Vatican Viewpoint

Is anyone else going to be “confronted” by and at the United Nations?

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.

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, 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. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage. A seat in the House of Lords. In 1983, Michael Foot had refused to endorse Peter Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons. But in 2010, David Cameron offered Peter Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords.

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.

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. Germaine Greer’s The Boy is a celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”. 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.

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. There are those who perennially rush to defend and to laud Roman Polanski. There is Internet pornography, which is the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today.

The war in Afghanistan is a war 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.

And then there are the numerous Social Services Departments that 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. Clearly, that became the same view of girls. We now see the consequences.

Among many, many, many others.

Not least, the sadly deceased Margaret Thatcher, who spent every New Year’s Eve of her Premiership with Jimmy Savile, and who arranged knighthoods for him, for Peter Morrison (her closest political aide), for Laurens van der Post, and for Cyril Smith, but who fought Victoria Gillick through the courts, thereby establishing a de facto age of consent of 13 or younger without ever bothering to trouble Parliament to approve it.

The average age of first intercourse fell horrifically during the 1980s, although it went back up under the last Labour Government. It is now down again, under a Government drawn overwhelmingly from the social milieu that has always become sexually active earlier than any other.

What’s that you say? They do not purport to be moral authorities? Really? Oh, yes, they do. As we see at the UN today.