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| 'The Father, the Son and the Holy Ggost' |
That
headline is in single quotes because it's the
headline of an article on Nouvelobs today by French social psychology professor Laurent Bègue.
The article
is written against a background of increasing pressure from the Catholic church (more on that here)
and other opponents of the government’s plans to legalise gay marriage, and just a few days before nationwide anti-gay marriage demonstrations.
There is nothing new in the idea expressed in the headline of course, as the theory has existed in academic and research terms since the Eighties (see Wikipedia for more details). Nor is there anything new in the article itself, apart from some research information I didn't know about, but still, it got me thinking. I had a nagging feeling that I knew something which would help me decide for myself whether or not the theory is true. Then it came to me. Of course!
You don't have to be a psychologist or any other kind of ologist to see just how true that theory is when you think about it. Here we have a church, Catholic as it happens, which is virulently homophobic. To each his own. And we know that there are many more homosexuals in the Catholic church than there are in civil society, and that picture is compounded even more by the fact that the church doesn't even support heterosexual relationships within its organisation, never mind homosexuals. Yet here they are at the forefront of the fight to stop gay marriage and offer no specific rights to homosexuals in terms of union. Well well well....
But wait a minute, I thought, this line of thought has much more serious implications than that of homosexuality, which is after all accepted by most reasonable people who support the right of people to live their lives how they wish as long as they do no harm to others.
The deeper and more serious implication of the issue is that it is also well-known that the Catholic church has an inordinately high percentage of pedophiles within its ranks than is the case for the rest of society. And that many thousands of them have been exposed over the last few years. And that the church refuses even today to introduce satisfactory measures which would allow them to identify pedophile clergy and turn them over to the police.
Why did I bring up pedophilia? Am I creating an artificial and pernicious link between homosexuality and pedophelia? No, I am not, BUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS. Someone from the Catholic church makes that link almost every day in their criticisms of gay marriage. Several prominent clergymen and many lesser-known clergy have strongly and publicly insinuated during their campaign that homosexuality may lead to pedophilia. That is very revealing indeed.
No sane person would link homosexuality to pedophilia, and there is no evidence - research indicates the opposite in fact - to show that an abnormally high number of those pedophile priests who have been tried and convicted are also homosexual.
No, there is no link, but, as is the case for homosexuality, the fact that the Catholic church makes such outrageous conflating statements on pedophilia shows just how guilty some of its members must feel about it.
Ugh. What a detestable organisation the Catholic church is.
