When Christopher Hitchens gets into his Devil's Advocate role, it is only natural for all right-thinking non-contrarians to leap at the chance to play Fedei Defensor. And so for the sake of all our souls, I'll give it a quick go. With all the hullabaloo about the Pope covering up child molesting, the fact is that Benny has done far more to protect children from abuse than Hitchens ever has and contributed far less to allowing child abuse to be perpetrated than Hitch ever has.
Benny is against the culture of war that Hitch pimps for and which casually takes the lives, limbs, virginity and childhoods of countless children. Just compare the stances of the two dudes on, say, the Iraqi genocide or the impending attack on Iran.
Benny is against the culture of porn and perversion that sexualizes children ,commodifies the human body and trivializes the sex act and sexual relations to the detriment of all children everywhere, period. Contrariwise, Hitch is a great supporter of freedom from prudery, which translates into opening a Pandora's box of opportunities for destroying children.
Benny is against divorce and desertion of one's family, which emotionally scars the kids that are put through it. Hitch, lest we forget, dumped his pregnant wife and his infant son for another woman, leaving the lad to grow up into a dork who, while in his twenties, is working for the neocons, when any half-normally adjusted young man of his age would be working with the likes of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, et al, or else riding a motorbike up and down the M1 and getting absolutely blotto on lager at the weekends.
More to the point, Benny is genuinely against child sexual abuse under any circumstances. As for Hitch, what evidence is there that he's against it on principle, rather than only when he can use it as an issue to beat the Catholics or the Muslims with? Where does he stand on the Franklin scandal? What's his stance on mob-controlled child prostitution in the US?
As the NYT article linked to by our fraternal comrade Rakhmetov states:
The German Archdiocese has acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of Father Hullermann, though it attributed those mistakes to people reporting to Cardinal Ratzinger rather than to the cardinal himself.
Church officials defend Benedict by saying the memo was routine and was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” according to the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese.
I rest my case.
So, Hitchens is calling for the Pope to be arrested over the latest sex scandal. Fine. I hope it works out for him better than his previous calls for justice to befall Clinton and Kissinger. By the same token, the same principles of justice, one could quite reasonably call for Christopher to have his eyes put out, tongue cut out, ears deafened, arms and legs amputated, and then have the still living trunk dumped into a cesspit. That punishment, shown worldwide on prime time TV, might go some way to restoring a bit of justice on account of the evils Hitchens has enabled vis-a-vis the Iraq War. Not being a fan of barbaric punishment, I couldn't advocate it myself, but I can certainly see the merits of it as a deterrent for others who might want to vent their personal frustrations over erectile disfunction and/or pick up a few extra bucks by warmongering.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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