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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Oddly enough, the growth of gay rights seems to have been accompanied by even more virulent attitudes to paedophiles than used to apply in the past. It is as if society, still desperate to draw the line somewhere, picks the slightly arbitrary age of 16 as the difference between moral outrage and normal appetite. Newspapers which salivate over pictures of pretty girls of that age or over, scream for ‘sickoes’ who do the same thing over 14- or 15-year-old girls to be jailed. Obviously active paedophiles do something very wicked, but it is strange that they are put in a worse moral class from drug barons (who also ruin children’s lives), violent burglars or murderers. In last week’s Spectator, Charlotte Metcalf told the shocking story of the well-educated paedophile Roger Took. He had clearly done terrible things. But I thought she struck a false note when she wrote ‘It is sickening to report that Took now reads The Spectator in prison as a badge of his learning and respectability. He obtains it cunningly, via third parties, so that his subscription cannot be cancelled.’ Why should his subscription be cancelled? Why should a bad man not be allowed to read The Spectator? It is noticeable that, with the decline of Christianity, people become more bigoted (see above), because they do not make the traditional distinction between the sin and the sinner.

People keep discovering things that a few noisy Muslims can be persuaded to be offended about — statues of pigs in a Midlands park, a police poster involving a dog. How about croissants next? A reader reminds me that they were first made to celebrate the defeat of the Turks by Jan Sobieski at Vienna in 1683. How much longer will European society be permitted to serve this daily humiliation to Muslims with their continental breakfast?

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Michael Charles

July 21st, 2008 11:53am

One would have to argue with the EU if one wanted to abolish regional development agencies. And Dave is scared of the EU.

Theodore C. George

July 27th, 2008 6:32am

In fact, the Judaeo-Christian scriptural foundation for condemning homosexuality is so slim as to be almost non-existant. Not in the Ten Commandments, not in the Sermon on the Mount, nowhere in the Gospels, Jesus never mentions it and is very little concerned with sexual matters at all. Leviticus condemns dozens of "abominations" e.g. diet, dress, grooming. Sexual obsessions came hundred of years later in (changeable) Church doctrine.