Ex-priest admits to sharing child pornography with online dominatrix
Well, you can hardly call this news surprising, to be honest. Maybe I should just have given this column the title ‘There we go again…’:
PDT San Francisco — A federal grand jury indicted Bernie Ward, a former Catholic priest and ex-radio talk show host, in September on two counts of distributing child pornography and one count of receiving child porn using the Internet. Ward pleaded not guilty to the charges in December and had insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
Last month, Ward sought a ruling from the judge that would allow him to present a defence that he received and distributed “the charged contraband” for legitimate First Amendment purposes, namely to research and comment upon “social mores.” Ward claims the conversations he’s had with a woman who is an online dominatrix consisted only of role-playing as part of a book he was researching on hypocrisy.
So, no, priests - or ex-priests - being forced to confess they are really that into children is not exactly earth-shattering news. Depressing, yes; a ‘hold the presses’ moment, not quite anymore. That the man was also engaged in discussions with an online dominatrix adds a bit of very strange spice to the mix. That’s the kind of stuff we expect from English Conservative politicians more than from renegade priests - but maybe this just means that mister Bernie Ward attended an English public school when he was young.
The founder of the Jesuits famously claimed, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and he is mine.’ The old English public schools could make a similar claim, ‘Give us your children and when we’re done with them they’ll be buggered for life.’
It is kind of funny that our former priest & former d.j. now tries to hide behind the First Amendment. I’ve said it before but I’m more than happy to repeat it: While it’s said that patriotism is the last refuge any scoundrel seeks, in the USA the First Amendment is often a scoundrel’s first refuge.
One of the functions of America’s Supreme Court, of course, is to interpret all the Amendments. The Court is, if you will, to the Constitution what the Pope is supposed to be to Christ: the legitimate and only and infallible representative on earth. It is not and was never meant to be the easiest of jobs: to be the guardians of the Law. Still, even though I’m not a lawyer I can’t help but feel that our paedophile priest doesn’t have a prayer when it comes to hiding behind the First Amendment.
While it might not always be easy to know what the founders of the Constitution really had in mind, I’m pretty sure that when they wrote that First Amendment they weren’t exactly thinking of protecting the interests of some shabby priest who shared kiddie porn with an online dominatrix.
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