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The
Gay Scapegoat
June 8, 2002
By Terry Sawyer
 You
would think that the recently uncovered hive of pederast priests
would muzzle the gaudy self-righteousness of cultural conservatism.
It does, after all, fit the slur of the Catholic Church as
a corrupt institution with an appalling decadence at its core.
More than that, it puts garter belts on the hypocrisy that
our railing religious leaders subject us to from their anointed
perches. Picture Jimmy Swaggart lecturing sinners from his
slappy recline in a by-the-hour motel.
If there’s one thing conservatives have become masters of,
it’s ascribing the ills of the world to everybody’s freedom
but their own. In fact, they’ve become virtuosos of the PR
ricochet. So I guess it’s no surprise to me that hiding pedophile
priests within the catacombs of church bureaucracy would become
the fault of the radical gay “agenda.” It has long been a
staple of the Rightist gutters to collapse sex between consenting
adult men and sex between a male adult and child onto the
axis of same-sex lust. Interestingly though, for a heterosexual
rapist, it is still the rape and not the heterosexuality that
is the most salient factor. For conservatives, homosexuality
is just one lumpen heart of darkness, where sexual desire
is directed like buck shot at animal, child, vegetable or
mineral. If you can find a same sex practice that is abhorrent
then gays by virtue of being a minority, are automatically
impugned. Individuality is still the luxurious province of
straight white men who can rape, murder and pillage with abandon
and still have it be a question of character rather than kind.
Said in his usual brandy snifter tone, William F. Buckley
muses about the problem of the Catholic Church as a subset
of the apparently greater problem of increased tolerance.
“Fifty years ago, in my college with an undergraduate body
of 5,000 male students, one could not recall a single homosexual.
Now, they are expected to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
. . They were certainly not encouraged to give rein to their
impulses; perhaps better said, they were intimidated in the
matter.” Perhaps it gives him locker room comfort to imagine
that there wasn’t a single gay person in his undergraduate
class. For Buckley, the sexual revolution freed a deviant
sliver of the population who have, in turn, grafted their
unnatural desires upon people who would have otherwise grown
into the hunky, joshing, all-American types of Mr. Buckley’s
imaginary time machine. The logic here is breathtakingly demented.
Somehow the gay rights movement contributed to scandals that
began twenty years ago. Somehow the gay rights movement forced
the church to lie, abuse and suppress the victims of these
crimes. Somehow Mr. Buckley forgot his own den-slippered admonitions
against a culture where everyone finds a way to shift the
blame for their own moral failings onto others.
A priest quoted in the Boston Herald goes even further saying,
“There’s a subculture of gay priests and everyone knows it.
The media don’t like talking about this because, by and large,
they have come down on the side of gay rights, the advancement
of the gay agenda.” Gosh, y’know, that’s true, I have yet
to see a journalist get on television and talk about how much
God hates queers, and I’m rather thankful for that skew. On
second thought, it that really true? I can’t even count the
number of times that I’ve been able to turn on the television
and see Jerry Falwell or Reverend Phelps spewing invective
that, if said about any other minority, would be relegated
to the nether hours of cable access, where, frankly, I think
these people belong. If the media have been silent, perhaps
it’s because those on the frothing Right haven’t bothered
to make the case that sex in the priesthood can somehow be
connected to the legislative agenda of gay liberals or the
lives of gays as a whole. Their hope, I gather, is that innuendo
and strident bigotry will be enough to cast an entire segment
of the population into the abyss as child rapists. And God
knows that the Right has learned to simply evoke “the children”
to justify a variety of draconian attitudes that one must
assume in order to protect them from phantom or darkly exaggerated
dangers. By all means, let’s demonize liberal homosexuals
because we all know that gay men with healthy attitudes about
their sexuality must be flocking to the priesthood.
If the Church is correct and these scandals are decades old,
it’s hard to see how the gay rights movement could be to blame.
In fact, if anything, the gay rights agenda has been responsible
for giving people with doubts about their sexuality options
other than celibacy for dealing with their desires. Gay Christians
have worked hard to create pathways to God that aren’t limited
to self-hatred, self-negation, or self-abuse. If one must
admit an affinity with these priests simply by virtue of being
gay (and I don’t), then it’s impossible not to wonder if the
repression involved in being a priest and in the church’s
definition of sin aren’t in some way deforming of the sexual
impulse. After all, the priests who have left the priesthood
in screeching droves in order to marry, have done so knowing
that, for heterosexuals in the church, there is a picket fence
smile waiting to bless their matrimony, their parenting, and
their sunset ascent into heaven. Gays, on the other hand,
can opt for hell and a lifetime of alienation from their communities
of faith. Gays in the church are encouraged to stunt their
sexual development, eschew the concept of having healthy same
sex relationships, and deal with homosexuality like a crackhead
forever recovering from those one-rock slip ups. It’s not
surprising to see that, under these circumstances, someone
might relegate their impulses to the realm of a dirty little
secret needing partners to share in their quiet, trembling
shame. This is not to excuse these priests, who shouldn’t
be shrouded from their culpability with the bogeyman of liberalism,
since they could have left the church or fought to change
the injustice that forces them to choose between being strangers
to God or to themselves. This is only to point out that gays
embedded in the hierarchy of the Church are hardly paradigmatic
of gays at large and even further from us frothing crazies
on the radical left of the gay movement. I don’t want gay
priests any more than the church does.
There are now cries that the media is intentionally misnaming
this scandal in order to shroud gays from the ugly realities
of their evil. Rod Dreher, in the National Review, notes “They
are, rather 'ephebophiles,' adults who are generally attracted
to post-pubescent youths, generally aged 12 to 17.” I won’t
even trouble myself with the number of teen marriages in early
America or even the 1950s, since to do so would be to be to
leave us awash in ephebophiles, founding ephepobiles, and
a genealogy rotten with those dastardly weevils. Even in light
of the new-fangled diagnosis, I can still find no mainstream
gay group that advocates being in non-consensual, statutory
rape relationships with your parishioners. No matter which
way I turn this, it’s still a scandal that is a product of
people not firmly planted within the political and moral philosophy
of gay rights. Rightists respond by claiming that gay culture
sexualizes youth far more than mainstream culture. I wonder
if Bob Dole could stop tentpoling Britney Spears long enough
to agree? Can anyone imagine that American Beauty would have
won an Oscar had it been cast with a gay man fantasizing about
a male teenager glued to the ceiling raining down roses? And
any cursory glance through a porn store will show you more
than a fair share of pigtails, lollipops and parochial school
knee socks. Does that mean that heterosexual culture has institutionalized
sex with minors so deeply that it’s almost invisible? Or does
it mean that youth is an ever-present fantasy and only the
tiniest subset of human beings choose to literalize that yearning
in vile violation?
Young people have always been sexualized, for their beauty,
their vigor, and their undulled passion. And there have always
been people who go bump in the night that seek to use power,
authority and experience to dominate them for sexual ends.
Conservatism always gives chatty lip service to the idea that
we are all masters of our own destiny and not simply accumulated
residues of oppression or historical inequity. It’d be nice
if, for once, they could step out of their reflexive hatreds
and categorical denunciations and consider the case at hand
in terms of the individuals and their unambiguous responsibility
for their choices. That is, after all, what sin is supposed
to be all about.
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