The silver lining in the assault on the Catholic Church over sex abuse

Patrick H. writes:

What a catastrophe all of this has been for the homosexualist cause! Hitchens and his ilk have succeeded in cementing in the public mind precisely the connection between pedophilia and homosexuality that homosexual activists like Andrew Sullivan have worked so hard to erase. Consider: every case that Hitchens has battened on has involved priests molesting boys. No matter how much the NYT refuses to mention the sex of the victims, each of the cases has involved men preying on boys, with most of the boys post-pubescent. By insisting that all of these cases are instances of pedophilia, the anti-Catholics have only established, Pavlov-style, the connection of “pedophilia” with sexual attraction to boys. Given the public’s lack of knowledge of classical languages, I have no doubt that before long, if not already, the public will think of pedophilia as meaning something like “boy-lust”, with pedo- meaning boy and -philia meaning perverted desire. This connection, established where it counts—emotionally—has been produced by nobody else than the homosexualists and the Hitch-ites. And with every accusation of priestly pedophilia made in every case where some priest has abused boys, the connection is strengthened.

Maggie Gallagher has argued that the hysterical abuse directed at Carrie Prejean for her saying (gasp!) that marriage is between a man and a woman, has been a disaster for the pro gay marriage side. She has a point: the gay marriage cause has suffered (I believe) 31 consecutive defeats at the polls. It was not too long ago that gay marriage was the cause du jour, sweeping all before it. No more. And now, with the assault on Benedict, the enemies of the Church have also committed collective intellectual and moral seppuku. The ironic outcome of their malicious and irrational abuse of Benedict is the opposite of what they intend: liberal Catholicism is dead in the Church (the abuse cases occurred in its heyday, as did the widespread admission of homosexuals into seminaries); the media will be subject to intense scrutiny by Catholics as the enemies they are; and organizations around the world who deal with boys will look at what is happening to the Church and conclude that it has been the homosexuals in her priesthood that have caused her so much damage … and so they will take steps to minimize the presence of homosexuals in their own ranks. The homosexualists have damaged, perhaps fatally, their own cause, and now the God-haters like Hitchens have come along to finish the job. Maybe the homosexualists should tell Hitchens to shut up.

Moral of the story: if you want to hurt somebody you hate, you better make sure that once you’re committed to your attack, you finish the job. Because if you don’t, he’s on to you now. He knows you’re no friend. Counter-measures will be taken. The Church has not been finished. The slime-flingers messed up. They tossed their filth at the Church, but they didn’t finish the job. Counter-measures will ensue. Which brings me to: Britain has very harsh libel laws. It would be fitting if a Catholic brought suit against Hitchens and Dawkins for their undoubtedly libelous assaults on Benedict. That suit would stand a chance of winning. It would also stand a chance of warming this Catholic’s heart, which has hardened indeed against the enemies of his Church.

So there it is: homosexuals permanently tarred with the pedophilia brush; liberal Catholicism utterly dead; the media fully outed from their closet as committed enemies of the good; and the homosexualist cause set back for at least a generation, perhaps destroyed. Not quite the way the news is reporting things, is it?

- end of initial entry -

The Phantom Blogger writes:

There was actually an article on this exact topic at First Things by Mary Eberstadt, called “How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool.” Her main point was that the media, in order to attack the Catholic Church, had to develop a stronger disgust at pedophilia, because the view of the unacceptability of these acts had been subsiding with the rise and acceptance of homosexuality. She shows how pro-pedophilia articles had been published in the New Republic and The Nation.

Mark P. writes:

Fascinating take on the whole pedophilia business. What the media and the Hitchenites have failed to understand is that pedophilia means “friend of children” and that by definition pedophilia is sex with a pre-pubescent child. The “pedophile priest” cases are clearly not incidences of pedophilia but are, instead, incidences of underage gay sex. The solution, of course, is to purge homosexuality out of the priesthood.

LA replies:

Back in 2002 VFR dealt at length with the “pedophile priests” scandal, pointing out that the great majority of the “pedophile” priests had had sexual contacts with teenage boys or young men, not with children. The real issue was not pedophilia, but … homosexuality. The media could not attack homosexuality, since it believes in homosexuality, and it could not get any mileage out of attacking the church for homosexuality, for the same reason; so it falsely cast the scandal as being about pedophilia.

Here’s a December 2002 entry about the Vatican moving to screen out men with homosexual tendencies from entering the priesthood. In that entry is a comment by Matt that is worth reading:

The Church does teach that homosexual desire is objectively disordered (as is any desire to sin). See e.g.

http://sedcontra.blogspot.com/
http://www.beyondgay.com/

There has been far more said about celibacy than can possibly be even alluded to in a comment on a blog. But Unadorned does bring up an important point when he asks:

“Doesn’t celibacy impose unbearable obligations on all but the nearly superhumanly strong?”

A celibate priesthood, which we have had for millennia, is many things. One of the things that it is, is a concrete repudiation of the notion that sexual activity is a *need* and that one has to be superhumanly strong to resist it. Another aspect is that you aren’t likely to argue that resisting temptation is just too difficult with a chaste, celibate priest. Celibacy represents a moral high ground and a repudiation of the sexual revolution. That is part of why moderns hate it so much (see e.g. Sullivan, Andrew). Even if it is arguable that under some social circumstances a celibate priesthood would be OK, in the context of morally confronting the sexual revolution it is absolutely critical.

Now in light of recent events this may seem almost laughable; but the reality of the current Catholic clerical scandal is that the rates of abuse are no more than among the general population, and—not to minimize the sin of the abuser and the horror of the abused—the truly shameful thing about the scandal is the derelection of duty, coverup, and blame-shifting on the part of the American heirarchy.

All of that said, there are in fact some married Roman Catholic priests: specifically Anglican clergy who converted when already married, I believe.

Posted by: Matt on December 6, 2002 9:04 PM

Robert B. from Minnesota writes (4-13):

This is actually good news—that Dawkins was molested. It explains his hatred for everything good and decent in the Western World. [LA replies: I don’t think that the incident in his boyhood that Dawkins tells about was serious enough to be called molestation. It sounds as though it was more like an overly affectionate touch or something of that nature.] In fact, given the propensity of untreated abuse victims to become pedophiles themselves, one really has to wonder about Dawkins:

Dawkins says: “I do not believe that I, or they, suffered lasting, or even temporary damage from this disagreeable physical abuse of power.”

Psychiatrists would disagree with him, in particular, he fits the “Minimizing”:

Emotional Effects

Includes feelings of: confusion, powerlessness, helplessness, pain, betrayal, sadness, grief, loss, feeling dirty, shame, vulnerable, unsafe, scared, terrified, horrified, depressed, angry, numb from feelings and body, suspicious, untrusting, tortured, sensitive, emotional, hurt, panic, anxiety, and feeling miserable.

Beliefs About Self

Beliefs about one’s self include: “I am bad, no one loves me, no one could love me, I am unlovable, I am dirty, it’s my fault, I’m stupid, I should have done something, I should have told someone, I hate myself, I must be bad, I must have wanted it, I must have done something, I’m being punished, I deserve to die, I don’t want to be me, why do these things happen to me, I must have deserved it”

Minimizing Beliefs

Survivors are confronted with overwhelming pain. In order to cope with extreme and intense emotions, the details of what happened, and who hurt them, they may try to convince themselves “it wasn’t so bad, it didn’t really hurt them, others have been hurt much more” etc. This is a form of self-protection. It did hurt, it still hurts but it may be too hard or scary right now to face it all.

As a form of self-protection, minimizing may help slow the process down which may be what the survivor needs from time to time. As a constant way of coping however, minimization leads to self-blame and self-hatred which is not helpful and hurts a great deal.

Jim B. writes:

One needs look no further for this than the person of the unhinged steroid abuser Andrew Sullivan, who has in the past openly floated the idea that “man/boy love” should be legalized, only to drop it down the memory hole when it served as a convenient cudgel against the Church he both loves and hates.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 15, 2010 01:11 PM | Send