CONTROVERSY CONVERGENCE (as the Pim story blends into the paedophile priest story) :

Fortuyn favoured depraved : PIM Fortuyn, the charismatic right-wing Dutch politician murdered last week was a powerful advocate for paedophilia (MARCELLO MEGA AND JUSTIN SPARKS, 12 May 2002, The Scotsman)

His controversial views on race, immigration, liberalisation of drug laws and his open homosexuality were well-known. But his approval of paedophilia, while not a
secret, was ignored by Dutch journalists covering his election campaign.

In [an article for the Dutch current affairs magazine, Elsevier, in 1999], Fortuyn wrote: "Paedophilia is just like hetero and homosexuality. It is something that is in the genes. There is little if anything that you can do about it or against it. You are who you are--sooner or later the proclivity makes its irresistible appearance. It is not any more curable than hetero or homosexuality."

The column concludes: "The law philosopher and paedophile [Edward] Brongersma, for years senator of the Labour party, spent his life campaigning for understanding of the paedophile fellow man. He launched this effort fearlessly after serving a sentence for sexual harassment of a minor. The minor in question had not considered it harassment, but the justice department judged otherwise in the 1950s.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, Brongersma slowly but surely gained ground. After the invention of the Pill came sexual liberation. Gay sex became accepted, and why then should paedo sex not be allowed ­ under the strict condition that the child is willing and that there is no coercion? This enlightened point of view has meanwhile been abandoned, and under the influence of the ologists, the child is defined as totally devoid of sexual desires, at least where adults are concerned.

"We are far removed from the understanding that Brongersma tried to foster, to our own detriment, for that matter. For everything which can be discussed is in principle also manageable, one would think!" [...]

In 1998, Fortuyn published an autobiographical work called Babyboomers, the name given to children born in the post-war years up to 1953. He reveals that he had early sexual experiences with adult males, which he claims to have found pleasurable and exciting. His logic is that because he enjoyed sexual experiences with adult men as a child, it should be legal.

Fortuyn's first experience occurred when he was five years old. "The Dutch soldier asks if I want to see his tent. That's what I want. I like it and they all are sleeping
on the ground in a sleeping-bag. I ask if it is hard and cold to sleep on the ground. Oh no, come here. Together we crawl in his sleeping-bag. The soldier asks my name and I ask his name.

He is called Arie and he asks if I like that name. Yes, I think that's a nice name and I lie beside him, nice and warm."

Fortuyn then described a close sexual encounter with the soldier before leaving his sleeping-bag "to go and play outside." He added: "Can I come back tomorrow? Yes, tomorrow I may come back, says Arie."

A few pages later, he describes another incident: "I went to the park for a walk, it was very silent and the sun was shining. On the bench sat a young fellow. I stood still, curious."

Fortuyn relates another sexual encounter - this time in explicit detail. He concludes: "I was frightened and ran away to my home, to my mother. Excited, I ran into the room. My mother looked at me searchingly and asked what had happened. Nothing, of course. Watch out, little man, was the only thing she said. A glass of lemonade made me calm down. Yes, that was exciting."

Most telling is his appraisal of these memories. "In chapter 1 about the 1950s, I wrote about my early sexual experiences, experiences that I see as an enrichment. Today, an experience like that in the park could easily lead to a complaint by parents to the police because of paedophilia, and the relevant young man would be in trouble. But why?

"He didn't do me any harm. On the contrary, he showed me something that was incomprehensibly exciting and I could feel and touch it, but today we are ready to
interfere with complete teams of professionals. By interfering in such an irritating and grown-up way in the world of children, we make an enormous problem of something that for a child is no problem at all and is only exciting."

It's been an unpleasant couple weeks, arguing with friends and allies about Pim Fortuyn, and whether he should be considered "one of ours". I've maintained that, regardless of whether he was a racist personally, his political appeal was to racism. I've also argued, and Perry de Havilland addressed the issue in more detail, that Fortuyn was more of a libertine than a libertarian and that, as such, he made a no better than troublesome defender of Western values and an awful representative for conservatism generally. But the emotional power of his assassination clouded reason (in other words people disagreed with me) and conservatives, who should have known better (in other words, should have agreed with me), embraced him as a martyr in the cause of liberty and a fallen hero of Western Civilization.

But as this article amply demonstrates, Mr. Fortuyn's views were so far out of the mainstream as regards sexual licence, that no self-respecting conservative should any longer seek to hitch our wagon to his fallen star. If being in favor of liberty really requires us to adopt the view that every human behavior should be condoned and protected, then liberty is ultimately irreconcilable with human decency and dignity. If freedom includes the freedom to rape a child, and this unfettered freedom is a Western value that we require the rest of the world adopt, then sign me up for the jihad.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2002 8:17 AM