Liability For Wrongdoing

Peter Tatchell is liable for wrongdoing. He would lower the age of consent to 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused, and he wrote in The Guardian (26th June 1997) that:

“The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.”

Having printed that, The Guardian is liable for wrongdoing. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage. David Cameron is liable for wrongdoing.

Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt are liable for wrongdoing. They 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.

The University of Cambridge is liable for wrongdoing. For many years, the recommended reading for its postgraduate students of Criminology included the 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, by Tom O’Carroll, chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange, whose 1981 conviction for conspiracy to corrupt public morals through the contacts section of that organisation’s magazine was attacked a year later in the journal of the National Council for Civil Liberties by O’Carroll’s barrister, Peter Thornton, who is now a Queen’s Counsel and a senior circuit judge. His Honour Judge Peter Thornton QC is liable for wrongdoing.

Stephen Fry is liable for wrongdoing. His books, The Liar and The Hippopotamus, glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church. Successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel Four are liable for wrongdoing. In its dramatic output, that channel has been and remains a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts.

Germaine Greer is liable for wrongdoing. Her book, The Boy, is a celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women. Richard Dawkins is liable for wrongdoing. In The God Delusion, he describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”. Philip Pullman is liable for wrongdoing. His famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and he has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels.

Geoffrey Robertson QC is liable for wrongdoing. He made his name defending the Schoolkids’ Edition of Oz, and his wife made hers writing explicit depictions of teenage sex, so that she, Kathy Lette, is liable for wrongdoing. All those who rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski are liable for wrongdoing. All those in any way involved in Internet pornography, the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today, are liable for wrongdoing.

All those who have taken us to, and who keep us at, war in Afghanistan are liable for wrongdoing. That war is in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, an abuse to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they were very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we have installed in their place actively colludes in it as surely as in the heroin trade.

Numerous Social Services Departments are liable for wrongdoing. They 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.

The police are liable for wrongdoing. They 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?