-enforcement of the drugs laws, one really does have to ask for whose benefit that is.
Among many, many, many others.
What’s that you say? They do not purport to be moral authorities? Really? But they are all reliably signed up to female reproductive (if not total) insentience, to XX Syndrome and the drastic measures required to counter it, to ridding the world of proles and darkies, and specifically to ridding the world of Levantine proles and darkies. So, that’s all right, then. Isn’t it?
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I'm not an expert on Peter Tatchell, but doesn't his proposed age of consent at 14 mean that consent can legally be given from 14, not that it must be given.
ReplyDeleteSo in the same way as a priest or other person can be considered to rape an adult if consent isn't given, then under his proposal they would still be considered to have raped those boys, (and I think priests are also accused of sex with under-14s.)
Of course from the point of view of the church all sin is equal, so the consent or otherwise of an over or under age homosexual partner is irrelevant. This of course is way out of step with public ideas about morals, as is the Vatican's response to the Belgian investigation.
If the public's ideas of morality come from God, as they may well do, then it's not the God the Catholics say they know about.
Priests are very, very rarely accused of sex with anyone under about 13 or 14. Far less often than the general population, in fact.
ReplyDeleteNo one knows how many of these boys were coerced. The question does not arise.But uUnder Tatchell's proposal, it would. Making conviction practically impossible. Almost no one would ever even be charged.
Well, I don't have a massive problem with people who have sex with other people of 15 years and 11 months rather than 16 years and one month. Whether it's exploitative or not depends on other things like the relative ages of the partners, their relationship, position of authority etc., rather than just the age of the partners. Some countries have higher standards for "authority positions", so no teacher-student relationships below university age, and so on. (I think this is the case in Holland, so the 12 year old age of consent means that the police don't bother younger teenagers, but adults are not free to be in relationships with 12 year olds - to me that makes more sense than saying that when two 13-year olds have sex we say the boy raped the girl).
ReplyDeleteThe argument that legalising the above makes rape conviction difficult could also apply to sex with unmarried women of full age, where it's also difficult to prove even if physical evidence of sex exists - in the case of priests though, the situation is unchanged because the victims/partners tend to come forward much later than physical evidence exists, so in any case it's one man's word against anothers.
I'm not sure what numbers you have about the accusations made against priests relative to the general population, but I think the reason why the cases involving priests capture the imagination of the public is that their employer presents itself as a morally-grounded organisation, but has not in all cases cooperated with the police, and in one case made victims sign non-disclosure agreements. Most people's employers would not do that.