The Green Party along with Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney and various major establishment media outlets have rallied to the defence of Ireland’s new Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman after he was forced to make a statement regarding his association with Pete Tatchell.
In the statement O’Gorman distances himself from Tatchell’s opinions and suggests a right wing conspiracy is behind what he calls a “homophobic” smear campaign against him.
The controversy was sparked by a tweet by O’Gorman which resurfaced from 2018 showing a smiling Roderic O’Gorman posing for a photo with Peter Tatchell, a British LGBTQ rights campaigner who infamously wrote a letter claiming, “Not all sex involving children is abuse”.
Tatchell (68) was condemned for his 1997 letter to The Guardian in which he defended a book which challenged people’s opposition to child rape.
The gay rights champion was forced to backtrack on his letter and apologise saying the book he was referring to was not “a paedophile handbook” but written by psychologists and anthropologists and dealt with Papua New Guinean tribes.
Tatchell wrote “Young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ in the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea.”
He also mentioned that “positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures’ explaining that his friends had ‘sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13”.
Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman, who is himself a gay man, has not responded to the widespread sharing of the picture he tweeted with the caption:
“Happy #Pride! Delighted that @PeterTatchell is marching with @GreenParty_ie today”.
Other tweets in which O’Gorman liked an image of a woman recreating the image of Chronos eating his children. The image of the god, Chronos, or Saturn as the Roman’s knew him eating his children has long been used by pro-life advocates to decry abortion.
O’Gorman replaces Katherine Zappone as Minister for Children, who was herself a gay woman and self-professed student of witchcraft writing a 1991 book titled “The Hope for Wholeness: A Spirituality for Feminists” which discussed a pagan approach to spirituality must be adopted by women to achieve equality.
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