How the radical left tried to legalise paedophilia

Tag: ireland

This shameful history needs far more exposure than it has so far received writes David Quinn

Recently The Irish Times ran a very interesting piece by its Berlin correspondent, Derek Scally. It dealt with how the radical left in Germany from the 1960s right through to the 1980s campaigned to legalise sex between children and adults.

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This history has come to light because of child abuse scandals that took place in the recent past at a left-wing boarding school in Germany called Odenwald. The abuses at this school were revealed when the German media earlier this year began to turn its attention to abuse scandals involving Catholic priests.

The German press at least had the honesty to throw its net wider than simply the Catholic Church. However, with only one or two exceptions, the international media reported only the Church's abuse scandals. Those involving the German left were ignored. Scally's article was based on a much longer report in the German magazine, Der Spiegel, called 'The Sexual Revolution and Children: How the left took things too far'.

The article detailed how, in the ultra-permissive climate of the sex revolution, radical leftists decided children were also in need of 'sexual liberation'.

To this end they founded a new form of kindergarten called kinderladen. The aim of the kinderladens was to teach young children radical left-wing politics, to acquaint them with 'anti-authoritarian' attitudes and to help them rebel against 'repressive', 'bourgeois' notions about children's sexuality.

A great deal of what took place in these kinderladens simply can't be reported in a family newspaper such as The Irish Catholic but here is one of the milder passages from the Der Spiegel article describing what typically used to happen in just one kinderladen in Berlin in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The passage reads: ''The educators' notes [from the kinderladen] indicate that they [the teachers] placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

Provoked

''According to the records, a 'sex exercise' was conducted on Dec 11. An entry made on Nov 26 reads: 'In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us.''

Children were encouraged to fondle each other and to fondle adults.

These kinderladens started in Berlin but later spread to Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Stuttgart, and eventually to smaller cities like Giessen and Nuremberg.

The movement to 'sexually liberate' children was not isolated to fringe left-wing groups. It had political influence, especially among the German Greens as the Der Spiegel article also reports:

''The Greens were not long immune to the argument that the government should not limit the sexuality of children. At its convention in LÏdenscheid in 1985, the Greens' state organisation in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that 'non-violent sexuality' between children and adults should generally be allowed, without any age restrictions. 'Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalised', the 'Children and Youth' task force of the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-WÏrttemberg wrote in a position paper at about the same time. Public protests forced the party to remove the statement from the document.''

Student radical

To this day, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was a student radical in the 1960s and 1970s, and who worked in one of these kinderladens, is co-President of the Greens in the European Parliament. The Greens in Ireland have never repudiated him.

Nor was this movement restricted to Germany. In Britain something called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was a member in the 1970s of the National Council for Civil Liberties. PIE was dedicated to legalising adult/child sexual relations.

In America, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) - also dedicated to legalising adult/child sex - enjoyed a certain vogue for a time and was a member of one of the biggest gay rights movements, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) right up until 1993.

NAMBLA at one point could count among its supporters the renowned beatnik poet and radical, Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg is beloved of the left to this day.

In France in 1977, the newspaper Le Monde carried a letter signed by 69 luminaries including future Culture Minister Jack Lang and the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre demanding the release of three men accused of having sex with under-age children.

If 13-year-olds have the right to get the Pill, they asked, surely they have the right to have sex with whomever they want, including adult men?

Justifying

As late as the mid-1990s influential magazines such as The New Republic in America were still carrying articles basically justifying sex between adults and pubescent boys. Even today, the film director Roman Polanski has very influential defenders despite pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1978.

No-one pretends that the child abuse scandals carried out by priests of the Catholic Church, and covered-up by their superiors are not horrifying and outrageous. But for several decades prominent leftists established schools in which children were sexually abused all the while actively campaigning for the legalisation of adult/child sex.

This shameful history needs far more exposure than it has so far received.

http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/cont...aedophilia