End the Cycle of Abuse

April 2002

It is tempting to gloat over the Catholic Church’s problems arising from the revelation that a lot of their priests have been sexually involved with young parishioners.After all, the Catholic Church has been a leading advocate of the notions that celibacy­ that is, no sex­ manifests a heightened spiritual state and that all sex is sinful and immoral except in the procreative context of marriage.

This outrageous dogma has been continually reasserted despite all the evidence that it has caused untold human suffering.  Condom use has been opposed, encouraging the spread of disease and resulting in the birth of millions of unwanted children. Masturbation is condemned. Sex education and information is restricted to the just say no variety. And everywhere sexual guilt and anxiety are rampant.

But there is little cause for glee in the irrational reaction to such revelations: that those most identified as proponents of such misguided anti-sexual beliefs have been sexually active themselves, has, unfortunately, not resulted in the rejection of their nonsensical teachings, but rather in the rejection of the men who have failed to live up to such unnatural precepts.

In the hysterical climate where any expression of childhood and adolescent sexuality is repudiated as a monstrous evil, the press, the state, the church, and the health professions have become a frenzied mob outdoing one another in their zeal to root out all manifestations of supposed sex abuse and to expose and punish the sexual predators who seem to them to be everywhere in our midst.

The problem is not that people, including children and teenagers, are experimenting with and expressing their sexuality. This has always been the case and always will be. All laws and pronouncements to the contrary, people are sexual beings. It is the nature of the Creation.

The real problem is with those who would improve upon God’s handiwork and substitute a sanitized non-sexual version of humanity. These zealots seek to enforce their twisted vision by emphasizing over and over again the dangerous, the destructive, the negative, the terrible, the evil consequences of sexual expression. A self-fulfilling prophecy is thus created: teach people to fear and loathe their sexuality, and guess what­ they’ll grow up fearing and loathing their sexuality.

How else can one explain the high suicide rate among gay teenagers, the anguish an adult experiences 30 years after having participated as an adolescent in a sexual dalliance with a priest, or, as in one highly publicized case, the trauma a person continues to feel, ten years later, from having his butt groped in a public swimming pool? The damage to the person in these cases comes not from what actually took place, but rather from how he continues to regard what took place.

A zero tolerance approach to all expressions of childhood and adolescent sexuality can only cause harm. “Protecting” people from their own sexuality is not protection but oppression. By insisting on a behavioral standard concocted in fantasy rather than grounded in reality, all real support or guidance in the sexual realm is abandoned.

Children and adolescents need to have their sexuality acknowledged and celebrated. They should be encouraged to discover, explore, experiment with, and enjoy their sexuality. It is only in such a context that the genuine risks and dangers can be properly addressed.

Let us end the cycle of abuse that the press, politicians, clerics and social workers seem so eager to continue. Let us refuse to pass on the horrible messages of our own childhood, messages that permitted no legitimate expression of our sexuality. Instead let us embrace rather than fear our own and other’s sexual nature.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=7E21960D-49EF-40B2-962AB86ADD11DDA2>