This week’s GetReligion podcast, How did investigating McCarrick turn into a right-wing thing?, brought back unpleasant memories.
The New York Times broke the story of the McCarrick scandal, a scandal about a charismatic, but retired, U.S. Cardinal’s sexual predations (should any reader have been living in a cave, or should this blog turn up in an internet WayBack Machine some century hence).
The story was “newsworthy” until Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò steered it in a direction that made Pope Francis look bad. Now the newsworthy story in some quarters is the Vast Viganò Right-Wing Conspiracy against the current Pope, who is styled a “reformer” with all that connotes.
I’ve been here before — the place where truth or falsity is irrelevant because … Tribe.
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Decades ago, a City Councilman in my hometown introduced an amendment to add sexual orientation as a protected class in our Human Relations Ordinance (a pretty weak and ineffectual thing, really, but the symbolism was big). The Councilman was acting, it was reported, in the wake of his son “coming out.”
There was a fierce debate over the amendment. My City Council patiently pretended to listen to concerns — I’ll give them that; no odious limits on public comments — before they passed it. The press, of course, supported it.
A few years later, that “out” son was accused of spiriting two adolescent boys away from the home for troubled boys where he was employed as a counselor, and sodomizing them in his parents’ Rec Room. He seemed to make a habit of it, taking them one at a time.
The accusers were savaged in the press and public opinion despite, whether their stories were true or false, the scandal that this self-acknowledged homosexual, one Greg Ledbetter, was employed as a fox to guard the henhouse of the Cary Home for troubled boys.
If you want to know where press bias is shown, think “story selection,” not “spin.” The “news” was that some adolescent pawns had been incited to accuse the poster boy of a progressive ordinance, not that a young man who lusted after young men had been given sexual access to a whole house full of already-troubled young men.
Go figure. No, on second thought, don’t bother.
When the lads recanted their stories, the press did a victory dance and reminded everyone how cruel we right-wing conspirators had been to the Ledbetter Family and young Greg, even mysteriously finding some way to force these lads into telling a cock-and-bull story.
Greg Ledbetter is now in prison in Wisconsin for buggering ten adolescent boys there. In the Wisconsin investigation, videos were found of his sodomizing the two accusers who had recanted their (true) charges. And they found scrapbooks on how, with the help of his enablers, he avoided a reckoning here.
I’ve written here, here and here about the Greg Ledbetter affair should you be interested. My role was one of the right-wing conspirators. I never opined that the charges against Ledbetter were true, but I found them basically plausible, and Ledbetter’s employment in a job where he could gain sexual access to troubled boys absolutely appalling. As I once put it:
[O]n the theory that “we’re just like you except that we prefer the same sex,” I consult my own feelings (especially when I was a younger adult) about sexually mature adolescent girls. Hmmm. It seems to me that it would be highly imprudent to put a young straight guy in a position where he could finagle sexual access to nubile female charges.
Nobody in any position of authority ever publicly admitted that the homosexual orientation of a young male applicant, for a job involving unsupervised access to trouble adolescent males, was a relevant factor, perhaps even disqualifying. In fact, in every local jurisdiction in my county, we still have ordinances categorically forbidding discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation, with no qualification that it be “invidious” discrimination, nor any nod toward sexual orientation being relevant to at least a few jobs.
I can only hope that we have scofflaws in positions of hiring authority for those jobs, and that our Human Relations Commissions are not too packed with ideologues to wink at non-invidious discrimination.
“Discrimination” in the sense of “treating differently” should be the beginning of a conversation or analysis, not a “conversation-stopper.” But it’s not so. At the mention (“but that would be discriminaaaaaaation!”) eyes glaze over and visages turn fierce.
We’ll never begin to reduce sexual predation of adolescents until we wise up that allowing adults, especially young ones, unsupervised access to adolescents of the sex they prefer is not an enlightened progressive policy but a vice indistinguishable in practical effect from turning a Russian Roulette gun on the kids — but with two or three chambers loaded, not just one.
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The semi-discerning have been noting that the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Church these days involves ephebophilia, not pedophilia. I’ve fallen into that myself, and I might yet again.
But I think that “ephebophilia” is not quite right, either. I don’t think the problem is any version of chronophilia, “sexual attraction limited to individuals of particular age ranges” (emphasis added).
The problem of priests molesting adolescent males is an epiphenomenon of homosexual priests. Period. Full stop.
Consider that carefully. 100% of the abusers are male, and 81% of their victims are underage males. What kind of men systematically abuse boys and male teens?
Our liberal media does not want to answer that question, for obvious reasons. They have their agenda, and the flourishing of the Catholic Church is not on it.
Some day, the refusal of homophiles (i.e., all major cultural institutions) to admit the nexus between unchaste homosexual priests and predation on adolescent boys will be seen as a terrible ideological sin (pas d’ennemi au gauche) that enabled continued predation.
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