UK judge to teacher: ‘I don’t criticize you’ for sexual attraction to two-year-olds

READING, UK, August 4, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A UK judge assured a teacher busted with pornographic images of children as young as two years old that she would not “criticize” him for being sexually attracted to children.

On Saturday, Judge Mary Jane Mowat addressed remarks to substitute teacher David Armstrong as she handed him a suspended sentence for pleading guilty to possession of 4,500 images of child porn.

“I don‘t criticize you for being a teacher who’s attracted to children…Many teachers are but they keep their urges under control both when it comes to children and when it comes to images of children,” said Mowat.

63-year old David Armstrong was reportedly caught when a colleague at the Little Heath School in Tilehurst notified police after finding files on Armstrong’s laptop with names such “rape wife,” “nude model,” and “gay alligator.”

The Blaze reports that some of the images retrieved from Armstrong’s possession include ones of children as young as two years old.

This is not the first time Mowat had stirred controversy over her handling of sexual abuse of children. The Daily Mail reports that, In 2008, she allowed a former headmaster charged with pedophilia to walk free after he blamed the attraction on his drugs for Parkinson’s disease.

Family advocates said that the affair helped shed light on the devastating and progressive effect of pornography.

“The issue at hand is this, porn is not harmless,” Beth Meier of My House Initiative told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) in response to the controversy over Mowat’s comments.  “It isn’t an ‘acceptable’ form of sexual release.”

Meier elaborated, “Watching primetime TV, reading Cosmo, watching an ‘R’ rated movie with nudity and explicit sex scenes, which sometimes even PG-13 movies have, watching YouTube clips of girls in bikinis pretending to strip are all ‘gateway’ drugs to porn - these all incite lust and are a disordered view of our beautiful sexuality.”

“(Pornography) turns women into objects to use instead of seeing them as daughters of God,” she said. “What Catholics and Christians need to wrap their minds around is that we are not immune.”

Dan Spencer, the Executive Director of the National Fellowship of Catholic Men, told LSN that the controversy is “a stark example” of just how far society has moved away from the values that would guard against such attacks on children.

“Stances taken by this judge are a logical consequence of the ‘sex is a private matter’ mentality in both the U.K. and the United States,” Spencer said. “Western culture has slid down the proverbial slippery slope and is in no position to challenge such deviant behavior.”