[Julie Steiner]

No need to apologize. You could be quite right. And I have no problem with people getting emotional about this. WWJD? Maybe flip a few tables. (For starters.)

We cross-posted.

The number of predators was, percentage-wise, very small; the number of people shushing and/or blaming the victims was HUGE. When the first stories of abuse started getting media attention in the mid-'80s, the victim-blaming directly or indirectly included almost everyone in the Church, including me. We laypeople have to accept responsibility for our role in perpetuating the climate in which the abuse flourished. Our ignorance doesn't entirely excuse us, any more than it excuses the guys in charge.

And the victim-blaming goes on. Even nowadays I hear grumbling that people's favorite charities have had funding slashed, to pay victims' settlements, and how those greedy, vengeful victims are stealing from the poor. I don't hear it often anymore, because I get in people's faces about it, but I do occasionally hear it.

[John Whitworth]

Of course a grown man of over twenty having sexual intercourse with a baby of a child of nine is wrong. I don't know whether desiring such things is wrong in itself. I think according to the church is is a sin.Isn't that so?

But... do you think the chap who sang 'great balls of fire' (Sorry, senior moment) was a rapist? I don't though lots of English people thought and said that he was. Was the English teacher who had sex with a pupil aged fifteen a rapist? Well, he was in the UK, but when he fled to France he wasn't, since the age of consent there is fifteen. In the USA the age of consent in some States is eighteen. Is that true? I thought it was but I could be wrong. Wasn't the World Heavyweight Champion Jack Jones done for something like that with a girl (girls?) of sixteen. or am I wrong.

What about pederastically inclined men kissing boys of (say) twelve. How bad is that?

What about muslims who marry girls of nine, including (is it not so?) the prophet himself?

I don't mean to logic-chop but the whole thing is a minefield. And I do think Catholic priests have had a bad press. In the C of E we have vicars who do much the same thing. Marriage doesn't seem to have the effect it is supposed to. But there hasn't been the outrage. English people make jokes about it. Probably they shouldn't, but they do.

What would I have done if the teenage guy who stalked my seven-year-old daughter all over Dreamland (A Margate Funfare) had had his wicked way? I would probably have killed him or at least beaten him to a pulp. I was more able to do such a thing in those days. Doreen (my wife) would certainly have done it.

[William A. Baurle]

John,

No, I certainly don't think the balls of fire guy, Edgar A. Poe, Elvis the Pelvis, or any of those guys who married very young women, sometimes their cousins, were rapists, pedophiles, or any of that.

I had an acquaintance once who was accused of statutory rape by the father of his girlfriend, who was seventeen. He was nineteen or twenty, can't remember. I don't recall how the case went, or if it even went to court, but everyone knew that this was an instance of an irate father who didn't like that someone was diddling his daughter.

Certainly, the age of consent is largely arbitrary, and the best we can do. It's not like someone is an ignorant dewy-eyed kid one day and a responsible adult the following day, when they turn that magical 18, or 16, where ever one happens to be.

I felt guilty complimenting a 20 year old young lady I worked with, even after she had showed me a list of the twenty or so people she had had 'relations' with. Yes, she kept a list. Another co-worker jokingly, but bitterly, called me a 'cradle-robber' and yes, a 'pedo', because I had had the unmitigated audacity to find a 20 year old woman attractive, and the intolerable indecency to tell her so. Of course, I had it coming because I told this young lady how adorable she was a lot, and this habit of mine was quite bothersome to the other ladies.

Nevermind the fact that I never asked her out, never saw her outside of work (except for one occasion when the entire department went bowling), and never made a suggestive or off-color remark to her. I no longer work with her but we remain good friends to this day, if only through Facebook.

[William A. Baurle]

Lest we forget:

The ones to remember and bear in mind are the victimized boys who are truly victims: the ones who are not romantically interested in these nasty priests, NOT consenting, and who are forced to do things and made to suffer physical and mental trauma.

When I finger point, I'm pointing at rapists and/or molestors - and the ones who play hush hush about them, not all those who happen to fall into the gray areas.

[Julie Steiner]

John, to address various points you made:

Temptation is not sin.

Very few of us on the planet have never had a politically incorrect sexual fantasy. Very few of us have never thought, "Sheesh, what is wrong with me, that I find this sick stuff exciting, and can't seem to get it out of my head?" Very few of us would not be mortified if an uncensored version of the stuff in our heads were accessible to those whose opinions of us we care about.

Temptations are involuntary thoughts.

Sins are voluntary actions.

Big difference.

Of course, deliberately feeding a temptation (with porn or stalking or whatever) is a voluntary action, so that would cross the line into sin. But per se, just feeling a sexual attraction to something inappropriate? Not sinful.

Granted, a lot of the squeamish language used by religious instructors is so euphemistic that the distinction between involuntary thoughts and voluntary actions gets muddied. For example, it took me years to figure out that all those forbidding lectures I was subjected to about "entertaining impure thoughts" were probably intended to say "masturbating is bad"...but the latter concept was so indelicate that adults never dared mention it in language comprehensible to any kid in the room. (And also, of course, if any of us kids had managed to figure out what these adults were actually talking about, one of us would surely have asked them to explain what masturbation was, and why it was bad, and we can't have that, can we?) Anyway, if the object of the lectures was simply to make yet another generation neurotic about anything having to do with sex, they succeeded. Yay, tradition.

It's no secret that many adults find the firm young bodies of young people sexually attractive. That's not the problem. The problem is that some of these older, wilier adults exploit the young owners of those firm young bodies, to the great harm of those young people. And for what? A little temporary pleasure for the exploiter.

A few years ago I was looking into teen pregnancy statistics and stumbled across this: in 75% of that year's unwed births to California mothers under the age of 15, the fathers were over the age of 25 years. Seventy-five percent. And that was just the births--of course no figures were available for the men who took their teenaged girlfriends to get abortions, to make the evidence of statutory rape just quietly go away. (And, you know, sometimes birth control works, so the data wouldn't reflect those cases, either.) In short, there are an awful lot of creepy Californian over-25-year-olds determined to get their jollies, regardless of the destructive impact those jollies may have on young girls' lives. [Edited to say: I will try to come back and provide a more responsible citation for this than just "I remember".]

Those are the kinds of situations the "age-of-consent" laws are trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent. Not the kinds of December-May romances ending in marriage (i.e., longterm financial and [presumably] emotional support of the girl) that you mentioned.

I don't paint all of these relationships with the same brush, and I don't understand why you do.

In California, the penalties for statutory rape become less serious [Edited to say: misdemeanor as opposed to felony, and varying terms of prison time], the smaller the age difference between the parties. Two minors engaging in (still illegal) sexual activity are not treated the same as, say, a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old, who are also not treated the same as a 27-year-old having sex with a 17-year-old. [Edit: I changed the preceding sentences to make them gender-neutral.] There is also consideration given to the fact that not all 17-year-olds have the same mental and emotional maturity. There's a lot of wiggle room, and the courts use it to try to be reasonable and compassionate and fair to all parties. Again, the courts don't consider every underage relationship to be the same, and I don't know why you do.

Most US states allow the marriage of an underage girl to an adult man, if it has been determined (often, but not always, with parental input) that she is mentally and emotionally mature enough to consent to this, and that he is mentally and emotionally stable enough for this to be in the girl's best interest. If she is pregnant with the prospective groom's child, he may or may not be prosecuted for statutory rape. Usually not, if they are relatively close in age, and it seems that his motive for marrying her isn't just to escape prosecution. [Edited to say: I believe that if the adult is over 21 it's automatically a felony, but there is some leniency in sentencing depending on the circumstances.]

Generally, the practice of marrying off young girls occurs today in cultures in which fertility and domestic labor are seen as the only reason for a woman's existence. If a girl is raised to believe that her family and society value her only for her ability to crank out as many babies as possible and raise as many of them as possible to adulthood, she might very well want to get started on fulfilling her life's mission as soon as possible. [Edited to say: Or she might be terrified, but have no way out of the business contract between her father and husband-to-be.] Marriage does at least provide her with the compensation of financial stability (in addition to social status, and the inherent joys of being a wife and mother). The honor of being chosen for an early start on married life may well meet the only definition of success and happiness she's ever imagined for herself. [Edited to say: If the only other choices are getting thrown out (or murdered, see recent news from Pakistan) by your father for disobeying his wishes, or marriage to a wife-beater, or death, then marriage to some one who at least doesn't beat you is the best you can hope for, and you might consider yourself fortunate.] If she's fortunate enough not to be shackled to an abusive husband, or not to spend much time at the bottom of the pecking order of women in the household (mother-in-law, previous wives), she might even be happier in her arranged marriage than many women in the West who have chosen their own partners. [Edited to say: I expect to get slammed for this statement, so perhaps I should clarify that I'm not saying denying women any say-so over their lives makes them happier. I'm saying that it's possible to be in an oppressive situation and simply be content that it isn't much worse.]

Contrast her fate with that of a girl (or boy) who is sold into sex slavery. The pimp gets almost everything, and the poor kid just gets a subsistence diet, disease, and an early death. Even if that kid willingly consents to becoming a prostitute, is it really consent, when he or she has no other realistic options for survival?

And then, of course, there's just grooming a child for abuse, having one's fun, and shaming the kid into silence, as these priests tried to do. No concern for consequences to the child.

You really don't see a difference between those three scenarios, John? I don't find them at all equivalent, except for the fact that an adult gets to enjoy having sex with a child's young body in all three of them. The degrees of exploitation and damage to a young person's life are quite different, though.

In short, the priests who used their authority to sexually prey on young men and women really can't be compared to men wanting to marry teenaged girls, or to men simply fantasizing about sex with young people. Apples and oranges and bananas.

But I'm glad to discuss these distinctions. They're something that should be discussed.

[Julie Steiner]

The document that gave the 75% figure has been removed, but here is a pretty good summary of the problem of adults preying on young women in California.

And here is a teen-oriented document emphasizing that not all cases of statutory rape are prosecuted, clarifying the differences in penalties depending on the age difference, and encouraging pregnant teens not to avoid getting health care for fear of getting their partners in trouble.

[I realize that these points are somewhat off-topic, since the vast majority of the victims of clergy sex abuse were boys, and I certainly don't want to minimize what happened to them just because boys can't get pregnant. But I did want to address some of John's statements.]

[William A. Baurle]

Quite Apart From The Holy Ghost

I remember God as an eccentric millionaire,
Locked in his workshop, beard a cloud of foggy-coloured hair,
Making the stones all different, each flower and disease,
Putting the Laps in Lapland, making China for the Chinese,
Laying down the Lake of Lucerne as smooth as blue-grey lino,
Wearily inventing the appendix and the rhino,
Making the fine fur for the mink, fine women for the fur,
Man’s brain a gun, his heart a bomb, his conscience – a blur.

Christ I can see much better from here,
And Christ upon the Cross is clear.
Jesus is stretched like the skin of a kite
Over the cross, he seems in flight
Sometimes. At times it seems more true
That he is meat nailed up alive and pain all through.
But it’s hard to see Christ for priests. That happens when
A poet engenders generations of advertising men.

— Adrian Mitchell

*


By the by, I actually spotted this poem while going through a print anthology I picked up cheap some years ago called Unrespectable Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson. Put out in 1971, it's quite good and contains lots of formal verse by Mitchell, Stevie Smith, Phyllis McGinley, George Starbuck, and a host of other Pierian celebrities olde and gnu. I'll bet dollars to scones that John Whitworth would love it, and probably already owns it or knows of it.

[dean peterson]

Bill, the Mitchell poem reminded me another biting one he wrote, semi-famous as far as poems go, I think, To Whom It May Concern, which begins with these lines, if I remember right

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way ...

each stanza ending with the refrain: Tell me lies about Vietnam.

[Janice D. Soderling]

"Thou shalt not covet" but I do covet that book. There are three of my favorite writers named in a single line: Mitchell, Stevie Smith, Phyllis McGinley, George Starbuck.

Coveting a neighbor's book surely isn't as bad as coveting his or her ass.

[William A. Baurle]

Dean, yup, that's the name of the poem, and it's in the book I mentioned. I don't know what the form is called, but Elizabeth Bishop uses it to great effect in a poem with 'Bedlam' in it, I believe. Will Gooooogle when I get back from work later on. I'm on break right now and far too tired.

Janice, thanks for making me LOL**, I needed it after my stressful day thus far. I'll bet you can find a used copy of the anthology at Amazon or some other bookseller online. I'll check into it later if you haven't already.

Or:

I'd hate to part with it, but I can scan it for you, page for page, if you're willing to wait about ten years for me to have time to do it! : p < tongue-sticking out smilie.

**Sure, it's a very sensitive topic, but one does need some levity once in a while.