Celibacy Does not Cause Sexual Assault

I just came across this piece where a columnist makes a crack about how it's nice to hear, for a change, to hear about a heterosexual pervy priest.

Whether that floats your boat as humor, or not, doesn't really matter to me.

What I'm sick and tired of is the thinking so many people seem to have internalized that can be summed up with another line from the (very short) piece:

Quote:

---

Again, I say, it's time for a married priesthood.

---

What seems to me to be a major failure in thinking here is that it's not celibacy, or abstinence that causes someone to want to have sex with someone in a grossly inferior role. AFAIK people who are sexually attracted to children, or teens, as adults don't choose that because they're not getting enough sex, or not getting any sex. It's because that's their sexual attraction.

All that I expect opening up the priesthood to allow for marriage would do is to increase the recruiting numbers for people seeking ordination, since so many people I'd known who were sympathetic to the idea of taking vows were put off by the requirement for celibacy. There will still be people choosing the priesthood for reasons other than those most people would like to assume: To give themselves a buffer to fight any homosexual tendencies; to be able to manufacture situations where they can gain access to susceptible children or teens; to exercise power.

It may be possible that removing the restriction against clerical marriage will push such "marginal" candidates out of the priesthood. Personally, I believe that to be wishful thinking on the order of wearing a banana in one's ear to the keep the Sasquatch at bay.

The freedom to marry has never prevented child sexual abuse. Often enough it just provides another dynamic, where the abuser can create his or her own victims. Similarly, how many of the teachers recently caught in spectacular sexual improprieties were married? Mary Kay Leternou was, as was Debra Lafave. The simple permission to allow marriage is not going to, by itself, prevent further abuses.

Anyone who views clerical celibacy as a primary cause of any sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church is a bedamned idiot, and shouldn't be allowed out in the rain, for fear they'll drown. Further they're also likely living in a fool's paradise, and thinking that sexual abuse of minors couldn't possible be happening in their schools, their state's foster care system, or in Olympic level sports.

:Shake:


ETA: This is not suggest that I oppose clerical marriage. Just that I don't think it's got a damned thing to do with preventing further clerical sexual abuse.

Ugh. I would think the number of cases of youth pastors (note: pastors, not priests), teachers, and Boy Scout leaders abusing the children in their care should have made it clear by now that celibacy isn't related to it at all. You create positions where someone has a lot of unsupervised access to children with a bureaucratic organization behind this that's more interested in protecting its image than its charges and predators are going to get in there.

Priests, youth pastors, teachers and scoutmasters aren't turned into predators by their organizations. Their organizations are set up as a refuge for predators.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Zuul

Priests, youth pastors, teachers and scoutmasters aren't turned into predators by their organizations. Their organizations are set up as a refuge for predators.

---

And all such organizations that put protecting their members above protecting the children or teens in their charges should be hammered into the ground.

Actually I thought the reason for married Priesthood was simply the lack of candidates in the US for Priesthood in the US in general. I have never seen the logic leap you mentioned in the Op.

Yeah, I've heard you make this argument many times, Loki. And like I say to you every single time, people who put forth that argument, as far as I can tell, are not suggesting that not having sex is making priests go mad with lust and then molest little boys. It's that the requirement that priests be celibate is causing normal people to avoid becoming priests in greater numbers because fewer people are willing to give up sex entirely. And so many people taking the job are ones that are trying to avoid sex for whatever reason.

Whether there's any truth to that, I don't know, and I'm doubtful that it's enough to explain why the abuse is happening. But you're misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) the argument, and that's pointless.

I think part of it is that people like to think of sexual abuse in terms that are easier to accept and on some level less disturbing even if they do not reflect reality all that well.

As far as I know at least here, but I assume elsewhere, too, the most likely perpetrators of child abuse are stepparents and (other) partners of a parent.
Of course that's a disturbing thought and everybody likes to believe that such a thing could never happen in their family. The sexually maladjusted priest on the other hand is a stock character and an easy explanation. Of course they way the church handled the issue didn't help either.
It is much nicer if you don't have to accept that it could be just about anyone.

Loki, this is something that has always driven me crazy. And, really, I think it's just anti-Catholicism wrapped up in a "we have to think about the children" package.