'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.' -- Aristotle

PRIZE for the most popular 'tweet' of the week must go to restaurant critic Tom Doorley. It read: "I personally know and like both David Norris and Helen Lucy Burke. But I think David Norris would be both a better babysitter and President."

"What? David Norris is gay?" joked another tweeter.

But it is not his homosexuality but his intellectual honesty which may have landed him in trouble.

So, what does the intellectual -- who also happens to be gay -- say to the journalist? Sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn't it? Except we're not quite sure yet what the punchline is.

Amazingly (I jest), the only parts of the near 10-year-old conversation we seem to be focused on are to do with sex -- usually a taboo subject with anyone who wants to get anywhere in Irish political life.

And not just any old missionary position, "brace yourself, Mary", heterosexual and only for procreating sex. No, David and Helen were talking gay sex, relationships between older and younger men, and -- God bless us and save us -- the conversation even veered off to take in attitudes (both ancient and modern) to pederasty, paedophilia and incest.

Oh, Mother of Divine God (here, I have to bless myself), doesn't the poor man know that these are topics which should be kept well within the blasphemous, decadent, Protestant walls of Trinity College, and not allowed seep out to infect the Good Irish Catholic Body Politic?

It's not long since we weren't supposed to even admit that these things existed, let alone discuss them publicly (although all were regularly practised behind closed doors).

But really, what was said that has upset the good Ms Burke, her consulting editor at Magill at the time of the interview, Mr Waters (Irish Times, June 3), and myriad outraged listeners to the Joe Duffy show?

One of the comments which seems to have caused horror is one in which Norris is quoted as saying (although we aren't told how the question is phrased): "I haven't the slightest interest in children, or in people who are considerably younger than me. I cannot understand how anybody could find children of either sex in the slightest bit attractive sexually . . . but in terms of classic paedophilia, as practised by the Greeks, for example, where it is an older man introducing a younger man to adult life, there can be something said for it. Now, again, this is not something that appeals to me."

Here Norris is demonstrating his Aristotelian thought process as he entertains a thought without necessarily accepting it.

He continues: "Although when I was younger I would have greatly relished the prospect of an older, attractive, mature man taking me under his wing, lovingly introducing me to sexual realities, treating me with affection, teaching me about life."

To me, this sentence is desperately sad. One can hear the longing for acceptance, for understanding, of the young outsider; the person who was forced to become the pioneer, the defender of the outcast against the cold forces of homophobia that prevailed at the time -- and still prevail in some quarters -- in Ireland.

Yet to others, this comment is disturbing and dangerous -- as they believe it implies that Senator Norris approves of paedophilia.

Other comments that seem to have disturbed Ms Burke and her consulting editor were, as Mr Waters wrote last week in the IT, "to be summed up in two phrases that also featured in the Magill article, to the effect that there was 'a lot of nonsense' and 'complete and utter public hysteria' about paedophilia".

Doesn't sound good, does it? Did Norris really go and dismiss our concern, from his ivory tower in the Senate, about the crime of the 21st Century as "hysteria"?

If I -- as a parent -- believed that was true, I would be first in line to demand that Norris resign from public life. But again, context is everything. What Norris is discussing with Burke is the "complete and utter public hysteria" which results in irrational thought creating a dangerous blame game.

As Norris informed her: "A paediatrician -- a children's doctor -- had to flee her home. A pedicurist -- a man who looks after feet -- was burned to death in his own house." And he is right, when the members of the public confuse a children's doctor with a child abuser, and act violently on this confusion, public hysteria, "fuelled by the gutter press", is the cause.

Thankfully though, those who think that pedicurists are really pederasts with good feet are few and far between. Not so those who still believe that there is an innate link between homosexuality and paedophilia though.

Despite numerous studies that show the majority of paedophiles claim heterosexual status, it is still convenient in some quarters to associate one with the other. Even the press does it sometimes.

In 2004, after the Ferns Report was published, a newspaper headline read: "Gay sex ring at seminary revealed." Yet the only references in the article to the victims of this ring referred to a 'minor' and 'boys'. It was therefore by definition a paedophile

ring, yet even journalists sometimes fail to note the obvious distinction.

Last year, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (Vatican Secretary of State) notoriously claimed: "Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and paedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem."

This, of course, is not true, nor is it the problem, as was immediately pointed out to the good cardinal. But sadly, it's an untruth that a lot of people still prefer to believe.

An "invidious myth" was how Gregory Hersh, research psychologist at the University of California, described the incendiary comments. Father James Martin SJ, wrote in the American National Catholic Weekly on this topic: "Every reputable mainstream psychologist and psychiatrist (Catholics included) rejects the conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia (and ephebophilia)."

David Norris has argued that he was misinterpreted and quoted out of context during the Magill interview. As the original tape of the conversation is missing, we do not know for a fact whether he was or not. We have to choose between a man who seems to be suffering publicly from a surfeit of honesty and a woman who described (on radio) an official European delegation sent to investigate the trafficking of women and children in Thailand (which included Senator Norris) as his "holiday in Thailand".

Earlier last week, I feared that Norris had been lethally caught by the "When did you stop beating your wife?" ploy. I didn't dare to hope that the recently acquired scepticism of the Irish electorate combined with a traditional anarchic streak would cause many citizens to stand back and say: "Right, what's really going on here?"

But while the usual reactionary forces are (pretending?) to be aghast at the notion of a president who can talk academically and rather beautifully about the history of Greek Love, increasingly the evidence seems to show that the rest of us are prepared to judge the man on his record.

Hopefully those politicians who have it in their gift to endorse his nomination as a presidential candidate will have the courage and honesty to do that also.

Originally published in