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Speech For The Deaf
I am linus's ho writes "CNN is running a story about gloves which transelate sign language into audble speach, in a stephen hawking type mannor, only, i suppose, much different. The article can be found here"
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Amy Pretty Gorilla
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The Elephant in the Bath-House: Eric S. Raymond
Mary Eberstadt's Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don't completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues, Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an ingrown, perfervid, and corrupt sexual culture among priests, and too easy on the culture of secrecy and denial within which priestly abuse flourished.
I would go further than Ms. Eberstadt or Ms. Welborn; I think this scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex, sin, guilt, and authority. This is not an accidental corruption of the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of Communism. Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by those ideas and exploiters of them. There is a causal chain that connects loathsome creatures like the "Reverend" Paul Shanley directly back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Wilhelm Reich. I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.
One need not, however, attack the essentials of Catholic doctrine to agree with Ms. Eberstadt's main point: that the dominant media culture seems bent on obscuring a central fact about the pattern of crimes -- which is that they are predominently homosexual abuse by priests with a history of homosexual activity. Cases of priestly abuse of females of any age are rare (though at least one horrifying tale of multiple priests cooperating in the abuse of a teenage girl has surfaced from California). The overwhelming majority of the cases involve either pederasty (homosexual acts with post-pubescent boys and young men) or homosexual pedophilia with pre-pubescent boys as young as six years old. Yet you would be hard-put to deduce this from most of the vague accounts in the U.S. media, which traffic in terms that seem designed to obscure the gender and age of the victims and the homosexual orientation of almost all the abusers. Why is that?
Apparently, because one of the rules of the U.S.'s dominant media culture is that Homosexuals Are Not To Be Stigmatized (I think it's carved in stone right next to "Environmentalists are Saints" and "Gun Owners are Redneck Nut-Jobs"). Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan famously noted this rule in connection with the Jesse Dirkhising murder. We are not supposed to think of either Jesse's murderers or abusive priests as homosexuals; that might reflect badly on a journalistically-protected class by associating it with criminal behavior.
But more than that; the truth the dominant media culture really doesn't want to go near is that pederasty has never been a marked or unusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright pedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community.
The public spin of gay activist groups like Queer Nation is that most male homosexual behavior is androphilia, adult-to-adult sex between people of comparable ages. And indeed, gay historians agree with anthropologists that in the modern West, androphilia is more common relative to pederasty and homosexual pedophilia than has been historically normal. But another way of putting this is that in most other cultures and times, pederasty and pedophilia have been more common forms of homosexuality than androphilia.
Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern homosexuals. The `twink' or compliant teenage boy (usually blond, usually muscled, depicted in the first dewy flush of postpubescence) is the standard fantasy object of gay porn. By contrast, I learned from recent research that the archetypal fantasy object of straight porn is a fully-developed (indeed, usually over-developed) woman in her early twenties. And a couple of different lines of evidence (including surveys conducted within the gay population by gays) lead to the conclusion that older homosexuals actually pursue boys quite a bit more frequently than either older lesbians or older heterosexual men pursue girls.
Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more common. And in absolute terms it is -- but only because there are twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male homosexuality range between 1% and 4%). Per capita among gays, pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe -- and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events everywhere.
If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is the elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia connection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No amount of denying it's there is going to make the beast go away.
But homosexual activists don't want straights to see the elephant, and no wonder. One of the most persistent themes to show up in hostility towards homosexuals is the fear that they will recruit impressionable boys who might otherwise have grown up straight. Thus their insistance for straight consumption that homosexuality is an inborn orientation, not a choice. Thus also their insistance that the gay life is all about androphilia, none of that pederasty or pedophilia stuff going on here. And thus, they'd rather not have anyone thinking about the fact that most priestly abuse is in fact classically pederastic and pedophilic behavior by men who behave as homosexuals and identify themselves as gay.
That there is a pattern in the national media of political correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim' groups isn't news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups. But get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the New York Times recently said "literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals". There you have it in plain English; gays run the "newspaper of record". Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group -- not merely admitting but outright asserting, as a matter of pride, that the Times engages in gay-friendly spin control. And it has already been well established by statistical content studies that the national media tend to follow where they're led by the Times and a handful of other prestige newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.
The expected next step in this sequence would be for me to start screaming about the evil of it all and demand that Something Be Done. If I were a conservative, that's what I'd do. But in fact it's not self-evident that this particular disinformation campaign is worth anybody's time to be concerned about, except as yet another example of wearily predictable bias in the dominant media culture. Whether it is or not depends upon one's value judgment about consensual pederasty and pedophilia.
NAMBLA and its sympathizers in the rest of the gay community think they're engaged in a worthy campaign for sexual liberation. If they are right, then the anti-antigay spin on the priestly-abuse scandal is arguably analogous to what pro-civil-rights sympathizers in the early 1960s might have done if there had been a long string of incidents of incidents of black men seducing white women, both parties violating the miscegenation laws still on the books in many states at that time.
The pro-spin argument would have run like this: interracial sex is taboo for no good reason, so soft-pedaling the race of the people involved as much as possible is a justifiable form of suppressio veri -- not outright lying but being economical with the truth. Our readers will be able to deduce the whole truth if they put in even a little effort, but be needn't pave the road for them. By doing this, we will avoid inflaming racial bigotry and advance the worthy cause of civil rights.
For this analogy to hold good, we need two preconditions. First, we must believe that almost all the pederasty/pedophilia between priests and boys has been voluntary. Second, we must believe that consensual pederasty and pedophilia are not, in fact, harmful to the boys involved. Intellectual honesty (and, I'll admit, a low delight on my part in watching prudes and cultural conservatives turn purple with indignation) demands that we not dismiss this case without looking at the evidence.
The modern West condemns pederasty and pedophilia. Our cultural ancestors did not always do so; among the Athenian Greeks consensual pederastic relationships were praised and thought to be a good deal for both parties. Pederasty is socially normal in Afghanistan and other parts of the Islamic world; pederasty and pedophilia are also un-tabooed in parts of Southeast Asia and in Japan. Where pederasty and pedophilia are not taboo, the boys who participate in it frequently grow up to form normal heterosexual relationships and marry. In fact, it's the modern West's hard separation between straights who never have sex with other males and gays who never have sex with females that is anthropologically exceptional.
Of course, the fact that pederasty and pedophilia have been an approved practice in other cultures does not automatically mean we should give them a nod. Cannibalism, slavery and infanticide have been approved practices too. But the anthropological evidence doesn't suggest that boys who have voluntary sex with men automatically turn into traumatized basket cases; indeed some present-day cultures agree with the ancient Greeks that such liaisons are good for the maturation of boys. There are real secondary risks, starting with the fact that anal sex is a much more effective vector of venereal diseases such as AIDS than is vaginal sex -- but given a cultural context that doesn't stigmatize the behavior, clear evidence that consensual pederasty and pedophilia are intrinsically damaging is remarkably hard to find.
Accordingly, NAMBLA may well be right on one level when they argue that what matters is not so much which tab A gets put into which slot B, but whether the behavior was coerced or consensual. According to this argument, the elephant in the bath-house can be lived with -- might even be a friendly beast -- if it's docile-tempered and won't give the tusk to unconsenting parties.
Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who wind up determining what's on the front page of the New York Times and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know these facts. How surprising would it be if they interpreted most victims' charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing culture? By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and political interests while believing -- perhaps quite sincerely -- that they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.
The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is right, coercion matters a lot. As Ms. Eberstadt reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become broken, dysfunctional people. They show up in disproportionate numbers in drug and alcohol rehab. They have a high rate of involvement in violent crime. Worse, they end to become abusers themselves, perpetuating the damage across generations.
Voltaire once said "In nature there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences". Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence. The mores of gay bath-house culture turned out to be broken in the way that ultimately matters; a lot of people died horribly as a result of them.
It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA are almost equally ugly. If a climate of `enlightened' tolerance for consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay liberationists will not (and should not) soon be forgiven. The homosexual gatekeepers at the Times may be making themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous crimes.
And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal. Because a theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.
Now it's time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape. It is very clear that pederasts and pedophiles in the priesthood have routinely used their authority over Catholic boys not merely to seduce them, but to coerce and rape them. In a few cases the rape has been overt and physical, but in most cases it has been a subtler and arguably more damaging rape of the victim's mind and self.
The single most revolting image I have carried away from the priestly-abuse scandal is victims' accounts of priests solemnly blessing them after sex. That is using the child's religious feelings and respect for authority to make him complicit in the abuse. If I believed in hell, I would wish for the priests who perpetrated this kind of soul-rape to fry in it for eternity.
And we must call it rape; do otherwise is to suppose that most of the thousands of known victims wanted to be sodomized. Even if we discard the victims' and witnesses' reports, this is highly unlikely; there were simply too many victims. Some priests had sex with hundreds of boys, far too many to fit into the 1-4% cohort of homosexual orientation in the population they had access to. And we are not entitled to dismiss the victims' protests in any case, not given the corollary evidence that the trauma of abuse reverberated through the victims' lives, continuing to damage them years and decades afterwards. Comforting gay-lib delusions about false consciousness won't wash here.
Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would have been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than cohabitation. Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights proponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a particular propensity to rape white women. The analogous question, whether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is precisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media don't want anyone to examine -- and precisely the question that the priestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.
It's easy to sympathize with gay activists' fears that opening this question will expose them to a firestorm of prejudice from people who will prejudge the answer out of anti-gay bigotry. But the pattern of homosexual abuse by the Catholic priesthood has been so egregious and so longstanding that we need to understand the relative weight of all the causes that produced it -- whether those causes are specific to Catholicism or more general.
Are gay men biologically or psychologically prone to rape boys at a level that makes a gay man even without a known history of abuse into a bad risk around boys? Does queer culture encourage a tendency to rape in gay men who are put in authority over boys?
Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters? And here we are with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics. After the numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply because it's being raised by unpleasant conservatives.
The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality. To the extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze. One wouldn't have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best avoided for everyone's sake.
posted by Eric Raymond at 10:12 PM (permalink);
One may be interested to see that while i masquraded as Linus's ho, this story was posted. However, as my obviously pro-BSD self, the same thing was rejected. This is proof of conspiricy
Stop eating my sesame cake. Stop eating my sesame cake!!!