Peter Hitchens on Peter Tatchell and the Pope's visit:
"Here comes the Pope, though he would have much more fun if he stayed in Rome for root canal dentistry.
His mysterious visit, to the country in Europe where he is most likely to be insulted, is the target of every liberal elitist in Britain.
A whole assembly of crackpot sexual revolutionaries and wild ultra-Leftists will be ranged against him.
Such people normally do not have much popular support. Against the previous Pope, their campaign would have been insignificant squeaking, barely heard above
the applause.
But thanks to the abuse of children by some priests, and the Roman Church’s
feeble efforts to punish them, all that has changed. It is now respectable again to be anti-Catholic.
Well, that’s reasonable. Paedophilia is disgusting, and particularly so among men supposedly dedicated to goodness.
But the Vatican doesn’t actually tell its priests to abuse children. The vast majority of them do not so do. And it has tried to stamp out the problem and to offer genuine apologies to the victims.
I (as a non-Roman Catholic) have examined some of the main charges levelled against Benedict XVI by his attackers, and found that several of them are simply untrue, whereas others have been crudely distorted.
I have also examined the record of one of the main critics of the Papal visit. This is Peter Tatchell, prominent in the ‘Protest the Pope’ campaign.
Set for a battle: The Roman Church's feeble efforts to punish priests who have abused children have left many with criticisms of the Pope
Set for a battle: The Roman Church's feeble efforts to punish priests who have abused children have left many with criticisms of the Pope
I admire Mr Tatchell’s physical and moral courage, notably when he was badly beaten by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards for attempting a citizen’s arrest of that monster. The effects of that beating still trouble him.
But this does not cancel out what I believe is the hypocrisy of his attempt – and that of the Left in general – to wage war on the Pope by employing the charge of condoning or failing to act against paedophilia (it is No 5 in the charge-sheet set out by ‘Protest the Pope’).
For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a startling letter to the Guardian newspaper.
In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored. When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech.
He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’
Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.
He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.
He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.
And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships 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 nine 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.’
Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed.
What he said in 1997 remains deeply shocking to almost all of us. But shock fades into numb acceptance, as it has over and over again. Much of what is normal now would have been deeply shocking to British people 50 years ago. We got used to it. How will we know where to stop? Or will we just carry on for ever?
As the condom-wavers and value-free sex-educators advance into our primary schools, and the pornography seeps like slurry from millions of teenage bedroom computers, it seems clear to me that shock, by itself, is no defence against this endless, sordid dismantling of moral barriers till there is nothing left at all.
Yet when one of the few men on the planet who argues, with force, consistency and reason, for an absolute standard of goodness comes to this country, he is reviled by fashionable opinion."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1311193/PETER-HITCHENS-Question-Who-said-Not-sex-involving-children-unwanted-abusive-Answer-The-Popes-biggest-British-critic.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0zJWwvBec
