From my “Toldja So” files: I dust off this little piece I wrote on my “Catholic and Enjoying it” blog a couple of years ago:

Kate Harding labors to bring our Polanski-adoring elites back to the central point: Roman Polanski raped a child.

I hate being right all the time, but I predicted exactly this years ago. The reality has never been that our elites much care about victims of sexual abuse: They care about having a useful tool to bash the Church, which some pervert priests and (far more) some spectacularly bad bishops have handed them. But the fact remains that, when the Right Sort of Roman rapes a kid, the people who were cursing and swearing about sexual abuse will turn themselves into pretzels to justify it.

Indeed, Kathy Shaidle is quite right (she agrees with me! How could it be otherwise) to note that our chattering classes have been quietly laboring to mainstream pedophilia for quite some time now. Mark my words: The Church will one day be condemned for forbidding what some of her neglectful and corrupt ministers are presently condemned for having allowed.

Now, wouldncha know it?, Kathy Shaidle alerts me to the following:

Mainstreaming of pedophilia via pop culture continues

As some of us have been saying for years…

Now a (gay) actor/”role model” announces with delight that his new TV series features a cool new character:

It isn’t going to be watered down. It’s actually going to be darker, bigger and bolder, and more dramatic. I mean, for goodness’ sake, we’ve got a main character [played by Bill Pullman] who’s a pedophile! The interesting thing about that is that the audience is going to be torn, because they’re going to not like him for what he’s done — but they’re gonna like him.

In the land where Consent is the Sole Criterion of the Good, it’s just a matter of time before our sexually libertine Chattering Classes make this move. Shows and characters like this help to soften the ground, just as the endless tide of sympathetic portrayals of abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality softened the ground for our present acceptance of these things. 

The amazing thing will be when the day comes that our Chattering Classes and Manufacturers of Culture simultaneously celebrate pedophiles, condemn the Church for not protecting children from pedophiles, *and* condemn the Church for condemning pedophilia. The Church, actually having a body of moral teaching its members can betray, can always be arraigned because its members are sinners. That’s easy peasy. The really amazing thing is how the world, having no principles beyond expedience, can simultaneously celebrate and condemn moral acts depending on how useful it is in attacking the Church. And we are suckers for it due to concupiscence, unless we are strengthened by grace and rooted in the teaching of the Church.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
we first endure, then pity, then embrace. - Alexander Pope