How LGBT agenda offers perfect cover for predators to groom children

December 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – I have recently written on LifeSiteNews two articles about how people in positions of authority and trust have failed children and young people.

The first was about a clinic belonging to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) adopted a policy of “affirming” the expressed desires of young people and children to “change sex”, prescribing them powerful drugs, whose long-term effects remain little-known, to “block puberty.” The courts have now determined that this policy was wrong, because younger children are incapable of consenting to this treatment, and even the consent of older children must be treated with great caution.

The second was about the author of a Catholic Sex Education course promoted to “introduce” children as young as nine to the “gift” of “sexuality”. This man, a priest called Joseph Quigley, has now been convicted of pedophilia.

What has been happening in each case is that people in authority have been manipulating children and young adults to bring about something those in authority want.

In Quigley’s case it was the trust and openness which would facilitate abuse. In the NHS case it was the promotion of an agenda regarded as politically urgent. Those involved were desperate to show that they were on the right side of the debate about gender, even though this meant sacrificing the mental and physical health of children. Quigley also was riding a wave of fashion which suited his twisted ends.

Something similar is happening with the homosexual (“LGBT”) agenda. Joseph Sciambra, a victim of clerical sexual abuse, has recently written:

At a recent Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, I squirmed in my seat as some third-rate gay activist priest persuaded a group of gap-mouthed and wholly impressed Catholic religious and educators to recognize vulnerable children, befriend and gain their trust, and to then impose upon them an LGBT identity. It’s as if my abuser rose among the ranks in the Church and became the voice of reason on this issue. After the presentation, I ran to the public restroom and vomited.

What we are being told is that this is the compassionate thing: that any other approach is judgmental and wrong. But what Sciambra found is that the “born that way” message is a gift to abusers, because it imprisons young people not only in a category of person, but in a pattern of behavior. Those told they are gay are then told, by many Catholic priests, along with much or all of the medical and cultural establishment, that they should be acting out in certain ways, as their only path out of loneliness and self-loathing to fulfilment.

Much of Sciambra’s experience of Catholic priests was to be bounced between two kinds. There were the priests who told him that because of his nature, which he couldn’t change, behavior objectively contrary to the moral law was appropriate, and that he shouldn’t struggle against this. And then there were the priests who took advantage of his vulnerability actually to abuse him.

The first thing an abuser needs to do is to undermine his victim’s resistance to the proposed abuse, and the “gay affirming” ideology does exactly that. It prepares young people for abuse.

Exactly the same pattern can be seen with the “grooming gang” scandal in the UK which I have also written about. Vulnerable girls, often in the care of the state, were told incessantly by teachers and social workers that nothing in the sexual domain can be described as wrong or bad, as long as they consent to it. Abusers agreed entirely, and proceeded to manipulate the necessary “consent” out of them. This was not legal consent: under-age victims are incapable of giving it. But it was enough for the social workers and, for that matter, the police, who regarded the victims as autonomous people who had chosen a perhaps unfortunate path, and declined to enforce the law.

As a society we must free ourselves of the idea that following moral rules hinders healthy psychological development. If the rules are reasonable interpretations of the objective moral law which, as Catholics, we believe God has inscribed on the hearts even of pagans, they are not oppressive, but rather preserve and foster the deepest instincts of children and young people and protect them from exploitation. They help potential victims articulate what is wrong with what they may be asked to do, and allow us to set objective limits to acceptable behavior, as a matter of professional expectations, and as a matter of law.

The testimony of the victims in all these cases is unbearably sad. They were let down by nearly all the people charged with their care, who either abused them, or wittingly or not handed them over for abuse by others: and this is still going on. It is time the Church played her part in opposing this evil, instead of facilitating it.

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