The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: The Devil’s Kitchen: Gadding about.

I said I felt obliged to write about the current paedophilia witch-hunt. I am positively quivering with rage at the way in which our detestable Home Secretary is playing on the prejudices of the unwashed and ignorant in the case of Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter.

No-one approves of paedophilia, but the way in which emotion has been allowed to override the principles of justice is more dangerous by far than the nastiest paedophile alive. In the past 48 hours, I have been horrified by some of the stuff I have read on blogs on this subject, including serving police officers expressing – apparently in all seriousness – the view that only bullets in a paedophile’s head will keep our children safe.

Every time I say it, I attract readers’ wrath, but here I go again. A paedophile can no more choose his sexual urges than can any other deviant from the sexual norm. He is worthy of compassion for precisely as long as he restrains himself from putting those urges into practice. As his objects of desire can never consent, his sexuality can never find consensual expression and so he is condemned to chastity. It is insane, given the pressures under which that puts him, that our society has proscribed even digital aids to the masturbatory fantasies which any rational person would wish him to find as satisfying as possible.

But say I am wrong. Say he has a choice. In that case, he is a criminal like any other. These and many other points, I was planning to make at length, but DK has already done it  and done it well. I endorse every word of his post, and would only add this. The present witch-hunt is a disgrace to a once-civilised nation. I hope Paul Gadd can restrain his horrible urges in future. I also hope he can find a country which will either treat him for his mental illness (if that is what it is) or leave him free to try to avoid re-offending.

Jacqui Smith is either an ignoramus or pretends to be one in order to win the votes of those who are. Either way, she is a traitor to every civilised value this country ever stood for and unfit to be Home Secretary. I despise her political exploitation of this pathetic man with every fibre of my being.