November 27, 2012
If only Romney had campaigned against Elmo instead of Big Bird.
Then again, the sordid details of Sesame Street puppeteer Kevin Clash’s alleged dalliances with four then-underage boys didn”t emerge until after the election.
And let’s face it: The Democrats would”ve spun the GOP candidate’s call to defund PBS as a “homophobic” witch hunt, and Romney would”ve lost even more votes.
Witness actor (and Obama fan) Henry Winkler’s Tweet defending Clash. Lest you shrug at the mention of “Fonzie’s” real name, the powerful producer and director’s industry nickname is “the Nicest Man in Hollywood.” That’s not nothing.
Never underestimate how tolerant liberals are of kiddie diddling, as long as the diddler’s one of them. (See “Polanski, Roman.”) I didn”t say “pedophilia” because, strictly speaking, that’s not Clash’s problem. Adults cruising homosexual chat rooms for teenaged companionship is more accurately termed “ephebophilia,” or, in gay parlance, “a typical Saturday night.” It’s a tale as old as Death in Venice and the trials of Oscar Wilde: “Man/boy love” is part of gay “culture,” which is why activists strongly oppose any attempts to raise the age of consent. (“My first lover was 17 years older than me. And this is common [among gay people],” explained one such campaigner matter of factly.)
I got a crash course in this phenomenon when I worked at a Canadian Catholic newspaper during the Mount Cashel orphanage scandal that unleashed the clerical sexual-abuse tsunami that soon swept the US and beyond.
My liberal colleagues loved having a boy-shaped cudgel with which to beat the Church, and the negligent, ass-covering hierarchy deserved every smack.
However, the paper’s staff refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that almost all these abusive priests were homosexuals.
And subsequent abuse reports coming out of local hockey shrine Maple Leaf Gardens messed up their precious theory that their bête noire, mandatory celibacy, was to blame.
Welcome to the late 80s and early 90s, the era of the (highly lucrative) pedophilia moral panic. The Courage to Heal was a bestseller, “recovered memory” was the new dunking, Geraldo Rivera investigated Satanic cults, and the patently ridiculous McMartin preschool case turned into one of history’s most costly criminal trials. Comedian Emo Philips quipped at the time, “It’s nice to see incest finally coming into its own.”
In many cases, it was also a figment of fevered imaginations, although in fairness, the “massive denial of the experience of women and children who genuinely had been victims of sexual abuse provided the essential conditions without which the recovered memory movement could never have grown and flourished in the way that it did.”
