The Panting End Approaches
Roman Polanski, as Salon.com pointed out the other day, has pleaded guilty to child rape. For this, some Hollywood stars are more than inclined to defend him, partly because his childhood and what happened to his pregnant wife may have driven him mad.
More women than one would think lose their virginity at the age of thirteen or so--indeed, in human history, that was near the age of marriage right up to the twentieth century--but that makes it one of those things that nature and men have inflicted on women, rather than making it right. That's why we have an age of consent and, in no analysis I can think of can it be right that a man in his mid forties should claim that drugging and raping a child is anything other than evil. It was evil then and our technology and culture allow us to escape the evil now; civilisation is a form of repression.
I thought that I wouldn't comment on the story at all, but then I saw the allegations of Marine Le Pen, the famous fascist, against Frederic Mitterrand, the culture minister of France. M. Mitterrand appears to have been very open about his sexuality in a book. At some point, he fell into paying for sex with younger men in Thailand.
I teach Thai students, amongst others. They strike me as hard-working and decent and they come from an ancient and a proud society. They are absolutely entitled to the right anyone else should have, which is not to be enslaved by sick people for sex. I might, as a catholic, point out that that applies whether the slaver is wearing a suit or a cassock.
Mitterrand claims that, whilst doing so, he fantasised about boys. Most of my instincts are to want him out of office, though not in court, since he seems seedy and incapable of hiding his lusts but not to have done anything criminal by his own repeated accounts.
Bizarrely, the story also seems buttressed by one from the states this week, concerning Kevin Jennings. Mr Jennings is a professional gay person (one down on those sad men who describe themselves by parts of women or their chronic priapism) who believes that the moral weight of a human life can be hung on an adjectival practice, and that anyone who disagrees that Shakespeare and education and anything else with heterosexuals in it is brainwashing children, is a 'homophobe'. He's in the Obama administration.
The west is burning. It has probably always been corrupt, because people are fallen. All human cultures may be to some extent. This society, though, celebrates it as some sort of act of individualism.
My view is that sex makes fools of us all and that I don't want to know about other people--or rather, I don't wish to judge-- until sexuality and sexual assaults become matters of politics, and power.
I also know plenty of gay people who only bring their sexuality up when or if they encounter the fearsome bigotry that sometimes comes from men and women who want to define them by sex. Some of them are friends of mine. I am a catholic, and I could if I wanted go into why my faith thinks what it does; but civilised people aren't conflict seeking. That makes my friendships easier, I guess.
I'd far rather a world where people just treated other people as people and judged them as such, with rules set not by bigotry but for the public good in so far as they bothered the public at all. In my relations with women over the years, I have not been a saint, but I wouldn't go on about it. I have tried not to hurt people--I write that because I know that these words sometimes may fall on the eyes of those I have loved. I'm happy now.
But, really--rapists, sex slavers and philistines obsessed with teaching children sexual practices? Is this, at the end, how we behave?
Those fires are taking hold. There are times when I wonder how far from the fall we are. I also wonder why, when social workers, the UN, and government ministries can do or fail to stop awful things for years and never acknowledge them, that my church must be the one to continually apologise for the awful things it incubated, but which it is now trying to control.
Roman Polanski, as Salon.com pointed out the other day, has pleaded guilty to child rape. For this, some Hollywood stars are more than inclined to defend him, partly because his childhood and what happened to his pregnant wife may have driven him mad.
More women than one would think lose their virginity at the age of thirteen or so--indeed, in human history, that was near the age of marriage right up to the twentieth century--but that makes it one of those things that nature and men have inflicted on women, rather than making it right. That's why we have an age of consent and, in no analysis I can think of can it be right that a man in his mid forties should claim that drugging and raping a child is anything other than evil. It was evil then and our technology and culture allow us to escape the evil now; civilisation is a form of repression.
I thought that I wouldn't comment on the story at all, but then I saw the allegations of Marine Le Pen, the famous fascist, against Frederic Mitterrand, the culture minister of France. M. Mitterrand appears to have been very open about his sexuality in a book. At some point, he fell into paying for sex with younger men in Thailand.
I teach Thai students, amongst others. They strike me as hard-working and decent and they come from an ancient and a proud society. They are absolutely entitled to the right anyone else should have, which is not to be enslaved by sick people for sex. I might, as a catholic, point out that that applies whether the slaver is wearing a suit or a cassock.
Mitterrand claims that, whilst doing so, he fantasised about boys. Most of my instincts are to want him out of office, though not in court, since he seems seedy and incapable of hiding his lusts but not to have done anything criminal by his own repeated accounts.
Bizarrely, the story also seems buttressed by one from the states this week, concerning Kevin Jennings. Mr Jennings is a professional gay person (one down on those sad men who describe themselves by parts of women or their chronic priapism) who believes that the moral weight of a human life can be hung on an adjectival practice, and that anyone who disagrees that Shakespeare and education and anything else with heterosexuals in it is brainwashing children, is a 'homophobe'. He's in the Obama administration.
The west is burning. It has probably always been corrupt, because people are fallen. All human cultures may be to some extent. This society, though, celebrates it as some sort of act of individualism.
My view is that sex makes fools of us all and that I don't want to know about other people--or rather, I don't wish to judge-- until sexuality and sexual assaults become matters of politics, and power.
I also know plenty of gay people who only bring their sexuality up when or if they encounter the fearsome bigotry that sometimes comes from men and women who want to define them by sex. Some of them are friends of mine. I am a catholic, and I could if I wanted go into why my faith thinks what it does; but civilised people aren't conflict seeking. That makes my friendships easier, I guess.
I'd far rather a world where people just treated other people as people and judged them as such, with rules set not by bigotry but for the public good in so far as they bothered the public at all. In my relations with women over the years, I have not been a saint, but I wouldn't go on about it. I have tried not to hurt people--I write that because I know that these words sometimes may fall on the eyes of those I have loved. I'm happy now.
But, really--rapists, sex slavers and philistines obsessed with teaching children sexual practices? Is this, at the end, how we behave?
Those fires are taking hold. There are times when I wonder how far from the fall we are. I also wonder why, when social workers, the UN, and government ministries can do or fail to stop awful things for years and never acknowledge them, that my church must be the one to continually apologise for the awful things it incubated, but which it is now trying to control.
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