‘No age of consent law’: Gay Irish Presidential candidate
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeHomosexualist Irish presidential hopeful David Norris is fighting to maintain his candidacy amidst even more revelations that he supports “classical pedophilia” and opposes any law specifying an age of consent for sex.
On its front page yesterday, the Irish Daily Mail ran the headline, “I don’t believe in an age of consent,” and said that Norris had given an interview last year in which he said (in the words of the paper) that “prostitution and all drugs should be legalised,” and “he was pro-abortion and advocated pederasty.”
“And in the shockingly frank interview that raises serious questions about his suitability for the presidency,” the paper continues, “he said: I don’t believe in an age of consent.”
Norris has responded in a letter, asking his supporters not to judge him according to “a couple of sensationalist headlines,” and saying that he abhors child abuse and that all perpetrators should face “the full rigours of the law.” In the letter, however, he confirmed that he does not support any legal age of consent.
Norris also denied being “pro-abortion,” but added, “I do certainly believe that access to information is the best way to reduce the incidence of abortion.”
Norris was a front-runner in the Irish Republic’s Presidential campaign until last week, when a ten-year-old interview was unearthed in the media in which he made comments supporting pederasty, calling it “classical pedophilia.”
Norris told the magazine Magill, “There’s a lot of nonsense about pedophilia.” “I think there is a complete and utter hysteria about this subject,” he said, insisting that children were capable of giving informed consent to sex, saying, “The law should take into account consent rather than age.”
He also said that child victims of sexual abuse are sometimes more harmed by the condemnation of the abuse, and said that incest should only be banned in cases where a victim could be impregnated.
In his recent letter, on the subject of pederasty (sexual relations between an older man and a teenage boy) Norris confirmed his support for the practice, saying again that speaking from his own experience as a young gay man in Dublin, he would have preferred to have engaged in such a relationship as his “introduction to sexuality.”
Citing Plato’s work The Symposium, he wrote, “The greatest philosopher ever argued that physical love was the gateway to spiritual love, very movingly it concludes with the most beautiful young man in Athens, Alcibiades admitting that he has offered himself sexually to Socrates in return for sharing in Socrates’ wisdom. This text was preserved throughout the middle ages.
“I saw this enlightening approach and experience as a much more interesting and preferable introduction to sexuality than my own experience. That is my own personal opinion.”
