One thing is certain: the movie Sound of Freedom sure has the left tied up in knots! As we reported previously, the movie, which stars Jim Caviezel, who had played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, is about Tim Ballard, a former U.S. government agent who embarks on a mission to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia. It is produced by Eduardo Verástegui, who also plays a role in the film. The plot centers around Mr Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization. As we noted then, Kathleen Parker Cleveland^[1]Though the columnist is married to Sherwood M. “Woody” Cleveland, she hasn’t shown him enough respect to have taken his name. While she may not have shown him such respect, The … Continue reading, of The Washington Post, knows that no decent person can support child sexual abuse and trafficking, but, gosh darn it, the movie Sound of Freedom just has too many supporters on the wrong side of the political divide. Mrs Cleveland thought it important enough to stress Mr Caviezel’s role as Jesus, just to let readers know that, why, he must be a Christianist kook, so maybe don’t take the movie too seriously!

Now comes this, from Canada’s The Globe and Mail. The author, Michael Coren, is an Anglican priest.

The far right’s fixation on pedophilia is dangerous

by Michael Coren | Friday, August 11, 2023

I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood.

Normally, I prefer not to copy and paste the photographs which come with articles, but this one is important. Online, it falls right between the headline and byline, and the first paragraph of the Rev Coren’s article, and the caption, long for a photograph, makes certain that you know that Mr Caviezel is connected to QAnon:

Actor, Jim Caviezel who currently stars in the film Sound of Freedom speaks during a Catholics for Catholics anti-abortion ‘rosary rally’ on Aug. 6, 2023, in Norwood, Ohio. Caviezel frequently endorses a QAnon-based conspiracy theory where abducted children are seen to be victims of ‘adrenochroming’, a fictional practice of extracting adrenochrome from adrenal glands in a living human.

Mrs Cleveland did the same thing; are you turned off about the film now?

Then there’s the “anti-abortion ‘rosary rally'”, a reference to reference to an article by Daniel Panneton in The Atlantic, originally entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol“, about which I have previously written.

The Atlantic got plenty of pushback about it, and twice changed the article headline and subheading — the title “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary: The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement” isn’t shown in the screen captures tweeted by Taylor Marshall — imaged to the left, but the internet is forever.

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met her, but people can become good friends over Twitter these days — Christine Flowers used to have in her Twitter biography, that she has an “open carry permit for (her) assault rosary.” 🙂

Back to the Rev Coren’s original:

It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a right-wing mob, one of the hysterical shouts clearly heard was that he was a child molester. It’s grotesque nonsense about the Prime Minister that swamps social media. In fact, there aren’t many politicians and activists on the left who haven’t been accused of this awful crime.

Well, it’s true enough that Mr Trudeau was mocked when he announced that his wife and he were separating, with some people speculating that both of them found new boyfriends. But the Rev Coren wrote that he was accused of pedophilia, though he didn’t state why the accusations were leveled; perhaps it’s just because he’s a priest.

And with a horribly convenient timing, a new movie, Sound of Freedom, is currently the talk of the far right. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) stars as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who rescues children from sex traffickers. As the critic Sam Adams wrote perceptively for the online magazine Slate, it “arrived in theatres surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters – conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.”

Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable, but this phenomenon goes much further than that. Mr. Caviezel himself has spoken of “the whole adrenochrome empire,” describing the substance as “an elite drug that they’ve used for many years” that is “10 times more potent than heroin” and “has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”

Adrenochrome, zealots claim, can only be obtained from adrenal glands in a living human body, thus the need to abduct children. It’s obscene and dangerous quackery, but that doesn’t help convince the cult of the credulous. This rubbish has its origins in a QAnon belief that powerful, international figures intent on resetting the world, controlling people and destroying religious freedom are also kidnapping little boys and girls.

That was the lunacy behind Pizzagate in 2016, when thousands believed that a pedophilia ring led by those at the highest levels of the Democratic Party was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. More than a million messages were sent on Twitter supporting the fantasy, eventually leading to employees being harassed, followed by a shooting and then an arson.

Has the Rev Coren managed to turn you off of seeing the movie yet? Sure, he tells us that “Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable,” but immediately continues to tell readers what a kook the actor is.

There’s always been a strong dose of homophobia involved, through the venomous old canard of gay men being groomers, in spite of all the facts and evidence. Facts and evidence, however, are the last things relevant in all this. The trans issue magnified the paranoia, and it’s been pushed into the mainstream by a new generation of right-wing politicians.

And here we go again! The left want so very much to tell us that homosexuality has nothing to do with “grooming” the young, saying that “all the facts and evidence” tell us otherwise.

But as an Anglican priest, one who, according to Wikipedia,

In an interview with the National Post on 1 May 2015, .  .  . cited the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality and contraception as some of the reasons for his conversion to Anglicanism.

he has to know about the famous John Jay Report, concerning sexual abuse by Catholic priests and deacons, all of whom are male, which noted that rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

It isn’t just evil reich-wingers who are ignoring “facts and evidence”; the Rev Coren has just done so.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco is about to declare bankruptcy, as now we have this news:

Archbishop Cordileone: Chapter 11 bankruptcy for San Francisco ‘very likely’

by Daniel Payne | Washington, D.C. Newsroom | Saturday, August 5, 2023 | 12:22 PM EDT

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Friday revealed that it was “very likely” that the archdiocese would be filing for bankruptcy in the near future due to the hundreds of clerical abuse lawsuits that have been filed against it.

The prelate revealed the news in an announcement on the archdiocesan website Aug. 4 in which he noted that, following a 2019 California law that lifted the statute of limitations on certain sexual abuse claims, the archdiocese was ultimately served with “more than 500 civil lawsuits” related to clerical sexual abuse.

The “vast majority of the alleged abuse occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and involved priests who are deceased or no longer in ministry,” Cordileone noted, while others involved “unnamed individuals or named individuals who are unknown to the archdiocese.” The archdiocese has been “investigating the best options for managing and resolving these cases,” Cordileone said.

“After much contemplation and prayer, I wish to inform you that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization is very likely,” Cordileone said.

Don’t be fooled: the Archbishop is one of the good guys, who supported the Tridentine Mass, opposes homosexual ‘marriage’ and allowing Catholics in homosexual relationships to receive the Eucharist, and is strongly pro-life. But for decades and decades, our bishops swept accusations of sexual offenses by priests under the rug, paying off victims quietly and rather than reporting them to law enforcement just moved them around to other, unaware parishes. But in San Francisco, of all places, you know that the victims have mostly been boys.

We also recently noted that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia just settled, for $3.5 million, a sexual abuse case in which a now-deceased priest, who was shuffled from parish to parish to sweep his abuse under the rug, molested, you guessed it, a boy. And outside the Catholic Church, a Fayette County high school teacher, and “youth volunteer” at Faith Lutheran Church in Lexington, has just been charged with producing media of a 9-year-old boy in a sexual performance.

This was all in just the past week.

Scratch the surface of modern conspiracy theory and antisemitism often appears, but today the accused are usually singled out not by race but ideology, and that includes politicians and public figures considered to be left-of-centre, or even people who support vaccinations, abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, or climate justice policies. This might sound fanciful, but the evidence is sadly abundant.

Naturally, along with QAnon, the Rev Coren wants to link this concern about child trafficking to anti-Semitism, just another ploy to get people to not watch the movie. Heaven forfend, if you go to see it, you are literally Hitler!

It’s particularly tragic as children increasingly suffer under a culture of poverty, food insecurity and forced migration. Ironically, those roaring about pedophile rings tend to ignore all of this and are often downright opposed to legislation that may help children. As well, child abuse and human trafficking are genuine issues and have to be taken extremely seriously; baseless and hateful hyperbole only worsens the situation.

That’s nothing but a sop, to let you believe that yes, the Rev Coren really, really is worried about child trafficking, but he doesn’t want you to get too incensed about it, because what about other problems.

Even the National Institutes for Health, in 2021, under President Joe Biden, not the evil conservative Donald Trump, wrote:

Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level, but the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving varies under different scenarios.

Conservatives see private efforts to help the poor as preferable and are more opposed to government action to do so.

Don’t be fooled here. The Rev Coren, who has a wife and children of his own, so I assume that he is sexually normal, wants to defend homosexual males from accusations of “grooming”, to let people know that heterosexual males can be just as guilty. Jerry Sandusky, after all, was married to a woman, even though he liked 10-year-old boys’ butts. But the “facts and evidence,” to use the Anglican priest’s formulation, indicate an outsized number of boys being molested by adult men, when, if homosexuality were not a risk factor, we should see fewer than 5% of sexual abuse victims of adult males being boys.

I am not a psychologist, I am not a sociologist, I am not a behavioral expert of any kind. But what I do know and understand, and know and understand well, are numbers, and the numbers say that the last thing a priest, a priest of any Christian religion, should run his keyboard about is the notion that homosexuality has no relationship to child sexual abuse.
_______________________________________

That was the part I finished last night, but scheduled for publication at noon on Saturday. But the Rev Coren used Twitter to publicize his article, and soon got the negative responses you’d expect, and quickly started blocking people who questioned him . . . including me.

I am trying to figure out his thinking, and quite frankly failing at it. As a priest, even an Anglican one, he had to know that any article written by a priest which in any way tried to minimize the response to child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse would draw plenty of negative response. His Twitter handle reads “Reverend Michael Coren,” and not everyone who read his tweet clicked on the article — which is now paywalled, though perhaps not a first time Globe and Mail visitor — and saw that he is an Anglican priest, not a Catholic clergyman, and many mocked and dismissed his article as somehow justifying sexual abuse among Catholic priests. It doesn’t do that, and it does not somehow excuse child sex trafficking and sexual abuse, but it definitely shows that he sees those as lesser problems than children reared in poverty or opposition to the homosexual and transgender agendas.

Then there was this tweet by Frank Rizzo (@FrankRi68868220):

MAPs are a stigmatized community, thank you for taking a stand in support.

MAPs are “minor attracted persons”. Mr Rizzo — no, not the former Police Commissioner and later Mayor of Philadelphia, who has long since gone to his eternal reward — has no indication that he actually is a minor attracted person, and I assume that his tweet was meant sarcastically, but this is the kind of response that the Rev Coren should have expected.

There are some things about which a person should just keep his mouth, or keyboard in this case, closed, and the Rev Coren has just found his. You cannot defend, or even minimize, child sex trafficking as somehow not that serious, because no matter how nuanced your point, no matter how well you write, you will not truly make your point, and just draw criticism and scorn.