Priests are just having "consensual sex" with teens

There's much more in that Santorum AP interview than initially reported. Remember the Catholic Church priest scandals? Turns out that it was much ado about nothing -- merely sex between consenting individuals.

SANTORUM: You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles.

[...]

In this case, what we're talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We're not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We're talking about a basic homosexual relationship. Which, again, according to the world view sense is a a perfectly fine relationship as long as it's consensual between people.

Now, Santorum is not arguing the priests were justified in abusing pre-teens. He obviously agrees that such behaviour is reprehensible. But he's equating the abuse of young boys by men in position of (moral) authority to consensual relations between two same-sex adults. As he says, "a basic homosexual relationship".

But being a good Christian, Santorum doesn't condemn the homosexual. No siree.

I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. [...] I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. and I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions.

Posted April 22, 2003 06:43 PM | Comments (90)