"Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia? [Part 4]

The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution (plus "Conclusion")

Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland

Part [4] of "Liberal" and Green support for Paedophilia? is a continuation of Part [1], Part [2] and Part [3] and ends the article.

(6) The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution

There were no equivalents in Ireland to the USA’s Father Paul Shanley or Belgium’s Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and Cardinal Danneels.(See Part [3]) Obviously there were cases where children were sexually abused by Irish priests or religious. However no clerical abuser gave public lectures to clergy and laity in which he defended sexual relationships between adults and adolescents (as Fr Paul Shanley did). And there was no Irish catechism like the Belgian “Roeach” containing drawings of naked children who were making statements like: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends” etc. In Belgium, after Alexandra Colen made futile attempts with other parents to get the catechism withdrawn, she decided to sever all ties with the Catholic education system and set up a homeschool together with other parents, so that their children would be educated in a Catholic environment.

In Ireland Catholic traditionalists often expressed frustration with the inadequacy – and inanity – of post-Vatican II religious teaching in schools, but they were not faced with THAT type of problem.  The saga of Bishop Brendan Comiskey and “child- abuser” (more correctly adolescent-abuser) priest Fr Sean Fortune is relevant here. Brendan Comiskey had to resign as Bishop of Ferns in 2002 following claims that he had not dealt adequately with allegations of abuse made against Fr Fortune. In his resignation statement he said that he had tried everything in his management of Fortune but found him “virtually impossible to deal with”.  When Fortune committed suicide shortly before facing trial, he left a note in which he claimed that hehad been raped by Bishop Comiskey! So we are NOT talking about the kind of cosy friendship that existed between Cardinal Godfried Danneels and the paedophile Bishop Roger Vangheluwe in Belgium. (Alexandra Colen writes:  Mgr Roger Vangheluwe, the pedophile child molesting Bishop of Bruges, was the supervising bishop of both institutions – the Catholic University of Leuven and the Seminary of Bruges – whence came the editors in chief of this perverted “catechism” textbook.)

However from the 1960s – and especially after the Vatican II – the Irish Church was buffeted by waves of change which it proved unable to cope with. Most of the problems related to sex. In July 1968, in his sensational encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘On Human Life’) Pope Paul VI went against the advice of his own commission and proclaimed that the act of love must always be open to the possibility of procreation. ‘Natural’ methods of fertility control could be used but in Mary Kenny’s words the Pope’s ruling could be summed up in the phrase, ‘Give God a sporting chance’ – the pill and other forms of artificial contraception were out. This created a great furore. Many Catholic couples had been the pill in anticipation of its approval and many priests were coming to the view that the case for contraception, responsibly used, was reasonable. However conservative members of the hierarchy notably Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin and Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork came out strongly in support of the encyclical. 

As in other countries, this controversy worsened the conflict between liberal and conservative parties in the Church that was to have momentous consequences. Subsequently there were two referendums in 1983 and 1995 to amend the Constitution in order to allow divorce, the second of which saw a narrow victory for the divorce lobby – and this is often cited as marking the end of Catholic Ireland. (Following the ‘yes’ vote, Conor Cruise O’Brien declared that Ireland was at last ‘a fit country for Protestants to live in’.) . The prominent feminist nun (and distinguished historian) Margaret McCurtain, spoke out for personal choice and for the division of Church and State on issues like divorce. There was an ongoing bitter controversy for decades concerning abortion. However where allegations of child abuse by clerics are concerned, the issue of homosexuality is the key one and this is what links developments in Ireland to those in Belgium, the USA and indeed worldwide.

Ireland may not have produced a cleric like Fr Paul Shanley who flaunted his homosexual lifestyle and gave lectures to clergy – and Bishops – on the joys of same. However in “Goodbye to Catholic Ireland” (pages 355-57), Mary Kenny details how some “liberal” Irish priests began to stretch the boundaries of  what was acceptable in the area of sexual relationships.  She quotes as a characteristic example of the new liberal tone among the clergy a strong article in the Furrow in 1979 about the pastoral care of homosexuals written by Redemptorist priest Father Ralph Gallagher.

“Father Gallagher questioned in this ground-breaking article, the traditional Christian view of homosexuality as being ‘contra naturam’: the theory he said was undergoing serious review. ‘Many debates on homosexuality reveal prejudice, fear and unsupported statements rather than the elements of reason and freedom which, theoretically are the basis of ethical analysis  … Homosexuals should not be judged to be immoral any more than a blind person if prenatally the visual tracts are not complete.’  …Some of the unhappiness of homosexuals was, in part, the fault of the Church. ‘The alienation and loneliness of many homosexuals have been contributed to in no small way by the attitude of society and of the Churches.’ We should be cautious in our use of scriptural texts about homosexuality ….Ralph Gallagher warns his fellow clergy; we must challenge the notion that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil or ‘imperfect’. Homosexuality must be seen as part of a proper understanding of sexuality ‘in its wider sense’. And this wider sense was arising because sex was no longer simply about procreation: birth control had altered perspectives. ‘We must take cognisance of the changed emphasis on procreation in a theological understanding of sex. It can no longer be regarded as the single dominant norm by which all sexual behaviour is judged. The reality of personal sexual encounters is too wide to be compressed into the univocal notion of procreation.’

Mary Kenny comments that Hugh Hefner had said that after the pill, sex was about recreation, not procreation – and now here was a Redemptorist using (perhaps unconsciously) the ideas of the founder of Playboy magazine as source text. Father Gallagher himself had been deeply impressed by a letter from a homosexual who had struggled with his orientation and who wrote, ‘The most important thing that happened to me was the realization that homosexuality was natural for me and from God.’

Kenny comments [ my emphasis]: “As the 1960s slogan had it – if it feels good, do it! What feels natural is natural. The crucial change that the 1960s had brought about was this shift from reasoning to feeling.”

The development of feminism within the Catholic Church also led in some very strange directions. The Furrow began to show the influence of feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether. ‘Patriarchy’ within the Church was the target and the idealised image of the Blessed Virgin as a role model was inextricably linked with the asceticism of the Church fathers. (As per Wikipedia:  “In 2005 Ruether presented to an audience at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles her view that "Christianity is riddled by hierarchy and patriarchy” and that this created a social order in which chaste women on their wedding night were "in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes."  ….. "modern societies have sought to change this situation, allowing women education, legal autonomy, paid employment and personal freedom. But the sexual morality of traditional puritanical patriarchal Christianity has never been adequately rethought." ⁾ 

 According to an article in The Furrow by Helen Sheehy in 1985 we needed a complete revolution in the male-dominated Church. ‘Todays sexual ethic promoted by a male celibate Church finds no answering chord in the hearts of many women . Feminist theology seeks to re-image God.’  This new image was not to replace Father with Mother: we really required freedom from God. ‘Ruether maintains that that the substitution of a female for a male image only serves to perpetuate a parent-child relationship to God, which she deems to be inimical to autonomy. Behind her thinking lies a valid desire to dismantle a patriarchal system of government in the Church.’  

According to Mary Kenny: “Behind Ms Ruether’s thinking, also was Freud, who considered the concept of God a form of infantilism, and Sartre, for whom ‘autonomy’ was the purpose of life. There were many other articles on these lines and they indicated how the cookie was crumbling.”

The fact that The Furrow “a monthly journal for the contemporary Church” would publish such ideas and such authors is an indication that something other than “tolerance” is at work here. In the “About Us” section of its website, “The Furrow” highlights some of its famous contributors over the years. Among them is Mary McAleese former President of Ireland and a much more mainstream figure than a radical feminist theologian like Ruether (who is not listed). However the views of Mary McAleese indicate just what is regarded as “mainstream” in modern Ireland. According to her Wikipedia article (treating the period after she was President): [12]

“In a radio interview discussing her book Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law on 28 September 2012, said she was concerned at the growing number of young men, and in particular young gay men, who take their own lives in Ireland. She said that when the research is broken down, it shows that young gay men are one of the most risk-prone groups in Ireland. McAleese said many of these young men will have gone to Catholic schools and they will have heard there their church's attitude to homosexuality. "They will have heard words like disorder, they may even have heard the word evil used in relation to homosexual practice," she said. She went on to say "And when they make the discovery, and it is a discovery and not a decision, when they make the discovery, that they are gay, when they are 14, 15 or 16, an internal conflict of absolutely appalling proportions opens up". She said many young gay men are driven into a place that is "dark and bleak". McAleese said she met the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Charles John Brown, shortly after Easter to raise with him her concern about the growing number of suicides among young men in Ireland.” [My emphasis]

The influence of the Catholic Church has been in steep decline for the past 30 years or so, yet Mary McAleese sees no contradiction in blaming the Church for the increase in the number of young gay men who are committing suicide! Is this female logic?  Not really – but it is definitely feminist logic!

The willingness of liberal theologians in the Catholic Church to pander to gay and feminist lifestyles and to their ideologies of victimisation has consequences in the real world also. In an interview with the Irish Times shortly after he retired as Bishop of Killaloe, the VERY liberal Bishop Willie Walsh made perhaps the only comment in his episcopal career that had the potential to displease his fellow liberals in the Church and the media: [13]

I’m very nervous about saying this – it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced – but practically all the abuse that I’ve come across has been abuse of boys, and boys of 14, 15 years old. [my emphasis] Now, that raises some serious questions, and if you really went into them you would be accused of mixing up homosexuality and paedophilia. If a priest abuses a 16- or 17-year old, is that homosexual? It’s certainly not paedophilia. Where does the division come? It is a very hazardous area – and there’s no question in my mind that I’m not equating homosexuality with sexual abuse by priests. No, I’m not. But I’m saying that at a certain point the distinction is not that clear.

The reason that “it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced” is that Bishop Willie’s media admirers have no wish to face it. It’s a great pity that the Bishop himself made no attempt to refer to the elephant in the drawing room it until he was safely retired, but better late than never!

 (7) CONCLUSION

Pope Benedict was absolutely correct when he said in December 2010 that:

“In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained - even within the realm of Catholic theology - that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a "better than" and a "worse than". Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today ………

Our modern day liberals and anti-clerics have either forgotten what they and their predecessors were saying in the 1970s – or they are being deliberately dishonest!

Among the details they have managed to forget are:

•     The fact that a pro-paedophile organisation The Paedophile Information Exchange was a member of the British “National Council for Civil Liberties” (now called “Liberty”) until 1983 and was closely association with the gay liberation movement in the UK.[Part 2]

•       The fact that two leading feminist politicians Harriet Harmann and Patricia Hewitt cut their teeth as leading lights in the NCCL at precisely the time that organisation was associated with the PIE. (Curiously enough the NCCL cut PIE loose shortly after Harmann and Hewitt left to pursue their political careers.) [Part 2]

•       The fact that it was only because of the intervention Mary Whitehouse in 1976 that the government-funded gay charity “Albany Trust” did not publish a booklet provided by PIE and the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) group. The reason the Trustees gave for declining to publish the booklet was that it wasn’t sufficiently “objective”. It is difficult to know what sort of “objectivity” they had expected from the two paedophile groups but presumably they did not want to credit Mary Whitehouse with their change of mind! [Part 2]

•      The fact that the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was a member of one of the biggest gay rights movements in the world – the International Lesbian and Gay Association – right up until 1993. [Part 2]

•  The fact that in 1977, a French petition against age of consent laws was addressed to the parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age-of-consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France). This was signed by such luminaries as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer Philippe Sollers, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions. [Part 1 - NOTES]

•  The fact that Fr Paul Shanley the priest at the centre of the USA’s  paedophile hysteria, was for decades a liberal and gay icon who was finally removed from his “gay outreach” ministry in 1979 because of protests by Catholic traditionalists. Because he remained a Catholic priest, his former liberal friends later used his lifestyle to demonise him as a paeophile and to demonise the Catholic traditionalists who had always loathed him! [Part 3]

 It is very strange that former IRA-man and hunger striker Anthony McIntyre’s choose to denounce Pope Benedict on this issue in his blog “The Pensive Quill” (article entitled “Papal Bull” dated 26 December 2010). You would expect him to have some familiarity with the views of Labour Party stalwarts Harman and Hewitt as both had been Secretaries of State in the British Government and the NCCL had been vocal on the human rights issue during the IRA’s 30 year terror campaign. Moreover when a poster on The Pensive Quill referred to the 1977 petition to parliament from several French intellectuals - including Sartre and Foucault -  Anthony McIntyre defended Foucault and minimised the significance of the petition. I tend to assume he would not have done this except in a context where the petition was being quoted to show that Pope Benedict was correct in his description of 1970s attitudes to paedophilia.  Has Anthony McIntyre broken with the IRA only to replace the British Government with the Catholic Church, as the supposed fountain-head of all evil?

During the several years of violence that preceded the foundation of the Irish State in 1922, the Catholic Church was the sole force that united constitutional reformers with revolutionaries of every persuasion. This was a major factor in ensuring the survival of democracy in Ireland. In contrast, during the 30 year IRA campaign in Northern Ireland from 1969, both the Provisional and the Official IRA were anti-clerics whose attitude to Catholic Bishops was not very different to that of Dr Ian Paisley. For operational reasons both IRAs made some effort to conceal their antipathy during the years of terror and violence. Hardly had Taoiseach Albert Reynolds got the peace process under way in 1994 but (former Workers party TD) PatRabbitte felt free to destroy his coalition government by peddling fantasies about a conspiracy between Church and State to protect Fr Brendan Smyth. And now Anthony McIntyre has courageously broken with his former terrorist colleagues but continues to subscribe to a similar type of fantasy!

NOTES:

[12] Wikipedia article on Mary McAleese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McAleese

The Wikipedia article also contains the following:

In 1998, she met the Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on an official visit to the US. In an interview in 2012 she said that Law told her he was "sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President" and went on to insult a junior minister who was accompanying the then president. "His remarks were utterly inappropriate and unwelcome," she said. McAleese told the cardinal that she was the "President of Ireland and not just of Catholic Ireland". At this point, a heated argument ensued between the two, according to McAleese.

By any chance did Mary McAleese express to Cardinal Law the same kind of “compassionate” views that she articulated in 2012, and could it be that it was that kind of “compassion” that annoyed the Cardinal?

[13]  extract from “The Bishop Who Speaks His Mind” , by Kathy Sheridan, Irish Times, 6 November 2010. Article is behind Irish Times firewall but can be viewed at
http://www.irishsalem.com/individuals/Politicians%20and%20Others/bishop-willie-walsh/bishopwho-speakshismind-06nov10.php

"Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia? [Part 2]

Allen Ginsberg - "I Joined NAMBLA in defense of Free Speech"

The Paedophile Information Exchange, NAMBLA and Gay/Civil Rights Organisations

This is Part [2] of a four-part series "Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia?"  Sections (1) and (2) are contained in Part [1]  Please note that I wrote this article in 2010 so - for example - Harriet Harman is no longer Deputy Leader of the Labour Party !

(3) Danes First to Legalise Child Pornography

This was also the fate of an article published in The Sunday Business Post on 28 October 2007 by John Burke – “Danes First to Legalise Child Pornography”. [5] It began:

The sexual revolution of the mid-1960s heralded a dramatic increase in the demand for pornography of all types, fuelled by what leading Irish criminologist and UCD academic Ian O’Donnell notes was a narrowing of what was perceived to be obscene. Censorship laws were relaxed and the Danish government led the march by legalising all forms of pornography in 1969. The effect was to create a massive industry that created materials that later became mainstays among the international paedophile market.

One expert has described the following decade as a ‘‘ten year madness’’. A lack of legislation in other Western countries permitted a global industry to develop which was primarily based on images of children being abused, which were sourced and distributed from Denmark. Some years after he became a rich man from the production of child pornography, Danish businessman Willy Strauss recounted how his 1971 magazine, which was entitled Bambina Sex, sold more than 10,000 copies among pornography dealers within two hours of it coming off the printing press. ….

John Burke observes that by the time the Danes made the production of child pornography illegal, the industry had made numerous people vast sums of wealth through the creation of images of children being sexually abused, and the distribution for sale of millions of magazines and films reputed to remain in circulation among paedophile networks around the world today.

In a related article (“Protecting Childhood”) in the same issue of The Sunday Business Post, John Burke quotes Ian O’Donnell as wondering whether Irish society’s preoccupation with child sexuality has done more harm than good. Have we ended up viewing all children through the eyes of a paedophile, seriously altering the manner in which we interact with them as a result?

O’Donnell believes parental fear over other adults’ possible interest in their child’s sexuality has led to a vastly changed parenting environment. ‘‘A belief that the world was a safe place and that other adults could be relied upon has been sundered. In its place has grown an attitude of generalised mistrust, accompanied by an ingrained tendency to overestimate the dangers of childhood. It seems as if adults have lost the ability to discriminate between degrees of danger."

One might add that the ludicrous reaction to Pope Benedict’s perfectly reasonable – and accurate – observations is a further indication of society’s inability to discriminate between truth and hysteria.

(4) Paedophile Groups and Gay/Civil Rights Organisations

(A) Paedophile Information Exchange (UK) and National  Council for Civil Liberties etc

The Paedophile Information Exchange had links with “gay” organisations from the very beginning and with the National Council for Civil Liberties up to 1983 at least. In 1976 it attracted the ire of that doyen of reactionaries Mary Whitehouse who succeeded in preventing the government-funded “Albany Trust” from publishing a booklet provided by PIE and the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) group. The reason the Trustees gave for declining to publish the booklet was that it wasn’t sufficiently “objective”. (The Albany Trust was founded in the United Kingdom as a registered charity in May 1958 to complement the Homosexual Law Reform Society. After the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexual relationships, the Albany Trust became an educational and counselling organisation and was also involved the development of sex education – hence the paedophile booklet project!)

According to the Wikipedia article on the Paedophile Information Exchange:

“PIE was set up as a special interest group within the Scottish Minorities Group by founder member Michael Hanson, who became the group's first Chairman.

“Since the majority of enquiries were from England, PIE relocated to London in 1975 where 23-year old Keith Hose became its new Chairperson. Hose had connections with the South London group of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). GLF thinking questioned the family as the basis of an economic, social and sexual system and certain sections of GLF favoured the abolition of the age of consent; their youth group had staged a march in support of this demand (however, it should be noted that the age of consent for homosexuals was 21 at the time, in comparison to 16 for heterosexuals).

“Paedophile Action for Liberation [PAL] had developed as a breakaway group from South London Gay Liberation Front. It was the subject of an article in the Sunday People, which dedicated its front page and centre-spread to the story. The result was intimidation and loss of employment for some of those who were exposed. It later merged with PIE.

“This exposé on PAL had a chilling effect on PIE members' willingness for activism. In the PIE Chairperson's Annual Report for 1975-6, Keith Hose wrote that 'The only way for PIE to survive, was to seek out as much publicity for the organization as possible.... If we got bad publicity we would not run into a corner but stand and fight. We felt that the only way to get more paedophiles joining PIE... was to seek out and try to get all kinds of publications to print our organization's name and address and to make paedophilia a real public issue.'

“A campaign to attract media attention was not effective at that time, but Hose's attendance at the 1975 annual conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in Sheffield, where he made a speech on paedophilia, was covered at length in The Guardian.

In the same year Hose also attended a conference organized by Mind, the national mental health organization, where it was suggested that PIE should submit evidence to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee on the age of consent. PIE submitted a 17-page document in which it proposed that there should be no age of consent, and that the criminal law should concern itself only with sexual activities to which consent is not given, or which continue after prohibition by a civil court. …..

In 1976 both PIE and PAL had been asked to help the Albany Trust to produce a booklet on paedophilia which was to have been published by the Trust. This collaboration was 'uncovered' by Mary Whitehouse, who alleged that public funds were being used indirectly to subsidize 'paedophile groups'. The Albany Trust was partly supported by government grants. The Trustees decided not to publish the booklet, saying that it wasn't sufficiently 'objective'. ……

Affiliation To The National Council For Civil Liberties

By 1978 PIE and Paedophile Action for Liberation had become affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty, with members attending meetings. The organisation campaigned against newspapers' treatment of the Paedophile activist groups. Whilst affiliated with NCCL, PIE also campaigned to reduce the age of consent and oppose the proposed banning of child pornography. In 1976, in a submission to the Criminal Law Revision Committee, the NCCL asserted that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage” and that the Protection of Children Bill would lead to “damaging and absurd prosecutions”. Whilst PIE was affiliated with it, the organisation argued for incest to be decriminalised and argued that sexually explicit photographs of children should be legal unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered harm or that the an inference to that effect or to the effect that harm might have been caused could reasonably be drawn from the images themselves, with Harriet Harman (later deputy leader of the Labour Party) arguing that it would “increase censorship”. NCCL had excluded PIE by 1983.

Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman and P.I.E.

Since Harriet Harman is now deputy leader of the Labour Party, it is remarkable that her role in the NCCL from 1978 to 1982 regarding the paedophilia issue, has not come under serious scrutiny (It is not even mentioned in her Wikipedia article). Much the same applies to Patricia Hewitt who joined the NCCL as a woman’s rights officer in 1973 and was their general secretary for 9 years from 1974. (Hewitt was to become Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and later Secretary of State for Health.) The careers of both in the NCCL, dovetail neatly with the heyday of the Paedophile Information Exchange whose NCCL affiliation was only removed in 1983 – the year that Patricia Hewitt resigned to pursue a career in politics. (Hewitt  became Press Secretary to the leader of the Opposition Neil Kinnock where – as per Wikipedia – “she was a key player in the first stages of the 'modernisation' of the Labour Party”.) [6]

One of the rare occasions when the media questioned the role of these former NCCL stalwarts occurred in December 2009 when the Daily Telegraph published an article entitled “Harriet Harman under attack over bid to water down child pornography law”. According to the article:

The Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Women and Equality, who also sits on a Cabinet committee on young people’s welfare, is being touted as a possible successor to Gordon Brown. But she faces fresh criticism from Opposition MPs and campaign groups after The Daily Telegraph obtained documents showing that she called on ministers to make sexually explicit photographs or films of children legal unless there was evidence that the subject had been harmed. 

At the time she made the official submission, she was a senior figure in a civil liberties organisation that wanted the age of consent to be lowered to 14 and incest decriminalised. It also defended self-confessed paedophiles in the press and allowed them to attend its meetings.

Last night Tim Loughton, the Shadow Children’s Minister, said: “Clearly there is a serious conflict of interest with the committees she sits on, who might want urgently to clarify her position on the exploitation of children for the sexual gratification of adults. “It’s a shame that Miss Harman’s zeal for positive discrimination and all things politically correct among adults does not extend to the exploitation of children. Any child who is used for the sexual gratification of adults counts as an abused child and needs protecting.”

Miss Harman, 58, was a newly qualified solicitor when she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty, in 1978. At the time its general secretary was Patricia Hewitt, who went on to become health secretary under Tony Blair.

Among the groups affiliated to NCCL were the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, whose members argued openly for the abolition of the age of consent. NCCL complained to the press watchdog about their treatment by tabloid newspapers and said in one article: “We support any organisation that seeks to campaign for anything it wants within the law. They have that right.”

In NCCL’s official response to the Government’s plans to reform sex laws, dubbed a “Lolita’s Charter”, it suggested reducing the age of consent and argued that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage”. It claimed that children can suffer more from having to retell their experiences in court or the press.

Amid growing public concern about adults preying on children, the Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament in order to tighten the laws on child pornography by banning indecent images of under-16s. NCCL’s official response, signed by Miss Harman and submitted in April 1978, claimed that the new law could lead to “damaging and absurd prosecutions” and “increase censorship”. …….

Miss Harman left NCCL in 1982 when she was elected MP for Camberwell and Peckham, by which time several members of PIE had been jailed for conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

A spokesman for Miss Harman said: “She has always opposed child pornography and has never supported PIE and to suggest that she did is untrue and misleading. “NCCL’s approach to the protection of children’s bill was to argue for clear definitions in  the bill to make sure the law was precise so that it was about child protection and not about censorship.”

The spokesman added: “PIE had been excluded from the NCCL before she became legal officer.” However press cuttings from 1983 make it clear that it was still considered an “affiliate group”.

It looks like the NCCL only cut its links with the Paedophile Information Exchange AFTER both Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt had left. Well at least the NCCL didn’t wait for a further decade – it wasn’t until Nineteen Nighty Three (1993) that the International Gay and Lesbian Association cut loose NAMBLA – the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

(B) The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and the Gay Movement

According to the Wikipedia article on NAMBLA:

The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophile and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age of consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors, and campaigns for the release of all men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve coercion. Some reports state that the group no longer has regular national meetings, and that as of the late 1990s, to avoid local police infiltration, the organization discouraged the formation of local chapters. Around 1995, an undercover detective discovered that there were 1,100 people on the rolls. As of 2005, a newspaper report stated that NAMBLA was based in New York and San Francisco.

HISTORY  Events such as Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign in 1977, and a police raid of Toronto-area gay newspaper The Body Politic for publishing "Men Loving Boys Loving Men" set the stage for the founding of NAMBLA. 

In December 1977, police raided a house in the Boston suburb of Revere. Twenty-four men were arrested and indicted on over 100 felony counts of the statutory rape of boys aged eight to fifteen. Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne found that the men used drugs and video games to lure the boys into a house, where they photographed them as they engaged in sexual activity. The men were members of a "sex ring", and said that the arrest was only "the tip of the iceberg." The arrests sparked intense media coverage, and local newspapers published the photographs and personal information of the accused men. The "Boston-Boise Committee", a gay rights organization, formed in response to these events and to protect the "rights of gay men" and promote "gay solidarity." NAMBLA's founding was inspired by this gay rights organization. It was co-founded by the gay historian David Thorstad. …….

In 1994 NAMBLA was expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association, having been the first US based organization to be a member. "Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys" was produced and directed by Adi Sideman in 1994. Members of NAMBLA were interviewed and presented defenses of the organization. Allen Ginsberg appeared in the film.  …….

Media reports from 2006 have suggested that for practical purposes the group no longer exists and that it consists only of a web site maintained by a few enthusiasts.

RELATIONS WITH LGBT ORGANIZATIONS   The first documented opposition from LGBT organizations to NAMBLA occurred in the conference that organized the first gay march on Washington in 1979.In 1980 a group called the "Lesbian Caucus – Lesbian & Gay Pride March Committee" distributed a hand-out urging women to split from the annual New York City Gay Pride March because the organizing committee had supposedly been dominated by NAMBLA and its supporters. The next year, after some lesbians threatened to picket, the Cornell University gay group Gay PAC (Gay People at Cornell) rescinded its invitation to NAMBLA founder David Thorstad to be the keynote speaker at the annual May Gay Festival. In the following years, gay rights groups attempted to block NAMBLA’s participation in gay pride parades, prompting leading gay rights figure Harry Hay to wear a sign proclaiming "NAMBLA walks with me" as he participated in a 1986 gay pride march in Los Angeles.

By the mid-1980s, NAMBLA was virtually alone in its positions and found itself politically isolated. Gay rights organizations, burdened by accusations of child recruitment and child abuse, had abandoned the radicalism of their early years and had "retreat[ed] from the idea of a more inclusive politics," opting instead to appeal more to the mainstream. Support for "groups perceived as being on the fringe of the gay community," such as NAMBLA, vanished in the process.

In 1994 the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) adopted a "Position Statement Regarding NAMBLA" saying GLAAD "deplores the North American Man Boy Love Association's (NAMBLA) goals, which include advocacy for sex between adult men and boys and the removal of legal protections for children. These goals constitute a form of child abuse and are repugnant to GLAAD." Also in 1994 the Board of Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) adopted a resolution on NAMBLA that said: "NGLTF condemns all abuse of minors, both sexual and any other kind, perpetrated by adults. Accordingly, NGLTF condemns the organizational goals of NAMBLA and any other such organization."

In 1994 NAMBLA, along with many members of the Gay Liberation Front participated in the "The Spirit of Stonewall" march which commemorated the 1969 Stonewall Riots. …..

THE INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY ASSOCIATION CONTROVERSY   In 1993, the International Lesbian and Gay Association achieved United Nations consultative status. NAMBLA's membership in ILGA drew heavy criticism and caused the suspension of ILGA. Many gay organizations called for the ILGA to dissolve ties with NAMBLA. Republican Senator Jesse Helms proposed a bill to withhold $119 million in UN contributions until U.S. President Bill Clinton could certify that "no UN agency grants any official status, accreditation, or recognition to any organization which promotes, condones, or seeks the legalization of pedophilia, that is, the sexual abuse of children". The bill was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by Clinton in April 1994.

IN 1994, ILGA expelled NAMBLA and two other groups (MARTIJN and Project Truth) because they were judged to be "groups whose predominant aim is to support or promote pedophilia." Although ILGA removed NAMBLA, the UN reversed its decision to grant ILGA special consultative status. Repeated attempts by ILGA to reacquire special status with the UN were eventually successful in 2006.

Gregory King of the Human Rights Campaign later said that "NAMBLA is not a gay organization ... They are not part of our community and we thoroughly reject their efforts to insinuate that pedophilia is an issue related to gay and lesbian civil rights." NAMBLA responded by claiming that "man/boy love is by definition homosexual," that "man/boy lovers are part of the gay movement and central to gay history and culture," and that "homosexuals denying that it is 'not gay' to be attracted to adolescent boys are just as ludicrous as heterosexuals saying it's 'not heterosexual' to be attracted to adolescent girls."

Some Prominent NAMBLA Supporters

According to Wikipedia, “David Thorstad (born June 6, 1941), an American political activist and historian of the gay rights movement since the 1970s, was a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He was also active in Trotskyist politics for some years. ….  In 1978 Thorstad was a founding member of NAMBLA, "served as a member of the Steering Committee from some undetermined time until September 1996" and was one of a group of NAMBLA members who were sued in 2000 for the wrongful death of a ten-year-old boy in a long-running court case Curley v. NAMBLA in Boston.”  The Wiki article also mentions that Thorstad describes the modern gay rights movement as "politically correct zombies” – presumably because of their (rather late) repudiation of paedophilia?

According to Wikipedia, “Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.”

However Ginsberg obviously did not see paedophilia as one of these “destructive forces”. In fact he was a supporter and member of NAMBLA. In "Thoughts on NAMBLA", a 1994 essay published in the collection Deliberate Prose, Ginsberg stated, "I joined NAMBLA in defence of free speech." He referred to NAMBLA "as a forum for reform of those laws on youthful sexuality which members deem oppressive, a discussion society not a sex club." 
At any rate that is what the editors of his Wikipedia article regarded as fit to publish. (It suggests that Ginsberg was simply taking the principal of freedom of speech to its logical – if extreme – conclusion.) However the collection “Deliberate Prose also includes a letter from Ginsberg to Ralph Ginzburg [7] in June 1962:

 “Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me,  they’ll get used to our lovemaking in 2 days provided the controlling adults stop making those hysterical NOISES that make everything sexy sound like rape.  RAPE is the only obnoxious love, which we all want to discourage naturally, so you can call up the cops for that. If you still need sex-cops when nobody steals what they can get for free. Yes there’ll always be a few irreducibly unattractive eccentrics, to be sure, grabbing unpleasantly as long as there are little girls coming home from school. One barely needs a bit of law to deal with them and that law a law against violence, not really a sex law. Also need a couple of tantric cops or mescaline detectives, men of a certain delicacy to pacify the violent.” [8]

Andrea Dworkin reflected this in her 2001 autobiography "Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant" where she wrote "But in fact, he (Ginsberg) was a pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys." (page 38) 

(C) Radical Feminism and Paedophile Groups

Andrea Dworkin was a Man-Hating Feminist in the full literal sense of the term. Ginsberg and his fellow male liberals had originally collaborated with feminists in their common aim of destroying a hated Male, Bourgeois, Christian establishment and achieved considerable success in their goal from the 1960s onwards. As is common with successful revolutionaries, they then turned this hatred on each other. Paedophilia seems to be an almost exclusively male perversion and provided a perfect platform for feminist radicals who not only saw Patriarchy as the root of all evil but regarded men as their enemies. Dworkin’s denunciation of Allen Ginsberg is one indication of how and why “liberal” attitudes to paedophilia began to change in the 1980s. A decade later most liberals had not only abandoned their previous support for paedophilia but had managed to forget about it as well! (No doubt this is why in December 2009, a spokesman for Harriet Harman was able to claim that the Paedophile Information Exchange had been excluded from the National Council of Civil Liberties before she became legal officer in 1978, whereas the exclusion actually occurred in 1983 - the year after she left to become an MP.)

The career of Patricia Hewitt after she left the NCCL in 1983 to pursue a political career illustrates the new direction taken by feminists. As per Wikipedia :
“ In 2001, she joined Blair's cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, before becoming Health Secretary in 2005, chiefly remembered for getting smoking banned in public places, against heavy opposition. Hewitt has sparked many controversies, notably her selection of a female job-applicant over a stronger male candidate, and her theory that fathers may not be a useful influence in the upbringing of children.”

Very curious attitudes and achievements for a former general secretary of Britain’s premier Civil Liberties advocacy group! Wikipedia gives further details:

In September 2005, a Judicial Review found Hewitt "guilty of unlawful sex discrimination" when she employed a female applicant for a DTI [Department of Trade and Industry] position ahead of a significantly stronger male candidate. The judge ruled that Malcolm Hanney had lost out to a candidate ranked third by the interview panel and that the failure to appoint him was "in breach of the code of practice for ministerial appointments to public bodies". Hewitt had quoted the Code of Practice on Public Appointments, which said: "Ministers will wish to balance boards in terms of diversity as well as skills and experience.", though the panel had clearly stated that Mr Hanney was "much the strongest candidate". 

The DTI apologised and Hanney was awarded £17,967.17 costs. The appointment was not overturned however and Hewitt herself did not apologise and claimed not to have realised she was in breach of the law. Rod Little of The Times juxtaposed Hewitt's claim with the fact that Hewitt's department was itself responsible for the Sex Discrimination Act, suggesting she believed the purpose of sex discrimination legislation "was intended to be of benefit only to women" rather than "maltreated job applicants...foolish enough to be born with a penis".

The Wikipedia article does not discuss the relationship between the NCCL and the Paedophile Information Exchange during the period when Hewitt was general secretary of the former. However it appears that her attitude to men and children had undergone a very strange evolution. As per Wikipedia:

Sociologist Geoff Dench has stated that Hewitt discourages male involvement in child rearing by questioning "whether we can trust men with children" and she concluded that it would be necessary to adopt the practice of "not leaving men on their own with groups of children". Dench also criticised Hewitt for suggesting that it requires less intelligence and education to raise children than to be employed.Erin Pizzey similarly criticised the views expressed by Hewitt and her co-authors in the 1990 IPPR report "The Family Way". Writing in the Daily Mail, Pizzey claimed the report was a "staggering attack on men and their role in modern life" as a result of its stating, "it cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion".

And again:
Hewitt was criticised for a 2003 report by the Women and Equality unit which was run by Hewitt, in which it was stated that there was a "real problem" with mothers who stayed at home to bring up their children. It was described as '"bullying and intolerant" by The Institute of Directors with criticism also coming from mothers groups. [9]

Does this represent some sort of turnaround from the days when the National Council for Civil Liberties were hand in glove with the  Paedophile Information Exchange? Or is it just a logical development from what had gone before?


NOTES:

[5] The two related articles regarding “Danes First to Legalise Child Pornography” are behind the Sunday Business Post firewall but can be read at:
http://www.irishsalem.com/international-controversies/denmark/danesfirst-childpornography-28oct07.php

[6] As per Wikipedia,  Hewitt “had sent a letter to Kinnock claiming to fully support his leadership bid and lobbying for the role, yet also sent an identical letter to Kinnock's opponent in the Labour leadership election, Roy Hattersley.”

 [7] Ralph Ginzburg (October 28, 1929 – July 6, 2006) was an American author, editor, publisher and photo-journalist. He was best known for publishing books and magazines on erotica and art and for his conviction in 1963 for violating federal obscenity laws. One person who had no problem supporting Ginzburg was Allen Ginsberg who travelled to Washington and picketed the Supreme Court building to protest a ruling against his friend.

[8] from page 168 of “Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952 – 1995 by ALLEN GINSBERG”, Forward by Edward Sander/ edited by Bill Morgan, HarperCollins Publishers
According to a quote on the cover from the San Francisco Chronicle, “These essays rise towards the incantatory power of poetry” 
http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060930813

[9] The highly informative Wikipedia article on Patricia Hewitt is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Hewitt