"PQ"

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Aug 02, 2007

Several years back the Left fired a shotgun load of lurid comedic attacks at the Boy Scouts, and missed. These attacks found their epitome in a sexual parody by Elton John (no pun intended) that ended with a sex dance by a gang of male strippers dressed as teenage Boy Scouts--hilarious stuff it was not, and the shot string passed by harmlessly. These homoerotic attempts at humor, suggesting that the Boy Scouts harbor pederasts and teenage protogays, seem to have been exhausted in the mainstream media soon after Dale v. Boy Scouts of America was put before the Supreme Court of the United States.

It was in Dale v. Boy Scouts of American where the Scouts successfully argued that it had the legal right to exclude known homosexuals from its membership. The Scouts not only asserted the right, enraging the Left, the Scouts implemented the ban rather thoroughly, prohibiting membership to gays, or by expelling gays who were already members. As the legal defense of this policy reached its climax at SCOTUS, the gay rage humor appeared to peak also.

The left could not devour the Scouts within the US court system, nor did it succeed in destroying public support for Scouting with its humorless parodies, so it turned its efforts to attacking the Scouts through the petite persecution of social harassment and isolation-- town and park counsels in left-leaning cities routinely prevent the Scouts from using public and non-profit property; leases are not renewed; non-profit organizations withdraw financial support;  local news outlets give reduced coverage to the Scout's good works (including its good record on the sex-abuse front.) 

Scouting policy on homosexuals continues to enrage the Left, whose attacks against the Scouts have been unrelenting. But the humor has subsided, probably because the basis of humor rests on it possessing an element of plausibility, and such plausibility was not in evidence. At play here is a Plausibility Quotient, or PQ. There is little plausibility to the idea that the Scouts are hypocrites, or that despite the scouting policy, there are hidden homosexuals flooding into the organization, or that the organization is harboring large numbers of potentially repressed abusers. In the early 1990s, there may have been some plausibility to a joke about a pederast Boy Scout leader here or there, or a gay Eagle Scout here or there, but the evident enforcement of the see-no-homos-here policy of the Boy Scouts of America, one that drove them all the way to the SCOTUS, and the Scout's perseverance under the persecution and harassment from the Left, pushes down the Plausibility Quotient, and renders jokes about closeted gay scouts or scout pederasty ineffective.


Your Uncle Di was reminded of the Boy Scout’s saga  when he came across a post in Gerald's blog noting a video circulating on the internet that contains some extremely vile humor about priests abusing male youth. The ongoing lurid attacks on Catholic clergy by the late-night comedians is becoming more vile by the month it seems, and is of one piece with the rise in Christian bashing in the media.

However, as it appears that priest bashing sex jokes are increasing, Scout bashing sex jokes have been in decline for years--at least in the mainstream media outlets. Do you suppose that the Left has to save up its ammo for bigger targets like the Church, or do you suppose that they know that jokes about pederasty find their mark only when the PQ is sufficiently high? The second reason is undoubtedly at work.

Unfortunately, the PQ rises every time we read reports that past or current abusers were known for their homosexual behaviors in the seminary, and were simply given a pass. The PQ rises even further when seminary administrators who gave a pass to the homosexuals who later enjoyed the pleasures of pederasty, also blocked investigations about homosexual seminarians, and were evidently rewarded with a top slot in the diocese.  The PQ gets pushed into Mensa regions when we learn that an embassy of US bishops pleaded with the Vatican to delay implementation of the exclusion policy on homosexual seminarians.

Thus, your Uncle Di finds this priest bashing humor detestable, but lamentably predictable because of the PQ that is maintained by the US episcopacy. What else could one expect? The episcopacy continues to kick the homosexual can down the road perhaps hoping that it will just go away on its own while giving a boost to the PQ. As long as this situation prevails, the sex jokes about Catholic clergy will continue.