Judicial Travesty

May 2005

Last February, former Roman Catholic priest Paul Shanley was convicted of child rape, one of the latest casualties in the still-simmering clergy abuse scandal. The techniques employed in his prosecution and conviction should appall all those committed to due process and civil liberties. And the barely concealed anti-gay malevolence that motivated press and prosecutors throughout Shanley’s ordeal should especially terrify gay people and other sexual minorities.

If anyone could ever be said to have been convicted in the press, not in court, it is Paul Shanley. For months before Shanley’s arrest in 2002, the Boston Globe had been running lurid stories purporting that Shanley was the “worst of the worst” of the “pedophile priests.” Innuendo and hearsay were splashed across the Globe’s pages as fact. Again and again Shanley was identified as a founder of the much-despised NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association). And, reportedly, the Church’s voluminous internal report on Shanley and his supposed sexual improprieties detailed a 30-year history of child abuse, abuse covered up by the Church shuffling him around from parish to parish.

But none of it was true.

Shanley was an openly gay priest in the 1970s (when such candor took courage) who did advocate a more humane approach to homosexuality. And his dissent from the Church-imposed vow of celibacy, along with his frank homosexuality, did make him a “troubled” priest in the eyes of a very anti-gay Church. But Shanley’s sexual interests were with those of legal age. Shanley was not a founder of NAMBLA nor ever a member. But facts mattered so little to The Globe that they presented a six-year relationship that Shanley had with young man who was 20 years old at the outset as an example of Shanley’s pedophilic tendencies!

Prosecutors had problems in their “case” against Shanley since there were no credible accusers and no corroborative evidence whatsoever. So they did what prosecutors did in the daycare and satanic abuse witch hunts of the 1980s and early ’90s: they turned to the junk science of “recovered memory.”

Recovered memory charlatans maintain that victims of sexual trauma often need a skilled therapist to “help” them remember their abuse. (In Shanley’s case, news of enormous financial settlements being doled out by the Church evidently provided some of the “help” usually supplied by therapists.) Following the daycare and satanic abuse travesties, “recovered memory” has been thoroughly debunked; indeed, claims of recovered memory are banned from court in many jurisdictions.

Throughout Shanley’s persecution in the press and prosecution in court, a virulent sexual McCarthyism silenced many who recognized the judicial horror that was unfolding. To defend Shanley, or his right to a fair trial, risked being branded a “fellow traveler.” Prosecutors repeatedly urged jurors to not be “distracted” by the facts, to “use their common sense”– the implied message being that a gay priest was likely a child rapist, no matter the lack of evidence. So, on the word of one man– with a long history of alcohol, gambling, and drug problems– who claimed he only recently remembered being raped by Shanley as a child, who calls gay men “faggots”, and who had absolutely no corroborative witnesses or evidence, Paul Shanley was sentenced to 12-15 years in prison, a likely life-sentence for the 74-year-old ex-priest.

Our country is run by people whose core supporters find all homosexuality a profound offense against God. They busy themselves today attacking judicial protections of civil liberties and constitutional rights. No doubt they would like to criminalize all non-normative sexual expression. And they received an enormous boost from “liberal” Massachusetts’s show trial of Paul Shanley.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=688496F3-304D-494D-AA4B1393F7C8950A>