Posted on 04/23/2002 1:42:30 PM PDT by sonrise57
Robert Baden-Powell, the British military hero who founded the Boy Scouts, had an intense interest in teenage boys and their bodies. This interest expressed itself with a forthright innocence that to our post-Freudian sensibilities seems to have pretty clear sexual overtones. There is no evidence that Baden-Powell ever acted on this aspect of his enthusiasm for youth, and scouting enthusiasts both deny and resent the implication. But the specter of what was on Baden-Powell's mind might well make modern American parents reluctant to send their sons off for a wholesome weekend in the woods with scoutmaster Bob. And it would probably doom efforts by someone similarly inclined to start an organization like the Boy Scouts today. Would that be a good thing?
Millions of American adults dedicate their lives to serving young people as teachers, coaches or spiritual advisers. Roman Catholic priests, in particular, dedicate themselves to a degree most of us cannot even imagine. Why do they do it? Sheer goodness can explain a lot, but not everything. Even the most saintly among us is moved by a complex stew of motives, some admirable and some less so, some conscious and some unconscious. The sin of pride, for example, helps seduce many into goodness. Fear of real life is part of what tempts some into the cloister. And for a small fraction of those youth-serving millions, sexual longing plays a role.
Even many of those who put themselves among young people for reasons that are partly sexual probably do so with no conscious predatory intention. They may hope to gain some pleasure from mere propinquity, and also from helping young people in wholly admirable ways. Some are fooling themselves, with disastrous consequences. But many undoubtedly succeed in their lifetime project of service and self-denial, doing much good and no harm. They are surely more heroes than predators.
Societies other than the U.S., while not exactly laughing off the sexual abuse of children, manage to acknowledge this reality without the same episodic hysteria. In England, for example, the "randy vicar" is a stock comic character. And even in America we recognize and tolerate the inevitability of certain tendencies that have occasional antisocial consequences. The military services would have a harder time filling their recruiting quotas if they were successful in screening out everyone with an unhealthy enthusiasm for violence. Instead they work to control and channel those impulses, and they largely succeed.
Sure, there is a pretty obvious distinction between thinking illicit thoughts and acting on them. But it is not so easy to purge the actual predators without punishing those heroes of sublimation or losing their valuable contributions to society. Why? Because the line is hard to draw in practice. Is the football coach who spends a bit too long towel snapping in the locker room after the game a predator or a sublimator? Because fear of succumbing to temptation must surely plague even those who remain steadfast, and imposing ruination as the cost of succumbing will drive such people away--or condemn them to a lifetime of psychological torture. Because, finally, even this obvious distinction between thinking and acting is being swept away in the nation's current frenzy over predatory priests.
The correct response to all this may well be: too damned bad. Protecting children is more important. But at least these considerations ought to make us appreciate the dilemma of having officially designated bad guys.
The Roman Catholic Church is far and away America's biggest social-service agency. As such it does a tremendous amount of good: tending the sick, feeding the hungry, counseling the troubled and running a school system that is the envy of secular educators public and private. So what were Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law and other church officials thinking when they covered up sexual abuse of boys and girls by priests and allowed the offenders to start again in new parishes with fresh, unaware victims?
Maybe they were thinking that God works in mysterious ways and that all this good work may depend in part on people who are doing good for bad reasons. Maybe they were thinking that protecting the church's supply of such necessary people involves a trade-off, a balancing of considerations. There is no question that Law and his colleagues got the balance badly wrong. But at least we should try to understand why they may have thought there was one. Understand, and maybe even sympathize a bit.
Michael Kinsley is founding editor of Slate.com
What Girls? All of the news reports that I have seen is reports of Male perverts molesting young men.
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Clear to whom? A psychotic? That a few kooks are drawn to the boy scouts is undeniabley true. It is also true that many fathers become scoutmasters because their sons are in the scouts.
Some years ago I met a man who over a 40 year period ren four 4H clubs, two at a time. It wasn't because of a sexual interest. It was his commitment to public service and the future of farming in Iowa.
"...but the guy's dead and gone and can't defend himself so I'm going to take advantage of the opportunity to smear his good name."
What a load of cr@p.
I'm willing to bet that Kinsley has never played sports in his life. Even if a football coach were a double-gaited NAMBLA spokesman, he would never be a "predator" in any sense unless he was a moron -- 95% of his players could probably lay a thorough beating on him.
Michael Kingsley is sicker than just Parkinson's. If you are sexually interested in children, you ARE a sicko.....AND you WILL prey on them.
Where have we heard this before.
Ya gotta kinda wonder about people who think about homosexuality all the time and who see homosexuals everywhere and claim that everyone has intense interests in "boys and their bodies".
I'm having an illict thought about this idiot right now. He's lucky I can't act on it! What an A$$hole!!!!!!!
To Michael, I'd say, "show me...prove it"...
An overly sexualized person might find a man's interest in the healthy minds and bodies of young boys in that day and time "sublimated sexuality", but to the mind of the times, sich interest not only seemed innocent, it WAS. Interview with Robert on the origins of scouting If this man had interest in the bodies, minds, and hearts of young boys, it was because he knew that only with sufficient training could these young boys survive in a world where many of them would become soldiers. In those early days of warehouse education, scouting was a boy's first encounter with real tests of manhood, survival, physical endurance...something he could never learn from books in a schoolroom. Many thousands of Boy Scouts died in wartime, but without their scouting experiences, I'd imagine the death toll would have been much higher.
I think Michael must have some issues...The war against the Boy Scouts continues...gays couldn't force their way in...so, now they're hoping to convince the gullible that the founder was himself gay...
I stopped reading Time magazine many years ago, when in the guise of reporting the news, they ran one too many smears on the Conservative position on a major political/social issue. They have never deviated from a strong Leftwing bias, that I know of.
This article is a clever piece of rather vicious insinuation, coupled with a pretense of kindly intent: In short, an example of skilled propaganda. The thrust of that propaganda is most certainly not to make people more understanding of any problem, but rather to make people less willing to take strong stands against one of the most evil aspects of the assault on traditional values.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Still, that was then, this is now- I think chutney ferrets of the victorian era were more chaste. Now, I think they act on their urges with gay abandon...(sorry, couldn't help it...) and should be discouraged from associating with the objects of their perfervid perversions.
Alas, he has instead produced an unreadable mess that appears to be trying to convince us to give the RC hierarchy a break for covering up their molestation problem.
In reality, once a person makes the transition from thought to action it's nowhere near as complex as Kinsley makes it: the priests are guilty of actual crimes (which makes those who cover it up accessories after the fact.)
Beyond that, those people are no longer fit to be placed in a position of trust, especially since child molesters are notoriously recidivist. They should have been removed. Indeed, the Scripture is very clear on this.
By taking the "tough choice" route, Kinsley is trying to provide an out to men who very obviously do not deserve one. The only reason I can think of for his doing this is that both he and the cover-up artists are protecting some other element of their agendas.
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