Exit, Disgraced

"My words were badly chosen, and in the resulting uproar I was not able to express my abhorrence of child pornography and the sexual abuse of children. 
"I apologize unreservedly to all who were offended by my statement, and most especially to victims of sexual abuse and their families."
Professor Tom Flanagan

How doth the self-assured, the intellectual paragon of conservative Canadian values fall, when casually and without adequate forethought to the full weight of what they express, mount a defence of the indefensible.  To state, as he did, that it is no one's business when an individual peruses child pornography, because it harms no one has harmed himself irreparably.

Swift to declare he would himself not indulge in anything remotely akin to child pornography, yet in his open-minded stab at civil liberties, defending the right of mature men to seek out pornographic depictions of children being sexually exploited and brutalized. A private matter that should not have anything to do with the public weal because no one is harmed?

Those pornographic images so beloved of pedophiles and porno-gawkers do not suddenly create themselves out of nothing. Children are hunted by predators who take advantage of their vulnerabilities and who pose them or abuse them and violate their defences to be able to produce deviant-titillating images.

How large a leap of the imagination to value those depictions of abused children before some deviant nutcrank decides to isolate a vulnerable child and indulge himself directly in abusing the child? As though there isn't enough atrocities mounted within society against the vulnerable besmirching life for the helpless.

Professor Flanagan is a high-profile academic, a figure of political insightfulness, a former adviser to some of Canada's important public and political figures. He is the author of scholarly works, and his opinion sought and contested. This was not an opinion that was sought; it was proffered out of whole cloth, but casually, as an aside. And it is being contested and widely condemned.

All of Professor Flanagan's former colleagues, admirers and supporters, along with his academic peers and his own university and the public airways that he appears upon, have separated themselves from him in clearly defined words of aghast condemnation and disgust.

Strangely enough, it was First Nations people whose Idle No More movement he has derided who unearthed an old interview with the damning initial statement which, when confronted with it, Professor Flanagan did not disown, but sought to elaborate upon.

One of those classic moments when incaution and a fuzzy, ill-thought-out concept bites the hand that too late claps the mouth shut.