The Real Schoolyard Bullies

 

Childhood's end: Saint John, NB, March, 2025

A couple of days ago, someone set fire to our local playground. It was a beautiful playground, including a water park, in one of the poorer parts of town. Now it will be closed at least for months, if the city can afford to reconstruct, just as the summer is about to begin.

Why would somebody do this?

The answer is only too obvious; but it is one we do not want to accept.

I become increasingly convinced that there is a war against children. Many people hate children. They increasingly feel they have license to act on their desires.

Why do people hate children? Primarily, perhaps, because a child is a reminder of one’s own mortality. One day you will be gone, and they will inherit the earth. An intolerable thought to a true narcissist.

Also perhaps because the evil will resent innocence. It is an unpleasant reminder of what they have themselves lost.

Also perhaps because children, by being conceived, complicate the animal enjoyment of unrestricted sex. Then, for a moment’s pleasure, you have to support them for eighteen or twenty-four years.

Surely, you might object, everyone instinctively loves children?

Maternal instinct often does its work. But demonstrably not in many cases. Apparently one in four women alive in the USA today has had at least one abortion. Infanticide was a common practice throughout the ancient world, among the Romans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Canaanites; until quite recently in the Far East.  Judaism and Christianity stood apart in prohibiting the practice. 

It seems that once unrestricted abortion was again okay, the ancient floodgates opened. Encouraged, no doubt, by the “population bomb” notion that there were already too many people in the world.  

No-fault divorce and almost automatically giving custody to the mother pretends to take the children’s interests into account, but only a little research proves it is disastrous to children. If it is not done from malice, it is certainly at least done because we do not care. 

We knew from the kibbutz experience in Israel well before daycare became standard practice and publicly funded, that raising children in daycare was harmful. At best, we did not care.

While pretending to be “helping” or “reconciling with” First Nations, we are now systematically sacrificing untold numbers of aboriginal children by closing down the residential schools, shutting down the adoption option, shutting down the orphanages. Missing and murdered aboriginal women? Teens on reservations forming suicide pacts? Rampant fetal alcohol syndrome? Gee, I wonder why? Yet we do everything possible to avoid addressing the obvious cause, aboriginal family life. We do everything possible to avoid helping them. If a teenaged aboriginal girl escapes her abusive family and makes it to the city streets, she is arrested by the authorities, assigned the blame, and forced back home. 

Minimum wage laws and child labour laws seem calculated to trap the young in abusive situations, denying them the right to make a living. 

For that matter, the demands for unnecessary academic qualifications for almost any paying occupation are abusive to the young. 

Heck, the modern school and college is abusive to the young. They are ordered around like cattle, their time wasted on things of no value to them, and the teacher holds dictatorial powers. It is always up to the student to learn, not to the teacher to teach.

For a while—it now seems long ago--we pretended to be horrified by pedophilia. But that was only so long as we could pretend it was only happening among Catholic clergy. What this actually was about was cutting away one more escape route for abused kids: the local church and pastor; the local religious-run orphanage or residential school.

Now we increasingly discover child trafficking and pedophilia is widely practiced, in the public schools, in the public libraries, and especially among the rich. And here is no public outcry; instead, the outcry is against anyone objecting, or wanting to hold anyone accountable.

It is getting too obvious.

Remember the Good Old Days?

 

Does anyone remember when pedophilia was supposed to be a crisis only among the Catholic clergy? Any priest was suspect, and the church itself was blamed and fined crippling amounts. All paid ultimately by innocent parishioners. Many churches had to be shut down and sold off. Not to mention church-run orphanages and residential schools.

It was always obvious that this was scapegoating. Nobody was looking for pedophilia anywhere else.

We now know it was also projection. We find increasingly that pedophilia is common in the public schools, in sports teams, in clubs, in Hollywood. We learn that huge numbers of children go missing every year. That there are vast pedophile rings involving the rich and famous. That child sex trafficking is a big business.

And now that it cannot be blamed on the Catholic Church, the chattering classes seem unready to condemn it. Instead, films about the problem are suppressed; client lists are suppressed; child grooming is fairly openly promoted with pornographic books in school libraries and drag queen story hours. And those who object are condemned as bigots.

Does nobody see what is going on here?

The Catholic Church was and is targeted because it is a voice for protecting the children: from abortion, from immorality, from neglect, from abuse, from exploitation. 

Rules and morals protect the weak and vulnerable. The strong and malicious are always against them.

What I Learned at School Today

 

No doubt all of this video is worth watching. But I post it in particular for what Matt Walsh says at the beginning about sexual abuse in the public schools. I've been saying this for years: any problem with sex abuse by either Catholic priests or by teachers in the old Indian Residential School System, real as it was, is a hiccup compared to what has been going on in the public schools. With no outrage apparent.

After all, if you are a sexual predator, it is just easier to get what you want, into a position where you are in charge of young people and able to make them do your will by becoming a public school teacher than by joining a religious order or becoming a priest. Most priests or nuns get little contact with children. If a monk or nun is assigned to teach, it is not their choice; it is decided by a superior. The strategic placement for predation is guaranteed to a teacher. 

And there are moral tests in place to keep sexual predators out of holy orders. They must, after all, take a vow of celibacy, which they must visibly honour, more or less guaranteeing they lack a strong inclination towards and interest in sex. They must also often take a vow of poverty, another test of their sincerity. And they are vetted as much as is humanly possible by their superiors and their organization for good moral character. Under twenty-four hour observation. 

Which is exactly why, traditionally, the job of teaching was assigned in any Catholic school to monks and nuns. 

None of these safeguards are applied to public school teachers. It is as if we want predation. Which seems increasingly obvious in these days of SOGI: "Sexual orientation gender ideology." 

We don't care about children. We hate them/.

This Confirms My Suspicions

 

... of how things work in Washington. It's Eyes Wide Shut.

There's video.

Fair-Haired Boys

 

I have written recently my speculations about what turned my mentally-retarded Uncle “Tom” into a bisexual pedophile. I have traced it back through circumstantial evidence to my Uncle Teddy as prime suspect. Both are dead, so I trust there is no harm now in speaking openly.

But there was another child who might have been involved. My father. Call him Terry. He was at least two years younger than Teddy, at least one year older than Tom. Was he aware of what was going on? Was he affected?

There is no obvious sign of it. If Ted’s bachelorhood suggests homosexuality, Terry’s life suggests the reverse. He married and had five children. As far as I can tell, he was always faithful to my mother. He never disappeared for an evening, unless it was for a Rotary Club meeting. Perfectly conventional.

Yet it is improbable that he was oblivious to it all. And I have again some circumstantial evidence that he was involved.

Back in his early adolescence, my brother was caught with a little book titled Sex for One: a manual of masturbation. Not abnormal for his age; I had a copy of Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy hidden in my own drawers at about that time. It too was found, and confiscated; but the only feedback I heard was that my mother had read it. She gave no review.

But our father really seemed upset with my brother about that book. He ragged on him quite a bit, as if to humiliate him.

This was strange.

It was not for moral reasons. My father was no sexual prude nor moralist. When, in earlier childhood, he was given reports of his sons and daughter exposing themselves to one another in the attic, he said nothing and did nothing. He did not seem to care. When his wife and children, and the next-door neighbour, complained that his brother, Uncle Tom, was molesting the children, he said nothing and did nothing.

In fact, at around the same time he found the book in my brother’s room, he was advising us, his three adolescent sons, that we should learn the ropes by having sex with our mother, or with our older married cousin, then living with us. And he advised us in a rudimentary way how to seduce a woman: you play soft music, and avoid being too obvious about it. He seemed to be coaching us, and indeed trying to tempt us. 

He got no takers, though. I doubt he ran the notion by our mother or our cousin.

Most of us have a natural revulsion to incest. Evolution instills this, to preserve the species from a shrinking gene pool.

Our father, whether he acted on it or not, clearly did not have any sense that incest was repulsive. In fact, his advice to us suggests he thought it was, on the whole, preferable to exogamy. 

The one thing, I posit, that might override this natural aversion to incest is if your first sexual encounter is incestuous. Then you are imprinted by the natural monogamy of our species with the sense that this is the proper way to have sex.

This might even explain his loyalty to our mother. It was clearly not on grounds of sexual morality or the marriage vow: he was shopping her out. But a taste for incest would flip the drive for exogamy into a drive for endogamy, and so support monogamy. If initially foreign to the family, her continued presence, in time almost like a sister, may have made her automatically sexually preferable to other women.

So it looks as though our father’s earliest sexual experiences, like Tom’s, must have been incestuous. Otherwise he would realize how gross he was sounding.

When we boys were still quite young, he gathered us for the talk on the birds and the bees. Oddly, he did this not at home, but during a visit to our grandparents. (Dr. Freud, call your office. Did being in his parents’ home make him think of such matters?) There was no talk of sexual morality, of monogamy or waiting until marriage. It was more about how wonderful sex is. He omitted any mention of venereal disease.

He did pull out his penis and show it to us—not very sexually inhibited of him.

Why did he do this? Surely it was not required for educational purposes; we all had our own dangly bits, and knew what one looked like. 

A feminist might suggest this was a power move, a man “waving his penis around.” But in my experience, men never do that in front of other men. Perhaps in front of a woman. Surveys show most men are insecure about the size of their flaccid penis. 

But then again, this was not, as I recall, a flaccid penis. It looked as though it was at least semi-erect.

Which suggests he was doing it for sexual pleasure, and further had some homosexual and pedophilic impulses. Would most men feel comfortable taking out their penis to show it to young boys? If they did, would they be likely to get an erection?

And now, if it was not for moral reasons, why did my father take exception to my brother’s book, Sex for One? Why, if all the rest of this was fine with him, was he so opposed to masturbation?

He wasn’t.

My father took exception to the book, Sex for One, not because it was about masturbation, but because, he said, it was about homosexuality. He said it meant that my brother was becoming a homosexual. I don’t recall the exact word he used. It was not “homosexual,” and it was not “gay.” That word was not in common use. 

Why would he automatically connect masturbation with homosexuality? 

It seemed to make no sense.

Yet, given how the human body is built, male homosexual sex requires mutual masturbation: first Bert brings Ernie to orgasm, then Ernie returns the favour, by some form of artificial stimulation.

That this was our father’s sole and immediate association suggests a strong familiarity with homosexual sex. It would not have occurred to me; or, I think, to most.

Does this mean he was opposed to homosexuality, or to my brother being a homosexual? Not necessarily—though he would not be the first closet gay who tried to project his own “fault” onto others. The point might just as well have been to convince my brother that he already was a homosexual. Plant the seed and see if it develops.

Most tellingly, perhaps, in helping to identify where this came from, my father also showed exactly the same preference for blonde hair we saw in Uncle Tom. He married a blonde woman. He blatantly favoured his blonde sons and daughter over the browns—something I think we all noticed, in our way. He put heavy pressure on both blonde sons to live nearby and go into business with him; which would have him see them daily. “Fair-haired boy,” meaning someone arbitrarily favoured, was even one of his pet expressions. Granted that it was a fairly familiar idiom at about the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries; but not that common. In my father’s time, I never heard anyone else use it. It seemed to speak to him in some way.

For what it is worth, my father had dark hair. He was not referring to himself admiringly, then, but to some external object of his affection. 

Uncle Ted, as previously noted, had blonde hair.

Ted probably experimented on his younger brother Terry as well as on little Tom. In either case, it had more or less the same effect. The only difference was that Terry, unlike Tom, had a social life, and was able to marry. He therefore felt less need to act out his less conventional urges--so far as I can tell.

The moral of this story is not that we must suppress homosexuality specifically. I do not hold with Freud that suppression is out of the question; but it is a heavy burden on some, imposed on them through no fault of their own. It is not even that we must suppress incest, or pedophilia, although we must. It is that we must stop viewing other people as objects, there for our pleasure, sexual or otherwise. Other people, as Kant explains, must be seen as ends, not means. They are to be treated, as Martin Luther King explains, with the respect due to the content of their character, not according to the colour of their skin or the colour of their hair or their age or their sex or their physical attractiveness, or supposed ownership because they are our children or our siblings. 

If my speculations are correct—and some of the evidence is certain--Tom, Ted, and Terry all failed this test.

Joe Biden the Pedophile

Ashley Biden.

Apparently a diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden has surfaced, and reveals he showered with her as a child. This, in her own estimation, caused her to develop an addiction to sex.

Another piece of the narcissist puzzle. Biden is a classic narcissist. The narcissist puts the greatest worth on satisfying their desires. As a result, they are highly likely to indulge in sexual activities that violate norms. In fact, aside from the pleasure derived, this reinforces their sense of superiority: the rules do not apply to them. This often means incest: their own child is highly available, highly vulnerable, and in their control. And this completes their control.

It is a troubling fact that the US is being run by a narcissist; and Canada is as well. Narcissists tend to destroy those with whom they come in contact. This was the traditional basis of Greek tragedy: hubris is what they called narcissism, and the hubristic protagonist generally left the classic stage piled with corpses, and the land devastated.

To some extent, this is probably deliberate. And it is hard to account for some of Biden's or Trudeau's actions in government without assuming they want to destroy their respective nations.

After all, to the narcissist, they must be greater than the nation.

Conspiracy Theory and Practice

Francis Dashwood, a leader of the Hellfire Club, by Hogarth.

I hate to comment on the Jeffrey Epstein case, because anything about it is a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies are inherently rare, and it is easy to go off quarter-cocked.

But sometimes conspiracies are real. There really was a Bavarian Illuminati. There really was a Hellfire Club.

There is an alternate danger, too. That, faced with evidence of evil, we avert our eyes and walk away. It is the more comfortable thing to do. And Edmund Burke’s advice still holds: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

It is pretty definite that Epstein was murdered. The known circumstances put the claim of suicide beyond reasonable belief. We now also have the public testimony of a highly respected coroner who was at the autopsy; although couched in typical legal-medicalese. The results were “consistent” with homicide. They were not “consistent” with suicide.

And the murder of Epstein requires a conspiracy.

Moreover, the official autopsy report did not say homicide, and, according to the coroner who has now come forward, failed to include obvious things like a test for DNA. That too seems to require a conspiracy.

Now Project Veritas has come out with a “hot mic” video of an ABC news anchor lamenting that she had all the goods on Epstein and his Fantasy Island three years ago, and the story was spiked by the network. Fear of litigation by powerful people might explain it; but such fears did not stop the networks from reporting quite wild allegations against Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump, without much or any corroboration.

Owl of Minerva, crest of the Bavarian Illuminati

Three years ago—that would mean the story was spiked during the last presidential election, more or less. Might have been relevant. Again begins to look conspiratorial.

But then, we already know that the mainstream media is involved in a political conspiracy. That cover was blown years ago, by “Journolist.”

All of this in turn tends to prove the basic truth of the wild allegations regarding what was going on with Epstein’s pedophile ring. There obviously must be some very powerful people who risk some very grave consequences if the full truth comes out. Powerful enough to reach in and control the US Prison Service, ABC, or the NY coroner’s office, as needed. Consequences grave enough to prompt them to murder almost openly—to take such a risk.

Now we must also worry—is it possible to ever get this properly investigated? We no longer know who’s in on the fix, and who is clean. It seems to me too there are other troubling matters in recent years that have been more or less ignored—the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails, for example. I find it hard to believe that mere incompetence can account for it. More likely, Clinton was deliberately feeding information to some foreign power. The matter of Hunter Biden, China, and the Ukraine looks pretty outrageous, now that Trump has raised it—yet the damning basic facts have been in public view for years. And when Trump calls for an investigation, the Democrats act as though he has done something wrong, not Biden. Then there are longstanding unanswered questions about Juanita Broderick’s rape charges and the “Clinton death list.”

Perhaps sordid things have been going on among the upper crust at all times. Perhaps what is different now is that we have the democratization of information flow thanks to the Internet. No doubt that is at least partly true. On the other hand, the democratization of information has recently been very drastically throttled in again by Silicon Valley overlords.

These sorts of revelations may explain why.

The malfeasance does seem to fall heavily on the left side of the political spectrum. I don’t think I am being partisan here; it’s pretty obvious. If there is the slightest charge, moreover, against a Republican, it is more than thoroughly aired.

This moral imbalance between the sides seems to me to stand to reason: it is the left that has embraced “moral relativism” and postmodernism, in which you get to say or do whatever you decide is in your interest, regardless of truth or morals. Leaving aside Trump, who is at best hard to read, many leading Republicans do tend to at least publicly commit to moral traditions: Pence, Romney, Ryan, Cruz, Huckabee, Perry, Jindal, and so on.

Or, in Canada, Scheer.

Yet More on Moore

A lot of folks have recently weighed in on the Roy Moore case. I think an update is in order. I had most recently said that a new accusation by a fourth woman, Beverly Nelson, of an attempted rape in a car, probably tipped the preponderance of evidence towards guilt, so that Moore should withdraw as a candidate. Now I think I need to walk that back. I think serious doubts have been raised over that new accusation.

The one point that most strikes me—and this did not occur to me personally until someone else pointed it out—is that the accuser's prime bit of offered evidence is an inscription in her high school yearbook wishing her a Merry Christmas. Hang on: school yearbooks come out at the end of the school year, in Spring, and are carried around for maybe a few days after that. Who brings their high school yearbook to a restaurant the next Christmas?

Nah; not plausible. But plausible as a con, given that it reinforces the image of Moore as someone who chases younger girls—high school age.

Moore's legal team has demanded that the yearbook be submitted to an independent party to enable forensic analysis by handwriting experts. Gloria Allred, the publicity-hound attorney handling the accuser's case, has refused. I see no reason for this other than that she knows it is a forgery. If she thought it was genuine, she wold be eager to do this.

Another point, noted by Rush Limbaugh, is that the accuser says she was locked in Moore's car, and could not escape. Limbaugh points out that child locks, the kind controlled by the driver, did not appear in cars until a few years after the incident is claimed to have occurred. So why could she not have opened the door?

If Moore really is a pedophile, note that, according to everything the psychologists say currently, pedophilia is incurable. That is why we have this current hysteria about having sex offenders registers, and notifying neighbours if they move into an area, no matter how long ago the recorded crime took place. Accordingly, if the charges are true, there should not just be incidents 38 years ago. There should logically be continued incidents up to the present day. Instead, Breitbart.com, which has always been in Moore's corner, has published a stream of character references by people who ought to know saying Moore has always been a perfect gentleman for as long as they have known him. For what that is worth.

All we have so far, is one claimed incident almost 40 years ago. This tends to disprove the claim, unless we soon get others. The likelier picture is of a guy who, in his thirties, and single, was looking for a wife, and had a preference for younger women. A religious guy might, since virginity might matter a lot to him. Possibly he was socially awkward, and not always good at reading the signals of consent. Always a tricky business for any man.

Roy Moore

On Judge Roy Moore, things seem to be getting distorted. The last I saw, there were exactly two accusations of genuine impropriety: one of aggressively propositioning a 14-year-old, and one of giving alcohol to someone 18. Neither, even if true, are that far out of line. He is also accused of dating, and kissing, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, when he was in his thirties. Take away any ageist prejudice, and there is simply nothing wrong with that. It is traditional in most cultures to have a similar age difference, and by Alabama law the women were above the age of consent, 16.

Note an important distinction here between the Moore case and the current Hollywood scandals. Aside from their particular actions, the Hollywood accused are accused of using a position of power to exploit others for sex. Even if the charges are true, this is not so for Moore. He was just another eligible bachelor going on dates.

So we have two accusations? More may come out, but that is not enough to presume guilt, in the middle of an election campaign, when his opponents have every motive to smear him with false allegations. In good faith, he is still innocent until proven guilty.

House of Cards

The dam is bursting. Kevin Spacey now. Pity. A good actor.

My study of history suggests these things happen fast. Fast enough that a lot of people get caught out self-incriminating.

Another remarkable sign I just noticed. On Facebook, I follow groups of artists and writers. Always resolutely left-wing and political, which has long been discouraging. I do not think artists and writers are really all resolutely left-wing, but those who are not have for many years not dared to raise their heads above the parapet. It is hard enough making a living making art. They, along with students, are probably the one social group most vulnerable to bullying by those in power. Artists, especially in Canada, live on government grants, distributed by bureaucrats.

A recent meeting of writers was billed as “Writing in Dangerous Times: Survival, Resistance, Joy.” You just knew the “danger” was Trump.

But yesterday, for the first time I can remember, someone posted a right-wing illustration on the artists’ feed. It said that if you thought your gender was neither male nor female, your gender was in your imagination. Then another one popped up, less than a day later: a black artist calling out other blacks for blaming all their problems on “whites.”

I’ve never seen one such post on this feed before, let alone two.

I am not really all that surprised. The left had gone so far that you had to be insane to buy into what they were saying. Fifty-seven genders, "white supremacy," "cultural appropriation," and the like. You had to be against just about everything good or true. The remarkable thing is that it took this long.

Once the dam blows, everyone gets wet. A lot of people have probably been keeping a lot of things pent up, not daring to say them. Now, if they think they can, there will be passion and anger behind what they say.

But this is significant. Steve Bannon is quoted as having said "politics is downstream from culture," and he is right. This is where the turn will happen first: among the artist and writers. And it is happening. Next will come the young.

The Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It was pretty routine to the Greeks. Pederastic "courtship."

The problem with "pedophilia" in the Catholic priesthood, such as it is, has nothing to do with celibacy.

What nobody dares say is that it has a lot to do with homosexuality.

It is mostly a matter of gay priests "grooming" younger sexual partners.

It is quite natural for homosexuals, despite all the denials, to latch on like a limpet to young teenage boys. Since their sexuality has not yet been fully fixed and confirmed by experience, they are more lilekly to be open to homoesxual acts. Moreover, in case of any resistance, they are weaker. And less credible to the authorities.

It must, after all, be difficult for homosexuals to find sexual partners. Ninety-eight percent of those they are attracted to, and might approach, are going to be repelled by the idea, and may even react violently. Not good for your ego, at best.

Younger boys are the perfect solution.

Oscar Wilde with young Lord Alfred Douglas.

It also seems quite likely, given this dynamic, that nobody is born homosexual. They are turned homosexual by older homosexuals if they are gotten to at this early, impressionable age.

Early sexual experiences are likely to leave a deep impression.

Sadly, this means that a lot of gays have probably become priests out of no religious feeling, but as a useful way to meet and gain the confidence of such young men.

As many become teachers, or coaches.

Exit question: have you ever noticed that homosexual men are generally unusually good looking? Conversely, that unusually good looking men are more likely to be homosexual?

It makes sense: an older homosexual is going to approach the pretty boys first. The girls who come later get the leftovers.

Are Catholic Priests Among the Leading Causes of Mental Illness?

Father Edward Flanagan, founder of Boys' Town, for delinquent and homeless boys.

A friend, reading the post immediately below, asks whether, in light of this, the Catholic Church bears much of the responsibility for mental illness. He has been properly and thoroughly primed by the mainstream media. Pavlovian response: child abuse = the Catholic Church.

The answer is, absolutely not.

Actually, we have always known that child abuse is exponentially more common inside families than anywhere else. The incident occurring outside the family is itself a rare exception. And, among these, incidents involving Catholic clergy are again a rare exception, an exception within an exception. Extra-familial child abuse is more common in the general public than among Catholic clergy (Jenkins).

On top of that, historically, the Church has been a bulwark against child abuse within the family. First, an abused or troubled child is able to appeal in confidence to the local priest. Who else can you turn to, apart from relatives? It is a needed social function. Second, for the seriously abused, escaping to a monastery or convent was for long the obvious option. It was a safe haven, off the streets. Many became orphanages. Third, to anyone abused, the teachings of the New Testament must be a great consolation. Fourth, to those who have ears to hear, they are the vital spiritual guide, calling in particular to the abused.

Rather than attacking the Catholic Church, therefore, anyone who seriously cares about the welfare of children ought to support and seek to emulate it in any way they can. Indeed, the current pogrom against the Church is caused directly, I believe, by its taking a firm stand for child welfare. It is the church's unalterable opposition to abortion, made clear and final by Pope Paul VI, which has since then made it increasingly a target of the chattering classes. You can mark the split between the Church and “progressive” forces almost to that hour.

It is especially interesting, and concerning, that the Church is being attacked first in the areas where it is of most benefit to abused children. It is, for example, being driven out of the schools and the orphanages. It is being criticised in particular for celibacy. Yet one vital way the Church prevents child abuse within the clergy is surely the discipline of celibacy.

Saint John Bosco, founder of the Salesians, champion of street children.

Just think about it. If you are the sort who gets your jollies by bullying the tiny and weak, what's your best opportunity? It is to have children of your own. By requiring celibacy of its own, the Church takes this off the table, and more or less ensures that pedophiles and bullies will avoid the priesthood.

When it comes to profession, pedophiles and bullies will of course be most inclined to become teachers; failing that, coaches. Unlike priests, teachers can marry. Unlike priests, teachers come in close contact to children daily. Unlike priests, they are expected to order them around.

There is a good reason, accordingly, why the Catholic teaching orders were also celibate. Driving them out of the schools is a good way to increase the incidence of child abuse there.

In sum, the progressive cognoscenti are not after the Catholic Church for child abuse. They are instead abusing the Catholic Church in a way quite illustrative of how bullies work with children. They are making up down, black white, right wrong, and scapegoating the victims.

Scarred for Life. And Perhaps Longer.

My place, or yours

It is close to impossible to overstate the importance of abortion to our current culture. It is our central issue, just as child sacrifice was central to Canaanite or Punic culture in their day.

Because those who do wrong, and know they do wrong, hate anyone, however innocent, who reminds them of the fact, the Catholic Church's steadfast opposition to the practice, joined later also by Protestant evangelicals, has brought the entirely predictable retribution down on their heads. Why the sudden burst of concern and sympathy for homosexuals over the past few decades? Not due to their own efforts: they are a small minority. They and their concerns are front and centre entirely because homosexuality is opposed by the Catholic Church.

So too, to a large extent, with feminism. So the “New Atheism.”

So too with pedophilia. It is now an unspeakable crime entirely because Catholic priests were found doing it; and because there appeared to be some poetic justice, some evident hypocrisy, in the Church opposing the murder of children yet supposedly abusing those in their care.

However, it was always true, and known to be true, that pedophilia was less common inside than outside the Catholic priesthood. Now that it has been identified as the supposedly single worst crime known to man (as opposed, say, to abortion) a lot of other heads must inevitably start to fall. Sports teams, reformatories, public schools, and so on will inevitably be discovered to have been far worse.

Now “the coin has dropped,” this author says, regarding British boarding schools.

Which raises and interesting question. Since the rest of us were obliged to publicly apologize to Native Canadians for what happened many years ago at church-run residential schools, do the Native Canadians now owe a public apology to the British ruling class?