{"id":26,"date":"2002-06-16T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-17T03:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=26"},"modified":"2002-06-16T22:12:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-17T03:12:00","slug":"the-elephant-in-the-bath-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"The Elephant in the Bath-House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mary Eberstadt&#8217;s <cite>Weekly Standard<\/cite> article <a href=\"http:\/\/24.104.35.12\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/001\/344fsdzu.asp\"><br \/>\nThe Elephant in the Sacristy<\/a> shines a strong light on facts that<br \/>\nwill discomfit many of the politically correct.  I don&#8217;t completely<br \/>\nagree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amywelborn.blogspot.com\/2002_06_01_amywelborn_archive.html#77501086\">argues<\/a>, Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the<br \/>\ndoctrine of celibacy in creating an ingrown, perfervid, and corrupt sexual<br \/>\nculture among priests, and too easy on the culture of secrecy and denial<br \/>\nwithin which priestly abuse flourished.<\/p>\n<p>I would go further than Ms. Eberstadt or Ms. Welborn; I think this<br \/>\nscandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex,<br \/>\nsin, guilt, and authority.  This is not an accidental corruption of<br \/>\nthe church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of<br \/>\nCommunism.  Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences<br \/>\ncan be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by<br \/>\nthose ideas and exploiters of them.  There is a causal chain that<br \/>\nconnects loathsome creatures like the &#8220;Reverend&#8221; Paul Shanley directly<br \/>\nback to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a<br \/>\nchain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and<br \/>\nWilhelm Reich.  I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to<br \/>\nauthority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses<br \/>\nlike these as surely as rot breeds maggots.<\/p>\n<p>One need not, however, attack the essentials of Catholic doctrine<br \/>\nto agree with Ms. Eberstadt&#8217;s main point: that the dominant media<br \/>\nculture seems bent on obscuring a central fact about the pattern of<br \/>\ncrimes &#8212; which is that they are predominently homosexual abuse by<br \/>\npriests with a history of homosexual activity. Cases of priestly abuse<br \/>\nof females of any age are rare (though at least one horrifying tale of<br \/>\nmultiple priests cooperating in the abuse of a teenage girl has<br \/>\nsurfaced from California).  The overwhelming majority of the cases<br \/>\ninvolve either pederasty (homosexual acts with post-pubescent boys and<br \/>\nyoung men) or homosexual pedophilia with pre-pubescent boys as young<br \/>\nas six years old. Yet you would be hard-put to deduce this from most<br \/>\nof the vague accounts in the U.S. media, which traffic in terms that<br \/>\nseem designed to obscure the gender and age of the victims and the<br \/>\nhomosexual orientation of almost all the abusers.  Why is that?<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, because one of the rules of the U.S.&#8217;s dominant media<br \/>\nculture is that Homosexuals Are Not To Be Stigmatized (I think it&#8217;s<br \/>\ncarved in stone right next to &#8220;Environmentalists are Saints&#8221; and &#8220;Gun<br \/>\nOwners are Redneck Nut-Jobs&#8221;).  Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan<br \/>\nfamously noted this rule in connection with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/040201\/trb040201.html\">Jesse Dirkhising<br \/>\nmurder<\/a>.  We are not supposed to think of either Jesse&#8217;s murderers<br \/>\nor abusive priests as homosexuals; that might reflect badly on a<br \/>\njournalistically-protected class by associating it with criminal<br \/>\nbehavior.<\/p>\n<p>But more than that; the truth the dominant media culture really<br \/>\ndoesn&#8217;t want to go near is that pederasty has never been a marked or<br \/>\nunusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright<br \/>\npedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community.<\/p>\n<p>The public spin of gay activist groups like Queer Nation is that<br \/>\nmost male homosexual behavior is <em>androphilia<\/em>, adult-to-adult<br \/>\nsex between people of comparable ages.  And indeed, gay historians <a href=\"http:\/\/gayhistory.com\/rev2\/words\/pederasty.htm\">agree<\/a> with<br \/>\nanthropologists that in the modern West, androphilia is more common<br \/>\nrelative to pederasty and homosexual pedophilia than has been<br \/>\nhistorically normal.  But another way of putting this is that in most<br \/>\nother cultures and times, pederasty and pedophilia have been more<br \/>\ncommon forms of homosexuality than androphilia.<\/p>\n<p>Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern<br \/>\nhomosexuals.  The `twink&#8217; or compliant teenage boy (usually blond,<br \/>\nusually muscled, depicted in the first dewy flush of postpubescence)<br \/>\nis the standard fantasy object of gay porn. By contrast, I learned<br \/>\nfrom <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?m=200206#109\">recent<br \/>\nresearch<\/a> that the archetypal fantasy object of straight porn is a<br \/>\nfully-developed (indeed, usually over-developed) woman in her early<br \/>\ntwenties.  And a couple of different lines of evidence (including<br \/>\nsurveys conducted within the gay population by gays) lead to the<br \/>\nconclusion that older homosexuals actually pursue boys quite a bit<br \/>\nmore frequently than either older lesbians or older heterosexual men<br \/>\npursue girls.<\/p>\n<p>Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort<br \/>\nthat older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more<br \/>\ncommon. And in absolute terms it is &#8212; but only because there are<br \/>\ntwenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay<br \/>\nmen in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male<br \/>\nhomosexuality range between 1% and 4%).  Per capita among gays,<br \/>\npederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of<br \/>\nbetween three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe &#8212;<br \/>\nand the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating<br \/>\npederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events<br \/>\neverywhere.<\/p>\n<p>If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is<br \/>\nthe elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality\/pederasty\/pedophilia<br \/>\nconnection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No<br \/>\namount of denying it&#8217;s there is going to make the beast go away.<\/p>\n<p>But homosexual activists don&#8217;t want straights to see the elephant,<br \/>\nand no wonder.  One of the most persistent themes to show up in<br \/>\nhostility towards homosexuals is the fear that they will recruit<br \/>\nimpressionable boys who might otherwise have grown up straight.  Thus<br \/>\ntheir insistance for straight consumption that homosexuality is an<br \/>\ninborn orientation, not a choice.  Thus also their insistance that the<br \/>\ngay life is all about androphilia, none of that pederasty or<br \/>\npedophilia stuff going on here.  And thus, they&#8217;d rather not have<br \/>\nanyone thinking about the fact that most priestly abuse is in fact<br \/>\nclassically pederastic and pedophilic behavior by men who behave as<br \/>\nhomosexuals and identify themselves as gay.<\/p>\n<p>That there is a pattern in the national media of political<br \/>\ncorrectness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim&#8217; groups isn&#8217;t<br \/>\nnews, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups.  But<br \/>\nget this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the <cite>New York<br \/>\nTimes<\/cite> recently said &#8220;literally three-quarters of the people<br \/>\ndeciding what&#8217;s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals&#8221;.<br \/>\nThere you have it in plain English; gays run the &#8220;newspaper of<br \/>\nrecord&#8221;.  Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group &#8212; not<br \/>\nmerely admitting but outright <em>asserting<\/em>, as a matter of<br \/>\npride, that the <cite>Times<\/cite> engages in gay-friendly spin<br \/>\ncontrol.  And it has already been well established by statistical<br \/>\ncontent studies that the national media tend to follow where they&#8217;re<br \/>\nled by the <cite>Times<\/cite> and a handful of other prestige<br \/>\nnewspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.<\/p>\n<p>The expected next step in this sequence would be for me to start<br \/>\nscreaming about the evil of it all and demand that Something Be Done.<br \/>\nIf I were a conservative, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d do.  But in fact it&#8217;s not<br \/>\nself-evident that this particular disinformation campaign is worth<br \/>\nanybody&#8217;s time to be concerned about, except as yet another example of<br \/>\nwearily predictable bias in the dominant media culture.  Whether it is<br \/>\nor not depends upon one&#8217;s value judgment about consensual pederasty<br \/>\nand pedophilia.<\/p>\n<p>NAMBLA and its sympathizers in the rest of the gay community think<br \/>\nthey&#8217;re engaged in a worthy campaign for sexual liberation.  If they<br \/>\nare right, then the anti-antigay spin on the priestly-abuse scandal is<br \/>\narguably analogous to what pro-civil-rights sympathizers in the early<br \/>\n1960s might have done if there had been a long string of incidents of<br \/>\nincidents of black men seducing white women, both parties violating<br \/>\nthe miscegenation laws still on the books in many states at that<br \/>\ntime.<\/p>\n<p>The pro-spin argument would have run like this: interracial sex is<br \/>\ntaboo for no good reason, so soft-pedaling the race of the people involved<br \/>\nas much as possible is a justifiable form of <em>suppressio veri<\/em> &#8212;<br \/>\nnot outright lying but being economical with the truth.  Our readers will<br \/>\nbe able to deduce the whole truth if they put in even a little effort, but<br \/>\nbe needn&#8217;t pave the road for them.  By doing this, we will avoid inflaming<br \/>\nracial bigotry and advance the worthy cause of civil rights.<\/p>\n<p>For this analogy to hold good, we need two preconditions.  First,<br \/>\nwe must believe that almost all the pederasty\/pedophilia between<br \/>\npriests and boys has been voluntary. Second, we must believe that<br \/>\nconsensual pederasty and pedophilia are not, in fact, harmful to the<br \/>\nboys involved.  Intellectual honesty (and, I&#8217;ll admit, a low delight<br \/>\non my part in watching prudes and cultural conservatives turn purple<br \/>\nwith indignation) demands that we not dismiss this case without<br \/>\nlooking at the evidence.<\/p>\n<p>The modern West condemns pederasty and pedophilia. Our cultural<br \/>\nancestors did not always do so; among the Athenian Greeks consensual<br \/>\npederastic relationships were praised and thought to be a good deal<br \/>\nfor both parties.  Pederasty is socially normal in Afghanistan and<br \/>\nother parts of the Islamic world; pederasty and pedophilia are also<br \/>\nun-tabooed in parts of Southeast Asia and in Japan.  Where pederasty<br \/>\nand pedophilia are not taboo, the boys who participate in it<br \/>\nfrequently grow up to form normal heterosexual relationships and marry.<br \/>\nIn fact, it&#8217;s the modern West&#8217;s hard separation between straights<br \/>\nwho <em>never<\/em> have sex with other males and gays who<br \/>\n<em>never<\/em> have sex with females that is anthropologically<br \/>\nexceptional.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the fact that pederasty and pedophilia have been an<br \/>\napproved practice in other cultures does not automatically mean we<br \/>\nshould give them a nod.  Cannibalism, slavery and infanticide have<br \/>\nbeen approved practices too.  But the anthropological evidence doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nsuggest that boys who have voluntary sex with men automatically turn<br \/>\ninto traumatized basket cases; indeed some present-day cultures agree<br \/>\nwith the ancient Greeks that such liaisons are good for the maturation<br \/>\nof boys.  There are real secondary risks, starting with the fact that<br \/>\nanal sex is a much more effective vector of venereal diseases such as<br \/>\nAIDS than is vaginal sex &#8212; but given a cultural context that doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nstigmatize the behavior, clear evidence that consensual pederasty and<br \/>\npedophilia are intrinsically damaging is remarkably hard to find.<\/p>\n<p>Accordingly, NAMBLA may well be right on one level when they argue<br \/>\nthat what matters is not so much which tab A gets put into which slot<br \/>\nB, but whether the behavior was coerced or consensual.  According to<br \/>\nthis argument, the elephant in the bath-house can be lived with &#8212;<br \/>\nmight even be a friendly beast &#8212; if it&#8217;s docile-tempered and won&#8217;t<br \/>\ngive the tusk to unconsenting parties.<\/p>\n<p>Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who<br \/>\nwind up determining what&#8217;s on the front page of the <cite>New York<br \/>\nTimes<\/cite> and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know<br \/>\nthese facts.  How surprising would it be if they interpreted most<br \/>\nvictims&#8217; charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false<br \/>\nconsciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing<br \/>\nculture?  By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the<br \/>\naccused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and<br \/>\npolitical interests while believing &#8212; perhaps quite sincerely &#8212; that<br \/>\nthey are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is<br \/>\nright, coercion matters a <em>lot<\/em>.  As Ms. Eberstadt<br \/>\nreports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become<br \/>\nbroken, dysfunctional people.  They show up in disproportionate numbers<br \/>\nin drug and alcohol rehab.  They have a high rate of involvement in<br \/>\nviolent crime.  Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,<br \/>\nperpetuating the damage across generations.<\/p>\n<p>Voltaire once said &#8220;In nature there are no rewards or punishments,<br \/>\nonly consequences&#8221;.  Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in<br \/>\nthe 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence.  The mores of gay bath-house<br \/>\nculture turned out to be broken in the way that ultimately matters; a<br \/>\nlot of people died horribly as a result of them.<\/p>\n<p>It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA<br \/>\nare almost equally ugly.  If a climate of `enlightened&#8217; tolerance for<br \/>\nconsensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at<br \/>\nwhich boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay<br \/>\nliberationists will not (and <em>should<\/em> not) soon be forgiven.<br \/>\nThe homosexual gatekeepers at the <cite>Times<\/cite> may be making<br \/>\nthemselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous<br \/>\ncrimes.<\/p>\n<p>And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal.<br \/>\nBecause a theme that keeps recurring in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newtimesla.com\/issues\/2002-06-13\/feature.html\/1\/index.html\"><br \/>\nhistories<\/a> of the worst abusers is that they were trained in<br \/>\nseminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with<br \/>\ngay-liberationist subculture.  Reading accounts of students at one<br \/>\nnotorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising<br \/>\ngay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not<br \/>\nbeen an important enabler of priestly abuse.<\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly<br \/>\nthe name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape.  It is very clear<br \/>\nthat pederasts and pedophiles in the priesthood have routinely used<br \/>\ntheir authority over Catholic boys not merely to seduce them, but to<br \/>\ncoerce and rape them.  In a few cases the rape has been overt and<br \/>\nphysical, but in most cases it has been a subtler and arguably more<br \/>\ndamaging rape of the victim&#8217;s mind and self.<\/p>\n<p>The single most revolting image I have carried away from the<br \/>\npriestly-abuse scandal is victims&#8217; accounts of priests solemnly<br \/>\nblessing them after sex. That is using the child&#8217;s religious feelings<br \/>\nand respect for authority to make him complicit in the abuse.  If I<br \/>\nbelieved in hell, I would wish for the priests who perpetrated this<br \/>\nkind of soul-rape to fry in it for eternity.<\/p>\n<p>And we must <em>call<\/em> it rape; do otherwise is to suppose that<br \/>\nmost of the thousands of known victims wanted to be sodomized.  Even<br \/>\nif we discard the victims&#8217; and witnesses&#8217; reports, this is highly<br \/>\nunlikely; there were simply too many victims.  Some priests had sex<br \/>\nwith <em>hundreds<\/em> of boys, far too many to fit into the 1-4%<br \/>\ncohort of homosexual orientation in the population they had access to.<br \/>\nAnd we are not entitled to dismiss the victims&#8217; protests in any case,<br \/>\nnot given the corollary evidence that the trauma of abuse reverberated<br \/>\nthrough the victims&#8217; lives, continuing to damage them years and<br \/>\ndecades afterwards.  Comforting gay-lib delusions about false<br \/>\nconsciousness won&#8217;t wash here.<\/p>\n<p>Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would<br \/>\nhave been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than<br \/>\ncohabitation.  Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights<br \/>\nproponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a<br \/>\nparticular propensity to rape white women.  The analogous question,<br \/>\nwhether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is<br \/>\nprecisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t want anyone to examine &#8212; and precisely the question that the<br \/>\npriestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to sympathize with gay activists&#8217; fears that opening this<br \/>\nquestion will expose them to a firestorm of prejudice from people<br \/>\nwho will prejudge the answer out of anti-gay bigotry.  But the<br \/>\npattern of homosexual abuse by the Catholic priesthood has been so<br \/>\negregious and so longstanding that we need to understand the relative<br \/>\nweight of <em>all<\/em> the causes that produced it &#8212; whether those<br \/>\ncauses are specific to Catholicism or more general.<\/p>\n<p>Are gay men biologically or psychologically prone to rape boys at a<br \/>\nlevel that makes a gay man even without a known history of abuse into<br \/>\na bad risk around boys?  Does queer culture encourage a tendency to<br \/>\nrape in gay men who are put in authority over boys?<\/p>\n<p>Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts<br \/>\nof America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters?  And here we are<br \/>\nwith a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics.  After the<br \/>\nnumbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes<br \/>\nrevealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your<br \/>\nhumble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply<br \/>\nbecause it&#8217;s being raised by unpleasant conservatives.<\/p>\n<p>The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality.  To the<br \/>\nextent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are<br \/>\nnormal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys<br \/>\nmay after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known<br \/>\npredisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze.  One wouldn&#8217;t<br \/>\nhave to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional<br \/>\nrules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best<br \/>\navoided for everyone&#8217;s sake.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77834003\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mary Eberstadt&#8217;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&#8217;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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=26\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Elephant in the Bath-House<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}