Derryn Hinch – 3AW's other anti-Catholic bigot

When Derryn Hinch was thrown the 3AW drive-time slot last year, many people must have wondered how long it would take for his loud-mouth vanity and preening self-righteousness to turn people off once again. Some of us wondered how long it would be for his crass mindless anti-Catholic bigotry to show its ugly head. With regard to the latter, the answer was not long at all.

Out of curiosity, I tuned in for a while to see if there was any change in the firing of synaptic connections, so long affected by long boozy lunches. There was none, just the same old random firing off of long settled bigotries. It did not take long for the Catholic Church to get the usual serve.

Now, Hinch may say to someone like me: turn off if you don't want to listen to me. Well, I do. The trouble is that I often tune into Ernie Sigley's entertaining afternoon program (just before drive-time) and sometimes before I can scramble to the dial at the end of Ernie's program, Hinch's voice is filling my office. It is amazing that in just the short space of some minutes before I switch him off, he has often already had go at Catholics and the Catholic Church. Let me give an example of the standard of Hinch's bigotry.

A few weeks ago, Channel Nine in Melbourne sent one of its beautiful blond reporters to do a big story on an American priest attached to a Williamstown parish. The priest had owned up to having sex on three occasions with a sixteen-year-old male. Full of enthusiasm and with as much gravity as her blond head could muster, the reporter made out as if this was a case of clerical paedophilia and that the Catholic Church was typically negligent in hiding the priest away in a parish where the parishioners had no idea of his crimes. At one point, the camera focused on the primary school next to the presbytery with the reporter nodding warningly about the close proximity. The incompetent reporting of the incident would be laughable if it wasn't so serious.

I have two questions for that dopey Channel Nine reporter. Firstly, how many primary schools have sixteen-year-old students? Secondly, doesn't she know that the age of consent for male-to-male sex is sixteen years? Far from committing any crime, the priest would have been the envy of most homosexuals for his conquest. For since the time of Socrates, unblemished youth has been the ideal of homosexual desire.

Hinch (we must give him some credit) is not so stupid as to take the angle on the case as the dopey blond. This is the angle he tried to work: 'The Vatican says that homosexuals are 'depraved'. The Williamstown priest is homosexual, yet he is allowed to work as a priest. 'It just does not make sense!'

Firstly, I would like to know in what Catholic document Hinch has seen the word 'depraved' (the word he used) applied to homosexuals. In all the relevant official documents I have read, the state of homosexuality is referred as a disorder, a state contrary to God's created order. In truth, the people who usually refer to homosexuals as 'depraved' are ordinary people who will continue, despite the endless PC preaching of people like Hinch, to regard homosexual acts as disgusting and unnatural.

We know, of course, that Hinch used the word 'depraved to give the right colour and degree of sensationalism to his lying comment.

Secondly, and this is the important point, if Hinch had seen the Channel Nine report he would have learnt that the incident with the sixteen-year-old took place in the mid 1990s, that the priest truly regretted his actions, had confessed his sins (the dopey blond tried to get mileage out the rules applying to Catholic confession), had undergone therapy, and his superiors were confident that he would honour his vow of chastity. In other words, he had undergone in the context of the Catholic Church the same sort of rehabilitation that secular authorities prescribe for real criminals - for those like Hinch who are charged and convicted according to law and put in jail.

The truth of the incident makes Hinch's comment yet again an unconscionable distortion, an unjustified gratuitous trashing of the priest's reputation, and an incitement of the only community bigotry approved by the media - anti-Catholic bigotry.

The effectiveness of Hinch's bigotry is gauged by the fellow bigots he brings out of the woodwork ringing to declare that the Catholic Church is corrupt from top to bottom, that Catholics should be ashamed of themselves, that the Catholic Church has a lot to answer for, that legislation should be generated to counter the corrupt influence of the clergy, and so on.

To end this comment I have a small task of logic for Hinch. Most relevant surveys of the matter have found that the incident of paedophilia among clergy is no higher than comparable organisations or groups. That incident is put at 1-2 per cent. If Hinch bothers to look at the statistics of sexual abuse of the young by Catholic clergy he will find that the overwhelming majority of cases concern homosexual priests abusing pubescent males (twelve to fifteen-year-olds). Now if ninety per cent of the two per cent of Catholic clergy are guilty of homosexual abuse, then what is the conclusion? That is a problem of homosexuality or of the Catholic clergy? I doubt whether Hinch's calcified bigotry will enable him to follow the logical path.

Hinch and his fellow bigots have no idea of the growing literature on the background to clerical sexual misdemeanour. The PC class doesn't want to know about it.