Next Up, Then

Monsignor William Lynn has been convicted. Next up, then, Peter Tatchell, who 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 who 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.”

The Guardian printed that. Next up, then, The Guardian. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage. Next up, then, David Cameron.

Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt 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. Hewitt went on to have overall responsibility for every social worker in England, while Harman’s pro-pederast past was explored in detail by Martin Beckford in the 9th March 2009 edition of the Daily Telegraph, but that newspaper was too spineless or too compromised to put it on the front page where it belonged, so the story was allowed to die, at least for the time being. Next up, then, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt.

For many years, the recommended reading for postgraduate students of Criminology at the University of Cambridge 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. Next up, then, the University of Cambridge, and His Honour Judge Peter Thornton QC.

Stephen Fry’s books, The Liar and The Hippopotamus, glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church. Next up, then, Stephen Fry. In its dramatic output, Channel 4 has been and remains a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts. Next up, then, successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel 4.

Germaine Greer’s The Boy is a celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women. Next up, then, Germaine Greer. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”. Next up, then, Richard Dawkins.

Philip Pullman’s 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. Next up, then, Philip Pullman. Geoffrey Robertson QC made his name defending the Schoolkids’ Edition of Oz, while his wife, Katthy Lette, made hers writing explicit depictions of teenage sex. Next up, then, Geoffrey Robertson QC and Kathy Lette.

Plus all those who rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski. Plus all those in any way involved in Internet pornography, the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today. Plus all those who have taken us to, and who keep us at, war in Afghanistan, since 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.

Plus numerous Social Services Departments, which ran homes where 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.

Plus 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?