Kevin Myers: Liberal icons can't offend, only disappoint
Pity this day that poor baffled organ, the Liberal Feminist Mind, which has to deal with the issue of Davis Norris's exculpatory letter on Oireachtas stationery in support of an Israeli who buggered a 15-year-old boy, even as next door to vile, evil Israel, the Syrian regime butchers another few hundred protesters. Pity it, but briefly -- for henceforth, it's in charge.
We all know that the political power of the Irish Catholic Church is over. The new moral authority, the Liberal Feminist conscience, doesn't have rules or principles. It just has feelings, which have to be indulged.
So how does the Liberal Feminist Conscience react to Norris's letter to Israel? What is the official response toward one of the great icons of liberal Ireland? It is disappointed. Why? Because the liberal-left emotional machinery doesn't condemn or denounce its own. And in the organ that passes for the liberal-left brain, homosexuality is itself good, and homosexual acts are intrinsically good, so it is in that imprecise moral location, a quandary, when presented with issues arising from an adult male sodomising an underage teenage boy.
But what would happen if the teenager had been female? What would Liberal Feminist Ireland have said about a non-gay Fianna Fail candidate for the Presidency writing a letter of exculpation in support of a man who had buggered a 15-year-old girl? Well, by this time the howl of anger would already have not merely washed away his presidential ambitions, but destroyed his public life entirely. And we already have legislative evidence for this. The infamous 2006 Sexual Offences Act says a 16-year-old boy can be imprisoned for having intercourse with a 16-year-old girl because it can make her pregnant. But the law also specifies he can be imprisoned for consensually sodomising her, which obviously doesn't make her pregnant. Yet it was the very possibility that she could be made pregnant that supposedly was the defining issue in the framing of the law -- but it was clearly not. In other words, the subtext was to create a law that would punish males and not punish females -- and is that not the legislative definition of a feminist paradise? And who wants intellectual consistency when the law is there to satisfy the emotions of that strange variegated and hysterical assembly: the Liberal Feminist Mob, the LFM?
The real beauty of the Norris letter (aside from the exquisite "I am a person of some consequence . . .") is that it was written to judges in the state of Israel, which he has spent the past decades denouncing. I am unaware of Mr Norris organising demonstrations against any of the many vile Arab regimes that neighbour Israel, and all of which criminalise homosexual acts. (In his beloved Gaza, the penalty for homosexuality is death.) One such country, Libya, has even been an active enemy of democracy in Ireland, arming a fascist militia which killed thousands.
But of course, not even the most deluded member of the LFM would ever write a letter to an Arab government demanding fairness about anything.
Moreover, silence is the usual LFM response to the uncomfortable. Silence about Saddam Hussein. Silence about Mubarak. Silence about Assad. Silence about Gaddafi. These tyrants all murdered their opponents, in numbers varying from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands. But about generally law-abiding Israel, there is endless chest-beating rage. Reflection, thought, analysis, consideration and judgment -- these intellectual processes are entirely secondary to the primary engine of all LFM responses to anything: their own emotional self-indulgence.
Who can predict what the LFM will turn against next? There are no rules in this demented world of theirs, merely feelings. Indeed, the LFM has a special offendedness-meter, which decides their reactions to everything. On uncomfortable subjects, which of course the meter doesn't even register -- such as Arab despots, women sex offenders, male suicides, and gender-apartheid laws that discriminate against men -- there is Utter Silence. On the liberal icons (Norris, Obama, Mandela, Robinson) that do not live up to their own emotional and usually unpredictable expectations, there is at best, Disappointment. But when the issue is their professed opponents -- Israel, Bush, the Vatican -- the LFM offendedness-meter oscillates in a demented frenzy between Appalled, Disgusted and Outraged.
Mandela did absolutely nothing about AIDS in South Africa; How Disappointing. Pope John Paul II says condoms are not the answer; Universal Outrage! So what, hypothetically, would the liberal media have said about a Fianna Fail President cutting short his Presidency to get a job with the UN? Cue Appalled, Disgusted and Outraged. But it is not a hypothesis for Mary Robinson, the heroine (or are we even allowed to say that word any more) of liberal Ireland. Therefore, what probing questions did Miriam O'Callaghan ask our very own Abdicatrix Mary Robinson about her premature evacuation on RTE recently? Why, the subject never even arose. Can you imagine child abuse never being mentioned in an RTE interview with a cardinal? Well actually, yes you could -- in 1956.
So stand back Rome: the LFM rules from now. And fasten seat belts, chaps: it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Irish Independent
