Peter Tatchell was on telly tonight, in a Channel 4 documentary called The Trouble with the Pope: a journey into my own preconceptions
Now, I find it very strange that Peter Tatchell is choosing to take the Catholic Church to task on paedophile activity. In fact, to me, it looks like a tiger telling a lion to stop hunting gazelle.
Peter Tatchell has made no secret of the fact that he wishes to abolish the age of consent. I have personally taken him to task over this, and he told me that the reason he wanted to do so was for the rights of children, in other words, that children need to have a statute to give them the right to have sex.
I know Stephen Green of Christian Voice will be very happy for me to republish this article from his newsletter onto my own blog.
PETER TATCHELL AND THE PAEDOPHILE BOOK
Saturday 20th February 2010
By Stephen Green
Click here to view pages from the book
It was the start of a liberated sexual new dawn. The era of 'Why not?' Archaic laws restricting sexual practices and relationships were going to be swept away. No-one was to say who should do sexual things with whoever, or how. Sexual liberation had become - for some reason - a vital part of true Socialism. If adults consented, then, hey, why should the Church, or the Government, or assorted boring old fuddy-duddies say no to them? And for that matter, if children wanted sex lives, or if adult homosexual men wanted sex lives with children, then that was all part and parcel of the glorious sexual revolution.
Or so it seemed in 1986, when the most extraordinary book of the decade, The Betrayal of Youth, (Click here for the Table of Contents) was published by CL publications in London with the sub-title "Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People."
The Betrayal of Youth was edited by none less than Warren Middleton (alias John Parrott - NOT the snooker player) the then "vice-chairperson" of the Paedophile Information Exchange, Britain's foremost paedophile advocacy and aficionado support group. They did indeed have a lot of vice to be chairperson of.
A CAMPAIGNING BOOK
In a preface, Middleton acknowledged the help or support of Dr Ken Plummer of Essex University, Dr Brian Taylor of Sussex, Mr John Hart of Sheffield Poly, Chris and Jayne Hobbs, his mother and father, homosexual activist Jeffrey Weeks, Nettie Pollard of the National Campaign for Civil Liberty (now called just 'Liberty'), assorted activists and feminists, and a large number of P.I.E. executive committee members.
The book was part of a campaign to abolish all ages of consent, destroy the responsibilities of parents for their children, deny any ill-effects on children of interference by paedophiles, and withal to make it easier for paedophiles to gain sexual access to children.
A host of weird sex-obsessed nutcases contributed, at Middleton's invitation. Among them was militant feminist Beatrice Faust, another was the editor of the Sex Maniac's Diary, Tuppy Owens. In fact she wrote a chapter with Tom O'Carroll, convicted of corrupting public morals earlier by sending out a list of paedophile contacts.
Labour activist Eric Presland, playwright and leading light in the Organisation for Lesbian and Gay Action (OLGA), contributed to The Betrayal of Youth. His article was a routine denunciation of the "power" that adult society has over children, prefaced by a first-person account of sexual activity with children. Mr Presland related his first paedophile experience with a Asian boy of thirteen, and boasted of interfering with a little boy of six.
AGES OF CONSENT 'ARE USELESS'
'Parents,' he wrote, 'because of their autocratic power, their exclusive rights, and dubious motives of self-aggrandisement which lie behind the decision to have and rear children, are in many ways the group least fitted to be entrusted with the task of child-rearing.' So who are? Reading his chapter one is left with a strong impression that he thinks paedophiles make the best child-rearers. Presland wrote of one pre-pubescent sexual partner, 'I fought for him to free himself from the confines of the family.'
Two of the editorial collective of the far-left Peace News, Miss Kathy Challis and Miss Elizabeth Holtom, the latter a Quaker, contributed a chapter for The Betrayal of Youth. In it they ventured an opinion that would have been viewed with astonishment by Josephine Butler in her fight against child prostitution 100 years earlier: 'Ages of consent are useless. They are completely unrealistic, and they don't give children protection from exploitation in any case.'
The former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange, Steve Smith, contributed a chapter to The Betrayal of Youth. The biographical notes said coyly he "now resides in Holland " - he fled there to avoid conviction for sending obscene articles through the post - and he "now hopes to become active in the Dutch crusade for children's rights." Presumably he did just that, until even the Dutch lost patience, deporting Smith back to the UK and 18 months at Her Majesty's pleasure in 1991.
PAEDOPHILE MOODY ADVOCATES CHILDREN'S RIGHTS
A member of the PIE executive revealed the group's early thinking on consent law in the Scottish Minorities Group homosexual paper:
'Adults should be prohibited under CIVIL law from having relationships with children under 4, and in the case of children over 3 and under 10 a similar civil injunction could also be made by those close to the child .... For children between 10 and 18 there should be no legal restriction in cases which did not involve proven physical/psychological harm. Ten is the legal age of responsibility and if a child is deemed responsible for its criminal acts then it should be responsible for its own sex life.'
But Roger Moody, an 'out' paedophile intellectual, set out a political stratagem, the key to which was "a revolutionary perspective on social change." Roger Moody explains:
'Specifically, this means we don't work to lower the age of consent, but to abolish it, and we don't argue that rights over kids be transferred from courts to parents, but that the only people who have the right to kid's rights - are the kids themselves.'
This was the philosophy behind The Betrayal of Youth for which Peter Tatchell wrote his chapter 'Questioning Ages of Majority and Ages of Consent.' His chapter preceded Moody's offering: 'Ends 'and Means; How to Make Paedophilia Acceptable.'
CHILDREN'S RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER'
At the height of the Cleveland child sex abuse scandal, Peter Tatchell was allowed to comment on it on the Jimmy Young TV programme and promptly advocated 'rights' for children, In The Betrayal of Youth Mr Tatchell, homosexual activist, self-proclaimed 'children's rights campaigner' and described as an 'avid supporter of socialism,' according to the biographical details, tried to make the legal molestation of children an ingredient of democracy:
'In a fully democratic and egalitarian society, there can be no question of adults usurping the rights of young people by keeping them in a state of ignorance, fear and guilt, or by resort to arbitrary and autocratic laws which deny them responsibility for decisions affecting their lives.'
When I pressed him on this point in a debate at the Oxford Union it turned out that the abolition of the 'arbitrary and autocratic' age of consent law applied to children of twelve. My suggestion that it might involve children even as young as ten did not even cause Tatchell to blink. After all, the whole point of his article and the theme of The Betrayal of Youth was that there should be no age of consent at all.
Indeed, Tatchell wrote in The Betrayal of Youth that the age of majority (sexual consent) is 'Re-inforcing a set of increasingly quaint, minority moral values left over from the Victorian era.' The idea that they might just protect children from predatory men, men like his co-contributors, is not one that found any sympathy with Peter Tatchell.
REQUESTS - AND THREATS
When I was on BBC's The Big Questions on 8th January this year, Peter Tatchell was one of the podium guests. I was asked by the production crew not to comment about paedophilia in connection with Tatchell. The request had come from Tatchell himself. That incident prompted this article. And why should Tatchell make such a request? Not the Oxford Union debate, but another event almost sixteen years ago is still in his mind.
On the Judy Finnegan television show on Sunday 8th May 1994, just eight years after its publication, I accused Peter Tatchell of contributing a chapter to The Betrayal of Youth, which I described as a paedophile book. Tatchell is of course the leader of the homosexual media stunt group Outrage. When the homosexual 'age of consent' was last lowered - to 16 - an Outrage banner was photographed saying '16 is just a start'.
Anyway, Tatchell called me a liar, and threatened me with a suit for libel. In the "hospitality suite" afterwards he became abusive and violent. Obviously, Tatchell's contribution to the book on its own, let alone the company in which he placed himself, is now a source of great embarrassment to him, as indeed it should be. No writ was ever received, of course.
PAEDOPHILES 'AN OPPRESSED GROUP'
For the high-minded socialists and homosexuals of the 1970s and 1980s, sexuality was seen as just one aspect of the way in which children were exploited by patriarchal capitalism. Campaign for Homosexual Equality chairman Michael Jarrett was identifying paedophiles as an oppressed group, and the CHE list of "demands" included the complete abolition of minimum ages for sexual activity. The Labour Gay Rights Manifesto of 1985 said 'A socialist society would superseded the family household. ... Gay people and children should have the right to live together. ... It follows from what we have already said that we favour the abolition of the age of consent.'
So was Peter Tatchell out on a limb writing in a book advocating paedophilia, edited by a known paedophile? It is true that a lot of the loony homosexual left thought the same as he did and some of them were active paedophiles as well. But most of them stayed clear of contributing to this vile book. We should be clear that there is no evidence that Peter Tatchell was or ever has been a paedophile - but he certainly gave them support and was in company with them in The Betrayal of Youth.
PETER TATCHELL HAS QUESTIONS TO ANSWER
But twenty-four years later, and with Peter Tatchell elevating himself to the status of 'human rights activist,' helping a bunch of child-abusers achieve what they thought were their 'human rights' to interfere with small children doesn't seem quite such a clever thing to have done. Are Tatchell's views at an intellectual level still the same? Does he realise the implications of them? Does he understand that he provided support to a bunch of men who wanted nothing less than to interfere with little tots? Who approached whom to secure his contribution to this shameful book? Was he aware that Warren Middleton (alias John Parrott), the editor of The Betrayal of Youth, was an avowed child molester? Was he aware that at least two other active paedophiles were contributors? Is he still in contact with Middleton and his cronies? Has he ever renounced them? Answers to these questions will reveal much about Peter Tatchell's mind, agenda and judgment.
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