Lots of horseplay: the monkey suit, looking into his coffee in a spoof of Chief Theresa Spence seeking enlightenment in her fish broth, the dagger smile after a droll put-down.
Now the man behind Stephen Harper’s rise to power has blown himself up over stupefying comments about child pornography. CBC’s Power and Politics has dumped Flanagan. The PM’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, tweeted out the death sentence on the PM’s former confidante, describing his views on child pornography as “repugnant, ignorant and appalling”.
Tom is toast — and this is a big deal for the Conservative party.
For a variety of reasons, Stephen Harper has seen a bevy of people close to him implode recently, from senior advisor Bruce Carson to his personal pick for the oversight job at Canada’s domestic spy service, Arthur Porter. Now this.
It will be remembered that Flanagan re-invented conservatism for Stephen Harper. He steered the ship for the first four years of the transition period, managed two leadership campaigns, was chief of staff during a critical part of the Canadian Alliance period, ran the Conservative national campaign in 2004, raised money, hired staff, contracted pollsters and recruited people like Ian Brodie to the Harper team.
Now he has incurred the wrath of millions of people on Twitter. Millions more in print will soon be gagging as well. Someone has edited Flanagan’s Wikipedia profile and added “Supports Child Pornography.” As for Canada’s aboriginals, their disgust over remarks made at the University of Lethbridge by the PM’s former mentor is bottomless.
In a bizarre exchange with a student caught on video, Flanagan said that he didn’t think people should go to jail for possessing child pornography. You could hear Vic Toews choking all the way to Vancouver. Here are the main points Flanagan made:
“A lot of people on my side of the spectrum, the conservative side of the spectrum, are on a kind of jihad against child pornography. I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures.
“I got put on the mailing list of the National Man Boy Love Association and I started getting their mailing for a couple of years. That’s as close as I came to child pornography.”
The student who confronted Flanagan also made reference to a quote attributed to Canada’s answer to Karl Rove when the Manitoba government was hurrying through tough new legislation on child pornography. At the time, Flanagan suggested the whole subject was debatable: “What’s wrong with pornography in the sense that it’s just pictures?”
The synapse meltdown here is jaw-dropping. How can you be against child pornography but then reduce its products to “taste in pictures”? Where was Flanagan when the personal misery of aboriginal children was laid bare during the residential school expose?
This is the man who laughed at a request from the government’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission for documents dealing with what happened over those dark decades to real children behind the school walls. The issue for Flanagan clearly was not getting at the truth, but the number of documents being requested — 8 million. He seemed to forget about the number of lives ruined.
Where was Flanagan when Catholic Bishop Raymond Lahey recently went to jail for possession of child pornography that he was caught bringing in from the United States? The bishop’s taste in pictures, which included images of naked boys in scenes of bondage and torture, was hardly the issue.
The issue then, and now, is law-breaking, runaway hypocrisy, and child abuse. Where does Flanagan think child pornography comes from — a computer screen, or the criminal abuse of children too young to protect themselves, the flesh and blood behind the images?
When I wrote Unholy Orders, the story of mass child abuse at a church-run orphanage in Newfoundland, I got a close-up look at both the kind of people who sexually abuse kids and the long term effects of such abuse. I learned two things. Abusers have no remorse (unless you count getting caught) and victims suffer for life. I met one victim who sleeps in a nest of blankets and pillows in his closet — because all the terrible things that have happened to him, happened in a bed at Mount Cashel. He is in his fifties.
During the Royal Commission into the tragedy at Mount Cashel, it was pointed out by the lead counsel for the commission, David Day, that the church had secured treatment for the admitted child molesters in the Irish Christian Brothers.
Day asked the worldwide head of the Christian Brothers if the boys who had been sexually abused had also been given treatment. The answer was no. This is what Brother Gabriel McHugh said and it says it all: “I sincerely was not aware of the terrible impact this kind of abuse has on individuals, the victims …”
Rehabilitation for the perpetrators, but nothing for the kids they ruined? McHugh’s staggering ignorance is like Flanagan’s breathlessly stupid view that child pornography is “only pictures”. That same catastrophic failure of emotional intelligence explains how casually the Mount Cashel boys, some of them under the age of seven, were assaulted. Here is the direct testimony of one of them at the Hughes Commission:
“He told me to come into the kitchen and he picked me up and sat me up on the counter and poured me some Pepsi. I drank a bit of it. And he grabbed me by the face and he kissed me full on the mouth. Then he lifted me down off the counter and he took me by the wrist and dragged me into the bedroom and closed the bedroom door and he raped me.”
It is nice to hear that Tom Flanagan is firmly against that kind of child abuse. But one Mount Cashel boy spoke to me about a subject Flanagan (astoundingly) doesn’t understand.
The victim, now a man, described going to a priest’s house to escape forced sex at the hands of the Irish Christian Brothers. While waiting for the priest to come home, he found hundreds of pictures featuring children involved in sex acts with adults. That boy’s intended sanctuary suddenly became as threatening as the orphanage he was trying to escape. He understood exactly what the pictures were about — and it wasn’t a personal expression of ‘taste’.
Tom Flanagan has a lot of questions to answer. If “jihad” means an all-out war against child pornography, is he really against that? Is child pornography just pictures? And how was it that he received material from the National Man Love Association? Anyone in this topsy-turvy age can find themselves on an embarrassing mailing list, but for a “couple of years”?
In the meantime, everybody should take a page from the police officers charged with investigating these matters. They don’t like the term “child pornography” because pornography involving consenting adults is a mainstream, booming global business. It comes with the cable package and the hotel amenities. Whether it is lewd or erotic is a matter of personal taste.
Calling the forced sexual abuse of children “kiddie porn” associates it with the normalization of adult pornography. Investigators prefer a different term: child exploitation material, or CEM.
As one investigator said, the people who have to deal with the crushing impact of this global assault on children don’t see pornography in the images Flanagan suggests represent personal taste. Those images are not mere pictures. They are crime scenes.
I note that Flanagan has unreservedly apologized for his monstrous “theoretical” ruminations in Lethbridge. My suggestion is to save the hot air, and go and volunteer to work for free on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission until they get to the bottom of something Flanagan doesn’t know a thing about.
How better to learn that crimes against children are not a matter of aesthetics?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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