Andrew Sullivan has awarded me “Quote of the Day” status for a remark I made yesterday on Amy Welborn’s blog, on a thread having to do with an Illinois priest who got beaten up when he propositioned two teenage boys in a public park. I said:
Vicious little punks’? Please. I’d say theirs was a healthy response.
The only thing they did wrong in my book was kicking him while he was down. They were certainly right to knock this old perv’s block off when he laid his hands on one of them. I’d like to buy those hoods a Coke…
To paraphrase the Misfit, the Church would be a better place if there were punks there beating up cruisy clerics every single day of the Church’s life. If a priest or anyone else ever propositioned my kid like this, if my kid wasn’t in a position to break the perv’s nose, I’d go find him and do it.
A reader could get the impression from the way Andrew presents the quote that I’m endorsing gay-bashing. But as anyone who reads further in the thread can see, I did not such thing.
When a Welborn reader named Dave said, “I guess I don’t associate feeling manly with knocking out a gay person,” I responded in the comments box:
Dave, we’re talking about an older person offering to pay minors for sex.
If this were a man offering to pay two girls for same, I’d feel exactly the same way, except probably more strongly, because they wouldn’t have been in a position to defend themselves if the older man had forced himself on them.
And that’s what I really do believe. Dirty old men who come on to minors, male or female, deserve a pop in the nose because they’re dirty old men, not because they’re gay.