By Selwyn Duke
Contradiction is no stranger to the mainstream media, and it is on full display in their treatment of the Catholic-priest sexual abuse story. Normally, the media take pains to point out that transgressors should not be used to typify the group with which they’re associated. For instance, when terrorism is covered, we’re told that the jihadists of the world constitute just a small group of “extremists” and do not represent Islam. That is, when the media can’t manage to identify such people only as “youths” and must actually address the issue in the first place. Yet, with the Church matter, they have no problem blaming the Church as a whole, tarnishing the reputations of the institution, Catholics in general and all priests through gratuitous, slanted coverage.
But there is one group in this story that not only isn’t painted
with a broad brush, it’s whited out: homosexuals. Claim that the abuse was homosexual in
nature and you’ll hear accusations of intolerance, bigotry and
backwardness. “Don’t be ignorant,” say
the apologists, “Haven’t you heard about psychology and the ‘determination’
that homosexuality and pedophilia are completely different things?” Well, I will ask if they’ve heard about word
definitions.
If these critics are so enamored of specificity and
categorical rectitude, they should know that the abuse in question is not pedophilia. This is because pedophilia refers to sexual
relations with pre-pubescent children, and virtually all the victims in the
Church scandal were adolescents. Thus, it is correctly classified as
ephebophilia, attraction to older adolescents; or hebephilia, attraction to
pubescent children. If you’re going to
embrace psycho-babble, babble correctly.
This is no minor point.
It is the height of silliness to scream about incorrect labeling and
feign intellectualism and then yourself apply a word wholly inappropriate to
the transgression. Of course, though,
such contradiction is understandable.
Those guilty often don’t know the facts about the abuse and/or don’t know
esoteric labels such as hebephilia and ephebophilia (which, of course, belies
any claim of intellectualism). Yet there
can be another motivation: If you aim to demonize a target, nothing quite packs
the rhetorical punch of “pedophilia.” And
people thus driven cannot plead ignorance — they are liars.
As for me, I’m a simple sort, a man with little use for
newly-minted psychological terminology.
And I’ll provide my perspective: Regardless of a boy’s stage of
development, he is undeniably male — the same sex as the priest abusers. And most of the abusers targeted only members
of the same sex. Now, what do you call
same-sex attraction?
For those scratching their heads, I’ll expand on the
point. When late homosexual congressman
Gerry Studds had an
affair with an adolescent male page, did anyone say it wasn’t a homosexual
relationship? If it wasn’t, then his
good constituents in Massachusetts must have overlooked his “pedophilia,” as
they re-elected him six more times before his retirement.
Of course, some may point out that the kid Studds got Spartan
with was 17, and the age of consent in Washington, D.C. is 16. OK, this is a good starting point. It then follows that the priests who had
affairs with boys of legal age are homosexual.
But this leaves us with an interesting question: What if a man has
relations with a boy one day less than legal age? What about two days less? A week?
A month? At what point does the
man cease being a homosexual and suddenly become an “ephebophile” who, for some
strange reason and in a thoroughly non-homosexual way, only targets male
adolescents?
Now let’s take it further.
When singer Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13-year-old girl and director
Roman Polanski forced himself on one, did anybody say the fellows weren’t
heterosexual? When men are arrested for
statutory rape after having relations with 15, 16 and 17-year-old girls, do we
say they are not? When men marry teenage
girls — common for most of history and in many parts of the world today — do we
view it as examples of that contradiction in terms, non-heterosexual marriage? And in all the reportage of the cases involving
female teachers who have affairs with 13 and 14-year old boys, did anyone stamp
his foot and proclaim, “Do not call these women heterosexual, you soft-science
Luddite! Psychologists tell us
otherwise!”? Not only did no one do so,
we didn’t even discuss the matter. This
is because the obvious doesn’t warrant discussion — that is, until there is a
strong reason for denying the obvious.
Getting back to the defense of Islam I mentioned earlier,
truth be known, it makes more sense than saying that men who target teen boys
aren’t homosexual. After all, some might
mention that Islam, like all religions, must espouse certain dogma; thus, if terrorism were contrary to Islamic
dogma, terrorists could not truly be Muslim, despite their claims of piety. Yet one could even more credibly use this
argument to claim that the Church transgressors are not really priests. What I mean is, unlike Islam, Catholicism has
a teaching body, the Pope and Magisterium, that defines Catholic doctrine; therefore,
unlike in Islam, it isn’t a matter of which cleric you choose to believe. And, to say the least, the transgressing
priests did great violence to Catholic teaching, thereby rendering themselves something
less than priests in spirit. Yet facts
are stubborn things, and the fact is that the abusers were ordained as priests in
the Catholic Church, and no one seems to have trouble accepting that
reality. We do not hear anyone say,
“No! They aren’t priests! The definition of a priest involves being
celibate, and these men were anything but.”
Well, there is another fact here: They not only are/were priests, they
also happen to be (or have been, in the cases of the deceased and defrocked)
homosexual priests. And to say otherwise
is to be guilty of selective specificity.
Just as critics recoil at the supposed intellectual sloppiness of
labeling the abusers homosexuals but will then most sloppily call them pedophiles,
they will identify them as “Catholic” and as “priests” but not as
homosexual. Why is this? Is it just a coincidence that every example
here of selective specificity, sloppiness and hypocrisy serves to either
protect the reputation of homosexuals or damage that of the Church?
There reason is not hard to discern. While the abuse in question is a problem of
homosexuality, homosexuality is never a problem for our abusive media. The truth is that if the Church were actually
a homosexual organization, with positions aligned with leftism, there could
have been twice the abuse and there would have been .2 percent the
coverage. As with the cases of the Duke
University academic who adopted two black boys and habitually molested them
and Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old boy who was tortured and
murdered by two homosexuals in Arkansas, it would be buried faster than a
mafia snitch in New Jersey.
This is why I have said
before that the coverage of the Church scandal has nothing to do with
concern about youth — it has nothing to do with Truth. It is simply a hammer with which the media
can attack religion, something they hate more than the worst child molester.
Pushing back the frontiers of oxymoronic moronity, the left
has added to “non-heterosexual marriage” and introduced the concept of
non-homosexual same-sex relations. It’s
the kind of lunacy you disgorge when trying to cloak a truth hiding in plain
sight.
Unfortunately, something that is not an
oxymoron, but a redundancy, is “deceitful mainstream media.” And just imagine, these are the same people
who accuse the Church of and condemn her for “covering up” a damning reality.
© 2010 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
This article first appeared at American Thinker
