The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns [1]

Nuns, Mothers and Babies in Bon Secours Home, Tuam

The final report from the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy) was due to be delivered to the Government in June but delivery was postponed until 30 October 2020 due to coronavirus. According to the Irish Times  "It was set up following claims that up to 800 babies may have been interred in an unmarked mass grave in the Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway." That's putting it very mildly. Brendan O'Neill editor of Spiked OnLine gives a flavour of the wordwide hysteria that preceded the establishment of the Commission (June 2004 article The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland) 

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post. ‘800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed. Commentators angrily demanded answers from the Catholic Church. ‘Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves’, said a writer for The Guardian, telling no-doubt outraged readers that ‘the bodies of 796 children… have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway’

I discuss the credibility of three preceding Reports including two chaired by the same Judge Yvonne Murphy.

This is the first in a projected series of three articles on "The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns". Part [2] is HERE and Part [3] HERE

(A) Credibility of Ryan Report (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse), May 2009

The Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy is due to be published shortly. I gave evidence myself to the Ryan Commission (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse) as part of a delegation from Let Our Voices Emerge. I emphasised the clearly bogus allegations of child murder made by leaders of "Victim" groups against the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. The Ryan Report was published in May 2009 and  I outlined my experience in a letter published in the Irish Examiner on 7 November 2011 Ryan Report Did Not Deal With False Allegations  

The report of the Ryan Commission published in May 2009 makes no reference to these claims of unlawful killing. Originally I thought that the commission had ignored them completely. It now appears that the commission did investigate the allegations in private session, found no evidence to support them and took a deliberate decision to omit them from its published report. I find this reprehensible.

 I did not give evidence to the Commission of Investigation, Dublin Archdiocese or the Commission of Investigation, Cloyne Diocese - both of which were chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy - Reports published in November 2009 and July 2011 respectively. However the modus operandi of Judge Yvonne Murphy seems to be similar to that of Judge Sean Ryan - including ignoring evidence of false allegations and accepting as true any claim that Church authorities cannot prove false!

(B) Credibility of Murphy Report into Dublin Archdiocese, November 2009

I am not the only one to have such misgivings. This is a Statement by The Association of Catholic Priests in July 2014 on the appointment of Judge Yvonne Murphy to chair the current Commission. 

Statement from the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) responding to the  establishment of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and the appointment of Yvonne Murphy 

The ACP welcomes the establishment of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. It is important that it be carried out competently, justly and in strict accordance with guidelines to be laid down by the government, which should reflect natural and constitutional justice.

The ACP notes the appointment of Judge Yvonne Murphy who chaired the Murphy Commission into abuse in Dublin diocese. It is also important to note that, in view of a report commissioned by the ACP into procedural fairness in that investigation, Fergal Sweeney, an Irish barrister who worked for many years as a judge in Hong Kong, concluded that the Murphy Report contained significant deficiencies in terms of respecting the demands of natural and constitutional justice.

Last October [2013], the ACP published Fergal Sweeney’s findings. His conclusions are on pages 37-39 of his document, which is on this web-site. The final point is as follows:

4.14   However, from the legal perspective it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that insofar as the Catholic clerics who were called to testify were concerned, the practices and procedures of the Murphy Commission fell far short of meeting the concerns of the Law Reform Commission and, more importantly, of natural and Constitutional  justice. 

In the light of the serious failings of the Murphy Commission, the ACP suggests that Fergal Sweeney’s important and robustly argued conclusions should be considered before the terms of reference for the investigation are established and the necessity of following them is accepted.  

Our concerns should not be interpreted as an attack on Judge Murphy, still less an attempt to obstruct the investigation, but a concern that the new Commission of Investigation should have the best possible team to carry out the vital work. 

The ACP is aware that Judge Murphy and the Murphy Commission are legally debarred from any comment once they issued their Report but even though strangely Fergal Sweeney’s study was largely ignored in the media and by the legal profession, it is vital for the credibility of the enquiry that those entrusted with investigating the Mother and Baby Homes should accept and implement the guidelines laid down by the government. This is a matter not just of natural justice but of judicial competence. 

We would also hope that the Commission will avail of the expertise of social scientists, especially anthropologists, to make sure that the cultural prism through which we interpret present reality is not imposed on the past. Here too competent historians must be consulted so that the Commission has an accurate understanding of the historical reality at that period in Irish history and of the various actors who were involved in the wider context of the Mother and Child homes at the time. 

Making the same mistakes twice, when people’s characters and reputations are at stake, would be unconscionable.

A discussion regarding Fergal Sweeney’s report can be found on the ACP website at 

ACP Report on Yvonne Murphy Investigation Published (November 2013)

The text of Fergal Sweeney's 40 page Report is here

A Review from a legal perspective of the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004 and of the Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (the “Murphy Report”)

Margaret Lee a retired Social Worker and former member of the Sisters of Mercy summarised it thus in the course of the afore-mentioned discussion 

I have read this review and I consider the following to be the salient Points

• 1. The enquiry that led to the Murphy Report was carried out under the 2004 [Commissions of Investigation] Act which was really guided by the Law Reform Commission Report of 2003. This report proposes a low key enquiry that would focus on the malfunction of the system not on the sins of the individual. It was viewed that such an enquiry would not attract the rules of constitutional justice precisely because the focus was to be on the system, not the individual. Two further recommendations of the LRC Report are pertinent: (a) the enquiry was to be held in private –again to protect the good name of the participants and (b) where a participant wished to comment on or disagree with the conclusions of the enquiry, such comments and/or disagreements would be included in the final report—in short both sides of the argument would be recorded. The Murphy Report does not meet the standards set out by the Law Reform because it names and blames individual clerics.

• 2. The legislation itself could be viewed as flawed and the Dail debates at the time foresaw the possibility of a legal challenge. The legislation does not make provision for an enquiry that might find a reason to go beyond the remit of focussing on a system and start adjudicating of individuals. If it had done so, it would surely have written into the legislation the 4 minimum rights which the Supreme Court set down in its Abbeylara judgement–right to know the content of the accusation, to cross examine the accuser, to address the adjudicator through counsel and make a rebuttal. Instead the legislation talks vaguely about “fair procedures” without stating how these fair provisions might be implemented.

• 3. The Murphy Report did not accord natural justice to the clerics who participated. Where there is a difference in the recollections of past events between clerics and professionals it resolves such differences in favour of the professionals and against the cleric and, most significantly, does not give any reason for doing so. The report does not give due consideration to any mitigating circumstances put forward by the clerics. This is particularly obvious in discussing the “learning curve”. The report dismisses out of hand that the clergy were on a learning curve when it came to child sexual abuse but freely acknowledges the existence of such a learning curve in the case of An Garda Siochana and Social workers—or indeed, psychiatrists.

• 4. The LRC places great emphasis on the limitations of any form of enquiry or tribunal when it comes to the administration of justice. It states that an enquiry is not able to carry out a function which belongs to the courts—that of punishment and it warns against the danger of attempting to do so in times of a public outcry.

This review of the Murphy report is not attempting to deny or minimize the wrong that was done to the victims of clerical child abuse. What the review is stating is that the clergy did not get natural justice. It is important to draw attention to this in a week when we have heard a lot of concern about targeting any particular group.

I find the silence of the named Bishops and of the members of the Law Reform Commission at the time of publication puzzling. I assume that the Bishops were terrified of savaging by the media. Why did not the members of the LRC not speak out?.....

Finally, there is no substitute for a formal statement of complaint to An Garda Siochana in the event of sexual assault or any other crime.

(C) Extracts from Discussion that followed ACP Statement on appointment of Yvonne Murphy (July 2014) 

Pádraig McCarthy July 18th, 2014 at 10:24 pm 
At the risk of increasing the task, it is important that the Commission of Investigation do not consider the religious run mother and baby homes in isolation: other such homes, including county homes, must be included. In relation to funding and staffing, the Commission must see how such homes which were funded by the state compare in funding to other kinds of homes, and to the regular maternity hospitals.

The matter of children being sent for adoption, and of children who died being sent to medical schools, must be looked at in all such institutions.

In looking at the matter of how society dealt with non-marital children and their mothers (what about the fathers?), the Commission must look at the context of how other jurisdictions at the time dealt with this. This would include the practice in some places of introducing legislation for the compulsory sterilisation of women in these situations.

In dealing with infant mortality, the Commission must look at how other institutions, including maternity hospitals, dealt with the burial arrangements; and how society at the time dealt with the deaths of small children – this includes the “Holy Angels” plots in many parts of the country as a normal practice. While today, we would see the burial of a child without a funeral rite as cruel and unfeeling, we need to ask how people saw it in the years before and following independence, including the question of whether it was seen as a kindness and help to the bereaved parents. The economic factors are relevant here. Also the fact that stillbirths were not registered here until 1995, so the child would not usually be given a name.

The level of infant mortality in society over those years is clearly important. Where there appears to be a much higher level of mortality of non-marital children, the Commission must look at the health and living conditions of the mothers; the question of poverty is relevant. The Commission must consider the experience in other jurisdictions also, where the level of infant mortality of non-marital children was frequently higher than the level in marital children, and what may be the reasons for this. The contemporary situation could be enlightening here. Also the kind of medical care available, and nutritional factors.

In the matter of adoptions, we must be aware of what was seen as good practice at the time. Often this involved minimising the bonding of the mother and child. Sending children abroad was not just a practice in Ireland: many children were sent from UK to Australia.

To look at international experience is not a way of justifying all that was done; but if we fail to look at the wider picture, we may be in danger of blaming ourselves because we are Irish, and largely Catholic.

I’m sure there are other relevant matters which do not come to mind at present. All in all, as the statement makes clear, it is important that the Commission take the matter in its historical context. This was a matter of serious failure in the Murphy Report.

The Commission must consider whether it can name and shame people they consider to blame: this was a very serious failure and injustice in a Commission of Investigation, as the Sweeney report makes clear.

It will be instructive to see whether this new Commission of Investigation learns from the errors of the past, and whether they pay attention to the study of the Murphy Report produced by Fergal Sweeney.

Rory Connor July 19th, 2014 at 4:03 pm 
One point that Fergal Sweeney did NOT mention is that the Murphy Report on Dublin includes criticism of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid even though he died in in 1973 and the inquiry was supposed to investigate the actions of the Catholic Church in the period 1975 to 2004. 

Also the Report failed to comment on the widely-publicized allegations of pedophilia against the late Archbishop even though these were made in 1999 i.e. WITHIN the period that Judge Murphy was supposed to report on. Could the fact that the allegations were universally rejected as false, have anything to do with this curious omission? The Dublin Archdiocese under Archbishop Desmond Connell, strongly repudiated the claims. Did they really have no effect on the attitudes of senior clergy who had to deal with similar sex claims against Dublin priests?

Judge Murphy’s report on Cloyne also failed to refer to scurrilous allegations against Bishop John Magee for which the UK Guardian was forced to apologise in 1994 and TV3 in 1999. Did Judge Murphy believe that these false allegations had NO effect on how the Bishop would have viewed similar claims against his priests?

The current investigation into Mother and Baby homes was sparked by a world-wide media storm based on claims that the Bon Secour nuns in Tuam had dumped the bodies of dead children into a septic tank. Most of the journalists who published this obscene libel have now quietly dropped it and only a few have had the grace to apologise. I hope that Judge Murphy will not fail to provide a detailed analysis of this fake atrocity story and name those responsible for creating it.

Dr Margaret Kennedy July 20th, 2014 at 9:34 am
 
It seems to me that the ACP despite its claim not to want to “attempt to obstruct the investigation” is in fact, conveying from day one that Judge Yvonne Murphy needs to brush up on her "practices and procedures" or even is "not suitable"  which from my perspective is disrespectful and does not fill me with admiration. Such enquiries are always limited by resources, information lost, not given (!) and in the end humanity and one’s human fallibility. I suspect some clergy did not equip themselves well in that enquiry! One could unpick most inquiries as ‘deficient’.


It further seems to me that the ACP wants to highlight the ‘unfairness’ of the Murphy Commission i.e. being allegedly ‘unfair’ towards clergy rather than hope that justice will be served to women and children incarcerated in ‘mother and baby homes’ and the subsequent (often) blighted lives of these women and children. That the ACP take this defensive clergy stance continues to present the Catholic Church as an institution largely only of benefit to clergy themselves! When Clergy begin to see the deficiencies of it’s OWN institution rather than point out the log in another’s eye, then will lay people subjected to the horrors of past Catholicism receive justice. I suspect that most of the Murphy Commission painted an accurate picture of victims abuse and the ACP statement above seeks to damn it whole and entire thus almost calling victims ‘liars’. Have we not endured enough of this clericalism? Now could the ACP speak/say something about the Women and Children who suffered in Mother and Baby Homes?

Pádraig McCarthy July 20th, 2014 at 1:19 pm 
Dr Margaret Kennedy 
Lessons need to be learned from the Murphy Commission – precisely because of deficiencies clearly identified by Fergal Sweeney, and also in my book Unheard Story. The ACP and Fergal Sweeney and I have been careful to recognise explicitly the valuable work done by the Commission. We are greatly concerned that justice be done for those who were abused, and for all concerned in the mother and baby homes.

The ACP itself is not a perfect association, and is very much aware of serious failings in the Church. The ACP certainly does not take a defensive stance in this regard.

It is not true to write, as you do, that “the ACP statement above seeks to damn [the Murphy Commission] whole and entire thus almost calling victims ‘liars’.” This cannot be found anywhere in any statement from the ACP; nor is it in Fergal Sweeney’s document; nor is it in my book.

This is not at all incompatible with bringing to attention deficiencies in the Murphy Report. One does not correct one injustice by inflicting another injustice. The points made by Fergal Sweeney in his document are the points to address: this is what is at issue here. The really strange thing is that the media and the political establishment have not so far addressed the matters raised by Fergal Sweeney.

Your work has been valuable in bringing public attention to abuse. It is understandable that any person who has experience of abuse, as you have, would be wary of anything that may seem to downgrade the appalling abuse which is well documented in the Murphy Report. It is vital that we hold on to that, and at the same time not fail to address failures in procedural fairness in the work of the Commission. This is not an attempt to exculpate anyone.

It is because the ACP wants the full story of the mother and baby homes to be made clear that the statement was issued. The media have backed away very much from initial sensational reports. As the ACP statement says: “It is important that it be carried out competently, justly and in strict accordance with guidelines to be laid down by the government, which should reflect natural and constitutional justice.” If there were deficiencies in the Murphy Report, as I believe Fergal Sweeney shows, then, indeed, “Making the same mistakes twice, when people’s characters and reputations are at stake, would be unconscionable.”

Joe O'Leary July 21st, 2014 at 11:50 am
 What one would like to see in a new Murphy report is a deeper sense of historical perspective, setting the work of the sisters who ran mother and child homes, Magdalene laundries, etc., in the context of the demands of society at the time. Even the shaming and shunning of unmarried mothers alleged to be a uniquely Catholic outlook could be put in perspective — unmarried mothers were not viewed benignly anywhere. As Fintan O’Toole points out, the vast amount of secret abortions that is our current solution to unwanted pregnancies bespeaks similar attitudes which have not gone away even though no longer connected with Catholic notions of guilt and sin. And it would also be nice if the next Murphy report recorded also the positive things people had to say about the sisters. If demonizing indignation is allowed to set the tone of the new report, as it in part set the tone of the Dublin and Cloyne reports, it will only undercut its reliability as work of historical reference.

Pádraig McCarthy July 29th, 2014 at 9:41 am 
Vincent Twomey has a good article in the Irish Times today (29 July) on the Opinion page, expressing similar reservations about how the Commission of Investigation may be influenced by its composition.
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission
Opinion: Appointment of judge to chair body raises expectation of criminal findings

Eddie Finnegan July 29th, 2014 at 1:28 pm 
The interesting Opinion piece by Vincent Twomey in this morning’s Irish Times perhaps goes a step further than the ACP Statement and other substantial comments above. He asks, not just “Why Judge Yvonne Murphy?”, but why any judge as chairman of the mother-and-baby home inquiry? Like several of the contributors above, he asks why the narrow concentration “primarily on the mother-and-child homes run by Catholic religious congregations together with one Protestant-run home”. He also wonders whether the commission will enquire into the sensationalist media coverage of the original Tuam story.
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission

Perhaps Vincent can hope for a fairer hearing from commenters on this forum than from the often rabid online commentariat the Irish Times now permits or even encourages. If they don’t permit such mindless anonymous or pseudonymous rubbish in their Letters Page, why leave serious contributors open to it online?


Rory Connor August 4th, 2014 at 12:34 am 
Fr. Vincent Twomey’s article in the Irish Times on 29 July raises a couple of very important issues
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission

“Should the commission uncover grave misdeeds, even criminal actions, natural justice demands each instance be dealt with according to due procedures, all of which are predicated on the presumption of innocence. Malicious accusations against “the nuns” by some public commentators have been deeply offensive, not least to today’s aged Sisters, who, with depleted human resources, continue to provide unsung service to the marginalised in Ireland, which the State cannot provide. ……

“Finally, it would be a welcome development if the commission were to devote some attention to the media’s coverage of the initial Tuam story. How did such sensationalist coverage affect the women and children themselves – and those who provided service in the homes? What further hurt did it cause?”

The purveyors of ludicrous atrocity stories about the Bon Secour nuns have now largely gone silent – at least on the allegations that actually can be TESTED. So it may be helpful to remind ourselves of what they originally wrote: 

‘Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post. ‘800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed. Commentators angrily demanded answers from the Catholic Church. ‘Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves’, said a writer for the Guardian, telling no-doubt outraged readers that ‘the bodies of 796 children… have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway’. ……. 

The foregoing details are from Brendan O’Neill’s article on the SpikedOnLine website and he also comments that 

A hysterical piece in the Irish Independent compared the Tuam home to the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica, saying that in all these settings people were killed ‘because they were scum’ 

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-tuam-tank-another-myth-about-evil-ireland/15140#.U9muh9J4xjs

Brendan O’Neill is an atheist. Yet his article is entitled “The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland” and the subtitle is “The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged.” Compare this to Fr Brian D’Arcy’s article in the Sunday World on 10 June entitled “Fr Brian: Baby Graves are Our Greatest Crime” that includes the following
http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/columnists/fr-brian-d-arcy/fr-brian-baby-graves-are-our-greatest-crime

“When I first heard the news that more than 800 babies were buried in what was formerly a septic tank I was astonished – because initially I thought it happened in some famine-stricken country today. Then I thought I was hearing about Nazi Germany…..” etc etc

When the Commission of Investigation eventually issues its Report, will it even mention these fake atrocity stories that shamed us world-wide? Or will the Report ignore every allegation that is OBVIOUSLY false while accepting as true any claim that the nuns cannot PROVE is a lie? I strongly suspect the latter. After all, that is what happened in all previous investigations of this type!

Fr Brian D'Arcy [My comment dated 17 August 2020]

The above-mentioned Sunday World article by Father D'Arcy is no longer online but a shorter version is available  in the Irish Examiner dated 5 June 2014 entitled Disposal of babies' bodies in Tuam 'as bad as Nazi Germany': Fr Brian Darcy 

Well-known cleric Fr Brian Darcy has said the discovery of almost 800 babies bodies next to a Galway mother and baby home is as bad as anything that happened in Nazi Germany.

The Government has today confirmed that a "scoping exercise" is underway to determine whether other mass graves such as that found in Tuam exist in other parts of the country.

Fr Brian Darcy said he thought previous scandals involving the Church had left him "unshockable", but that this was a shocking as something that happened in Germany during World War II.

He added that people needed to be brought to justice for "sinful crimes". "I think if the facts are as bad as they seem to be, and I have no reason to doubt that, I think this will cause a massive revolution about the kind of country that we had and the kind of country that we're all children of."

(Helpful key words after the article include "Nazi Germany" and "World War II")

"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

Kevin Myers and J. K. Rowling

Kevin Myers and J. K. Rowling

Welcome to the world you created, J.K. Rowling

Online mobs are a threat to everyone’s freedoms

The Spectator, 18 July 2020 by Kevin Myers

[ QUOTE: But perhaps the most damning contribution came from J.K. Rowling, whose global influence is tectonic. She tweeted to her 13 million followers an utterly foul distortion of what I had said, namely: ‘Women and Jews deserve what they get. This filth was published in @thesundaytimes. Let that sink in for a moment.’ ]


Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet.

This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain. On the last weekend of July, on the basis of a poorly written column in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times about the pay differentials in the BBC, London social media vilified me. I was then denounced worldwide as a misogynistic, anti-Semitic Holocaust-denier. One of my most successful accusers was J.K. Rowling. And now it is her turn, as her entirely justifiable scepticism over the dogmas of transgenderism have rendered her into what she is clearly not, that mythical beast, a ‘transphobe’. So welcome to the world you helped create, J.K.

In Ireland, I had long been recognised for my unremitting hostility to the IRA, support for Israel and my many articles about the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet these easily verifiable points were ignored as some foul internet charlatan with my name but none of my beliefs briefly entered the global imagination. A tsunami of smears from other publications obliterated protestations from the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland that I had told the Irish people truths about the Holocaust that they would not otherwise have known.

But perhaps the most damning contribution came from J.K. Rowling, whose global influence is tectonic. She tweeted to her 13 million followers an utterly foul distortion of what I had said, namely: ‘Women and Jews deserve what they get. This filth was published in @thesundaytimes. Let that sink in for a moment.’

Deserve what they get? So women deserve to be paid less than men, and Jews merited the Holocaust? The former is bad enough, but the latter assertion is the most wicked representation even by Twitter’s sordid standards. Despite the proclaimed support for me from Jewish groups, plus two Israeli ambassadors as well as numerous women, their voices could not be heard above the cacophony of my enemies. When the fangs of Rowling’s Twitter followers close on their prey, there is only one outcome.

This was in 2017, and the personal lunacies foreshadowed the solar storms of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter and associated mobs revealed their enormous power in riots, sackings, cancellations and boycotts across the Anglophone world. In response to this madness, some 150 literary luminaries (including Rowling) last week signed a letter to Harper’s Magazine defending free speech, stating: ‘As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.’

Mistakes, J.K.? As in forgiving yours, but never mine? But the courage of the signatories then left them — for the letter did not mention BLM, ‘left’ nor ‘liberal’, but managed to denounce President Trump, ‘the radical right’ and ‘right-wing demagogues’. Perish the thought that anyone on their side of the debate would be engaging in smears and character assassination.

Such cowardly equivocation is of course to be expected from mere scriveners. The great Thomas Sowell reported in his Intellectuals and Society that Bertrand Russell thought Britain should placate Hitler by disbanding all her armed forces, while George Bernard Shaw said of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact: ‘Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming.’ A week later, the state of Poland was extinguished, duly followed by most of its Jewish population. As the Nobel Laureate George Stigler said of his fellow intellectuals: ‘They issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes no other basis.’

As then, so today. For J.K. Rowling accepts that online mobs (of the kind that did for me) are a threat to everyone’s freedoms, including those of the supine intelligentsia who seek refuge in cowardly equivalence. Unique duties come with her unique global status. These oblige her to warn her millions of followers of the totalitarian threats besetting our civilisation — not through the infantile telegraphy of tweets, but through the prose that conquered the world.

WRITTEN BY
Kevin Myers

MY NOTES

[1] According to the Irish Times  Sunday Times drops Kevin Myers and apologises for offensive article : In his 30 July 2017 column in The Sunday Times (Irish edition) headlined “Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned”, 

Myers hit out at the “tiresome monotone consensus of the commentariat, all wailing and shrieking as one about how hard done by are the women of the BBC”

The article said: “I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC - Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted - are Jewish. Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents?”

[2] Regarding the role of Vanessa Feltz in this strange affair see my previous blog article "Kevin Myers, Vanessa Feltz and Anti-Semitism"  The companion article "Kevin Myers, Jews and False Allegations of Anti-Semitism" is also relevant even though it doesn't mention Vanessa Feltz by name. I suggested that "Jews and Circular Firing Squads" could be an alternative title for the latter article!

[B] J. K. Rowling Writes regarding Online Mobs!

"J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues"

[I'm quoting extracts from the above article dated 10 June 2020]

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well...........

The fourth [reason for worry about new Trans activism] is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018,  American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.........

[C] Dictionary Definition of 'Woman is 'Hate Speech' (and JK Rowling)

Change.org faces legal action after removing 'hate speech' petition that defended dictionary definition of 'woman'

The site’s owners have been accused of breaching its own terms and conditions as well as infringing the right to freedom of speech

The Telegraph, by Camilla Turner,  EDUCATION EDITOR

30 October 2020 

 Within hours of publishing her petition on the site, Kellie-Jay Keen received an email from Change.org

Change.org is facing legal action after removing a “hate speech” petition that defended the dictionary definition of a woman.

The site’s owners have been accused of breaching its own terms and conditions as well as infringing the right to freedom of speech.

Within hours of publishing her petition on the site, Kellie-Jay Keen received an email from Change.org saying that it had been “identified as hate speech” and taken down from the site.

Her petition had stated that the “dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’ to mean ‘adult human female’ is under threat”.

It went on to say: “We would like to send a clear message to the Oxford English Dictionary that the word woman means Adult Human Female, and will never include men, males or boys. The very minimum a woman has to be is female.”

Her petition added that activists are “seeing to include men in the definition of women” and said that preserving the definition of the word woman was important because is “allows us to be protected in law and in our communities”.  

Mrs Keen said she had published her petition in response to a separate petition – also published on Change.org – which called on the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of “woman” to include “examples of representative minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc”.

Mrs Keen, a 40-year-old mother of four from Wiltshire who founded an organisation called Standing for Women, said she believed Change.org was enforcing a partisan approach.  

“I didn’t say anything offensive or inflammatory,” she said. “Time and time again, what I have recognised is that the word ‘woman’ is in itself seen as offensive.”

Earlier this year, Mrs Keen paid for an advertising poster which said  "I love JK Rowling" at Edinburgh's main railway station which was removed for being too "political" and potentially offensive.

Rowling, 54, was accused of being transphobic after writing on Twitter that she was puzzled by a headline on an article which referred to "people who menstruate", adding: "I'm sure there used to be a word for those people," she wrote. "Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"

Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union which has been supporting Mrs Keen, said that Change.org has launched a “pernicious assault” on her freedom of speech.

“It is extraordinary that when dealing with a question of such present public importance, Change.org would apparently apply its discretion in favour of silencing one side of an ongoing public debate and that, in doing so, would choose to adopt a stance contrary to the law of the country in which the relevant user was based,” he said.

“It undermines the public debate on gender identity in the United Kingdom. It also brings into question whether Change.org is a genuinely neutral platform when it comes to these important public debates or has its own political agenda it is seeking to promote.”

Change.org declined to comment.

Peter Tatchell and International Pedophile and Child Emancipation Organisation (IPCE)

Peter Tatchell

Peter Tatchell's article concerning "Lee" - "I'm 14, I'm Gay & I want a boyfriend" is dated 15 August 1997 and is on the website ipce.info 

The Home Page proclaims 
Welcome to the Homepage of the Ipce Web Site

but the acronym Ipce doesn't appear to be defined anywhere.  However the text on the Home Page gives a clue

Ipce started as a forum for people who are engaged in scholarly discussion about the understanding and emancipation of mutual relationships between children or adolescents and adults.

In this context, these relationships are intended to be viewed from an unbiased, non-judgmental perspective and in relation to the human rights of both the young and adult partners.

In the course of time, the function 'forum for discussion' has gradually ended. The remaining result is Ipce as a large library:

this web site. 

However The Free Dictionary handily gives 6 possible definitions of the acronym IPCE of which the only applicable one in the present context is:

IPCE        International Pedophile and Child Emancipation

I'm 14, I'm gay & I want a boyfriend

Fourteen year old Lee tells Peter Tatchell about first sex, boyfriends, coming out, paedophilia, and why an age of consent of 16 won't help under-age gays like him.

Lee is 14. He's been having sex with boys since the age of eight, and with men since he was 12. Lee has a serious problem. He wants a steady relationship and has been going
out recently with a guy in his mid-twenties, who he met at the hairdressers. But in the eyes of the law, Lee's partner is 'a paedophile' and Lee is' a victim of child abuse'. That's not, however, the way Lee sees it: 

"I want to have a boyfriend. It's my choice. No one's abusing me. Why should we be treated like criminals?". 

I am sitting in the kitchen of a friend's house talking with Lee. Wearing a white T-shirt and combat trousers, his sophisticated gay image makes him look older than 14. He comes across as bright, articulate, sure of himself, and mature beyond his years. It's hard to imagine anyone getting away with taking advantage of him.

We are discussing the new Sex Offenders Act. Lee is concerned. Under this legislation, which comes into effect next month, men over 19 who have consensual sex with guys under 18 are classified as dangerous sex criminals, on a par with the abusers of young children. After serving their sentence, they will be required to register their address with the police for a minimum of five years, and may have their identity revealed to the public.

This is a live issue for Lee because he prefers relationships with older guys. 

"I don't get on with people my own age", says Lee. "They're too immature. I like men in their 20s or early 30s. They are more experienced and serious. With them, you can get into a closer relationship than with a teenager". 

The age of consent laws don't make it easy for Lee to have a stable gay relationship. 

 "Some men run a mile when they discover how old I am", he moans. "They're worried about getting done by the law". 

Even without the Sex Offenders Act, any man who has sex with Lee could face a maximum sentence of 10 years for kissing, touching, sucking or wanking, and life imprisonment for anal sex. The top penalty for the offence of "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 14 year old girl is, in contrast, two years!

Having a relationship with someone his own age would, paradoxically, put Lee in greater legal danger than sex with an older person. The law says that a homosexual act with a male under 16 is a serious crime, even if the person committing the act is himself below the age of 16. So, by having anal sex with another 14 year old boy, Lee would be guilty of a major offence which can, at least in theory, be punished by jail for life. 

"The law is stupid", according to Lee. "If I know what I'm doing and I'm not harming anyone else, I should be allowed to have sex with who I want". 

Lee is just one of a growing number of lesbians and gays who are coming out at an ever earlier age ... twelve, thirteen and fourteen is not uncommon nowadays. Research published by Project Sigma in 1993 shows that 

• 9 percent of gay men had their first homosexual experience by the age of 10, 
• 19 percent by the age of 12, and 
• 35 per cent by the age of 14. 

Yet most gay campaign groups seem only interested in the human rights of the over-16s. 

"There's nothing much for young gays like me", says Lee. "Nobody cares about our rights". 

Lee first realised he was gay at the age of eight. Well, he didn't call himself gay. He just had sex with boys or, to begin with, one particular boy. 

"My first gay sex was with a friend from school called John. I was eight and half. He was the same age. We used to go swimming together. It all started at the local swimming pool. One day we were in the cubicles getting changed and somehow we started kissing. Then we had oral sex".

How did you know what to do? 

"Oh, I saw it on TV", quips Lee. You did? "They were talking about men having oral sex, so that's where I got the idea from".

Weren't you nervous about being caught? 

"No. It just happened. I didn't think it might be wrong or that we could get into trouble". 

How did you feel about your first gay experience? Lee beams with evident fond memories and confides: 

"I liked it a lot. It was great. But I did think sex with a boy was sort of strange. Until that time with John, I didn't have much idea about sex. It was mostly from the papers and television. I thought that men only had sex with women. For a while it left me feeling a bit weird and confused". 

He pauses for a moment, then adds emphatically: 

"I soon a got over it". 

Lee continued having regular sex with John for two years. 

"We were boyfriends", he boasts proudly. "I don't have any regrets at all". 

The relationship with John did not, however, stop Lee from experimenting with heterosexuality. 

"I had sex with John's twin sister. He found out and got very angry. He stormed out. For a while we weren't speaking. We made up afterwards". 

Did you enjoy straight sex? "Yeah", says Lee, "but sex with John was
better".

So when did Lee start thinking of himself as being gay? 

"It was a few months later, after I turned nine. I was watching a TV debate about gays. It made me realise that I was gay, and that it wasn't wrong. Since then, I've never had a problem about my sexuality". 

Lee's next big love affair happened when he was ten. 

"It was with a black kid who lived on my road, Michael. He was the same age. My friends introduced him. One day, we were in his bedroom playing on his computer and we started messing around. It ended up with sex. Other times, we had a game called 'kick the cancan', which involved kicking a can around. The can would often end up in the bushes, and we'd run there to look for it. Sometimes Michael and me would have sex there". 

Around this time, Lee first came out to his mom. 

"She was good about it. Her first reaction was that I was a bit too young to be gay. She told me to leave it a couple of years. Then, if I still wanted to be gay, she said she'd accept it. I left it a few weeks, before telling her again. She realised I was serious, and respected my feelings and wishes. Ever since, she's been really understanding". 

At the age of 11, Lee had a relationship with a 14 year old named Andrew. 

"Because of family difficulties, I ended up in a children's home. They sent me to an education centre. That's where I met Andrew. We used to hang around together and became really close friends. After a while he told me that he was on the rent scene. I asked him if he wanted a boyfriend and he said yeah. So we started going out with each other. That was when I first had anal sex and learned about condoms. Andrew pulled out a packet and went on about stopping HIV and AIDS. I shagged him and he shagged me. It bought tears to my eyes. It was painful, but I liked it as well. I enjoyed it more than sex with a girl. I got more of a sexual sensation". 

For about 18 months, Lee joined Andrew doing sex for money, picking up men in the local gardens and bus station. 

"It was mostly me just wanking them off. I stopped about a year and half ago. When I was doing it, I felt sick. I didn't enjoy it. I was only doing it for the money to buy drugs - mostly speed, acid and cannabis. I also had a few bad experiences with punters. Once Andrew and I were tied up and raped". 

In the children's home, Lee got taunted and bullied for being gay. 

"They called me queer and it ended up in fights. The staff didn't do anything to protect me, so I started running away". 

Lee is clearly very angry that no one took action to stop the bullying: 

"When I was being beaten up, the authorities did nothing. Now I'm gay and want to have sex, they're suddenly very concerned about my welfare". 

When you ran away from the children's home, where did you go? 

"I used to stay with this paedophile that I met in the gardens. He was okay. There was no pressure for me to have sex, but I did. I had sex with him because I wanted to feel loved and respected". 

What do you think of that man now? 

"Well, he didn't beat me up or hurt me like was happening in the children's home". 

And what do you think about paedophiles in general? 

"It depends on what kind of paedophiles", says Lee. "Those who have sex with little kids should be strung up by the bollocks. The paedophiles I knew always asked me if I wanted sex. They didn't pressure me. If you consent to having sex with a paedophile, it's fine. If you don't, it's not". 

How can a young child understand sex and give meaningful consent? Lee admits: 

"The really young ones can't. But I was 12 when I first had sex with an adult man. I knew what was happening. The other boys I know who had sex with men were in their early teens. They understood what they were doing". 

Perhaps your friends were particularly mature for their age. Most young people are not so sophisticated about sex. 

"They shouldn't have sex then", according to Lee. "And other people shouldn't take advantage of them. No one should be having sex with a child who is very young or who has emotional and mental problems. You could have a relationship with them, but not sex - not until they are old enough to understand the responsibilities involved". 

Many people worry that the power imbalance in a relationship between a youth and an adult means the younger person can be easily manipulated and exploited. It's a concern
that Lee acknowledges: 

"Yeah, that can happen. It's wrong. But that doesn't mean that every kid who has sex with a man is being abused". 

At what age do you think people should to be allowed, by law, to have sex? 

"Sixteen is too high", says Lee. "Most kids I know had sex long before then. It's stupid for the law to brand us as criminals". 

Do you worry about being arrested for under-age sex? 

"Sometimes. I mostly worry for the older guys that I'm having sex with. They could get life imprisonment and be denounced as a paedophile. They might end up on the sex offenders register. It could ruin their life". 

What do you think the age of consent should be? 

"About 14". 

Why? 

"That's the age a lot of young people start having sex. If they are not forcing or hurting other kids they shouldn't have the threat of a policeman knocking on their door. The current of age of 16 (or 18 for gays) means that those who are younger don't get proper sex education. My sex education at school was useless. The law makes it difficult for teachers to give out stuff about contraception, safer sex and AIDS. If the age was lower, the facts about sex could be taught sooner. It's stupid giving kids this information after they've started sex. That's too late. They need to know the facts about sex from around the age of 10".

I point out to Lee that an age of consent of 14 would not have been much help to him, since he was having sex from the age of eight. Even with consent at 14, most of his past sexual relationships would have remained illegal. 

"Young people under 14 should be allowed to have sex with someone up to a year or so older", he suggests. "That way they've got freedom, and are protected against exploitation by older men". 

Even with a permitted one year age differential, Lee's affair with Andrew, who was three years older, would not have been legal. Something a bit more flexible is required. 

The idea of a sliding-scale age of consent is something that OutRage! is promoting. In addition to supporting an age of consent of 14 for everyone (gay and straight), OutRage! argues that sex involving young people under 14 should not be prosecuted providing both partners consent and there is no more than three years difference in their ages.

When I put this idea to Lee, he nods with approval: 

"Some young people mature earlier than others. They should be able to have a relationship with someone a bit older. Society should accept that kids have sexual feelings". 

This is the nub of the problem. Our current legal system refuses to acknowledge that young people have a sexuality. The law says a person under 16 is incapable of giving their consent to a sexual act. Any sex with such a person is automatically deemed "indecent assault". Lee thinks that is "ridiculous": 

"I'm only 14 but I know what I'm doing. I understand what consent involves. So does the person I'm having sex with. No one is indecently assaulting me. That's a stupid suggestion. The law should stop treating young people like idiots."

Many people fear that making sex easier for under-age teenagers will expose them to dangers like HIV. Isn't that a legitimate worry? 

"I know about safer sex", protests Lee. "I didn't get that information from school. It came from TV and boyfriends. Some of them had HIV and died. I'm okay because we did safer sex. People say that older guys will take advantage of teenagers like me, but my partners made sure we took precautions - even the paedophiles. If people want to protect kids against AIDS, they should support better sex education lessons, starting in primary school. Education is the best prevention. But it isn't happening in most schools. Why doesn't someone make a fuss about that?". 

Lee thinks it's time the law-makers listened to young people: 

"They are always trying to tell us how to live our lives. Why don't they treat us with respect? We've got opinions. We deserve to be heard. When a kid gets sexually abused, the social workers listen to what he says and back up his complaint. But when a kid wants to have a gay relationship, his wishes get ignored. That's what is happening to me. I'm under a care order which states that my feelings have to be taken into account. But society won't  accept my feelings. It says I'm forbidden to have sex with a man until I'm 18. A perfect relationship is what I want. It would make me very happy. So why is the law trying to stop me?" 

* All names have been changed to protect the identities of the boys involved.

Peter Tatchell is the author of the gay sex education manual, "Safer Sexy - The Guide To Gay Sex Safely" (Freedom Editions, 1994). 

15 August 1997

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MY NOTES (Rory Connor): 

(1) I have lightly edited the above for readability - basically I highlighted the Heading, the opening summary sentence and the ending which gives brief details about Peter Tatchell and the date 15 August 1997. I also included a link to the Wikipedia article about the organisation Outrage! where Tatchell refers to it in the text.

(2) I will probably comment on this in a separate article. Just one comment here. Peter Tatchell presents "Lee" as a highly mature, intelligent, laid back 14 year old who started having sex with boys at age 8, with men at age 12 and who is now "going out" with a guy in his twenties and Lee is worried that this man is considered by the law to be a paedophile. 

Lee "came out" to his mother when he was 10 (no mention of a father) and after a brief hesitation she respected his feelings and wishes and was very understanding. Nevertheless at the age of 11 "due to family difficulties" Lee ended up in a children's home. There he met 14 year old Andrew who was "on the rent scene" and became his boyfriend. For about 18 months, Lee joined Andrew doing sex for money, picking up men in the local gardens and bus station.  Lee didn't enjoy it but did it for the money to buy drugs. Once Andrew and he were tied up by  a punter and raped. In the children's home, Lee got taunted and bullied for being gay (but not for prostitution or drug abuse??) and ran away. He was then taken in by a "paedophile" (Lee's term) who didn't pressure him for sex but Lee had sex with him anyway because he "wanted to feel loved and respected". 

And Peter Tachell seems to see this as quite OK and "Lee" as some sort of paragon who can tell the authorities where they are wrong in relation to the age of consent?