Blame It On The Rain

Okay the other night on one of the news shows they had Representative Mark Foley on to talk about what he did and why he did it. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Foley was a State Representative for the state of Florida who got in trouble for sending explicit text messages to teenage boys who were at the time congressional pages.

Well last night he was on some news show and of course offered up his apologies for failing his constituents and then proceeded to break down and cry as he gave the reasons for what he did, because he was abused as a child by a priest at his church. Now I’ve noticed in the past few years that many people who get in trouble for abusing children, improper behavior, and sometimes silly screw ups; have been blaming their childhood priests and churches for making them that way. Mark Foley isn’t the only person lately to be saying this even a priest has said that he did what he did because he was abused as a child.

Now the people that are being blamed by these criminals are all either dead or close to it so Foley and the others really have nothing to back up their claim since most of the adults from his childhood aren’t around anymore. So they are just trying to ride the sympathy wave that happens whenever someone says that they were abused as a child in an effort to deflect the fact that they broke the law and it is nobody’s fault other than their own.

Everyone likes to blame the church these days for pedophile priests and improper acts by the clergy as if the church is making them that way and promoting child abuse. It isn’t the fault of the church completely and I’ll tell you why I think this. A gay man who grows up in a religious household where the bible is held sacred and nightly prayers are a standard, like many homes of the early 20th Century, most likely will hide his orientation from his parents, family, and friends. Meanwhile he will be told by everyone that homosexuality is a sin and that those who men who “lay with men” will go to hell and burn for all eternity. This would bring a dilemma within the mind of this man, he could either continue on with his life the way he is and most likely be ostracized from everyone he knows or he could look inside himself and hope that his faith in God would help him to “not be gay”. Those that put their faith in God might even join a seminary and become a priest in the hopes to better understand what he has to do to “not be Gay”.

That is how a gay man would become a priest, but are all gay men and all priests pedophiles? Of course they aren’t, there as they say some rotten apples in the bunch and you can’t know what goes on in the deepest corner of a person’s brain to know just how they will act around someone else. Everyone has a fetish, this much is true, and some people have those really, REALLY dark and demented fetishes like pedophilia. Sometimes people don’t even know they have a fetish of any sort until something happens in their lives and it clicks inside and they hear an “Ooohhh, I like that” pop in their heads. A fetish isn’t exactly a bad thing either until it involves a criminal act like rape, pedophilia, or assault. Everyone has a fetish whether it is something simple like blonde hair or the exotic look of your partner; or if it is something that isn’t exactly accepted by the mainstream public like S&M or dressing up as a schoolgirl while your partner wears a Halloween mask and Easter bunny ears. Everyone has something that makes them click and just because they have a preference doesn’t mean that they should be pushed away or treated any different, people of the world need to open their minds more so that they can realize that we aren’t all different, we’re all the exact same on the inside in our own little ways. Now where’d I put that Santa hat?