It was a long time ago that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (shown) sexually abused teenage boys. So long, in fact, that the crimes\u2019 statute of limitations has expired. But a very small measure of justice was done Wednesday when the ex-Illinois congressman was sentenced to 15 months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and two years\u2019 supervised release under the condition he submit to sex-offender treatment. The Republican had pled guilty to charges relating to his efforts to cover up his crimes, as CBS News reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Wednesday admitted to sexually abusing teenage boys during his time as a high school wrestling coach in a Chicago suburb before his career as an elected official.<\/p>\n Struggling to stand in federal court Wednesday, 74-year-old Hastert gripped his walker, approached the microphone and said that he “mistreated” some of his wrestlers and apologized.<\/p>\n “They looked to me, and I took advantage of them,” Hastert said as he awaited his sentencing after pleading guilty last fall to breaking federal banking laws in a hush-money case.<\/p>\n Hastert had paid a victim, identified only as \u201cIndividual A,\u201d who threatened to expose him $1.7 million of a promised $3.5 million between 2010 and 2014. Hastert\u2019s withdrawals of the hush money are what led to the federal investigation. And with his conviction, he joins a long line of Illinois politicians who have wound up in prison (the Prairie State has a saying, \u201cIllinois: where our governors make our license plates”).<\/p>\n Hastert has now joined another group, one not in any way a laughing matter: that of prominent pederasts\/pedophiles. And many of them never had to answer for their trespasses.<\/p>\n Late congressman Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) was found to have had<\/a> sexual relationships with teenage male pages, but nonetheless was reelected to office until his retirement in 1997. In 2006, Representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) had to resign<\/a> after it was discovered he\u2019d sent lewd Internet messages to teen male pages. Leftist icon and man of letters Gore Vidal was, according to family members and as the Daily Mail<\/i> put it<\/a>, a \u201cglobe-trotting paedophile who preyed on underage boys\u201d; he also admitted<\/a> in his memoirs he was \u201cattracted to adolescent males” and once told a friend, \u201cYou know I\u2019m a pederast.\u201d Yet he died in 2012 at age 86 not having spent a day in prison. Also escaping the hangman was famed British DJ Jimmy Savile, a serial abuser whose decades of pedophilia<\/a> were only exposed after his 2011 death. And these are just a handful of many.<\/p>\n Yet as a history teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High School between 1965 and 1981, Hastert was part of an even larger group: government-school teachers who sexually abuse students. While the media never tire of focusing on the Catholic Church sex scandal \u2014 even though most cases originated prior to 1990 precisely because the matter had largely been addressed \u2014 there\u2019s an ongoing<\/i> sex abuse scandal in government schools<\/a> far greater in magnitude. As LifeSiteNews.com\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in 2010, \u201cAccording to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, \u2018the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.\u2019 According to the 2004 study \u2018the most accurate data available at this time\u2019 indicates that \u2018nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And faring even worse, perhaps, are youth in Hollywood. While Woody Allen\u2019s and Roman Polanski\u2019s abuse of minors received moderate press, they simply reflect what critics say is a \u201ccasting couch\u201d for kids. As former ’80s child star Corey Feldman put it:<\/p>\n I can tell you that the number one problem in Hollywood was, and is, and always will be pedophilia.\u2026 I was surrounded by them [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. Surrounded \u2014 literally. Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted, and what they were about…. They were everywhere, like vultures.<\/p>\n I reported on this issue<\/a> in the March 2014 New American<\/i> article \u201cHollywood Dearest: Seared Souls and the Silver Screen.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the scandal involving pedophiles embedded in the very upper echelons of the British government. Covered up for most of the last 15 years, the \u201cstory dates back to the 1980s and involves politicians, judges, intelligence officers, staff at royal palaces, and figures from private schools, big business, and the Church of England \u2014 and more than 100 government files on the pedophile network that have mysteriously gone missing,\u201d as I wrote<\/a> in 2015. Given this morally compromised state, it\u2019s not surprising politically correct U.K. officials also covered up, for 15 years, a Muslim child-sex ring<\/a> responsible for the abuse of 1,400 minors in just one town. Political correctness and moral correctness, it seems, never have the same address.<\/p>\n And this would explain a still larger problem. Some have noted, as I elucidate in \u201cThe Slippery Slope to Pedophilia<\/a>,\u201d that our oh-so-caring politically correct culture is now being used in the effort to legitimize adult\/child sex. Yet while many exclaim \u201cThat will never happen!\u201d (precisely what was said about faux marriage just 20 years ago), what about legal child sexual abuse, the type engendering a moral corruption that guarantees a continual defining of deviancy downward?<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just that children today are often subject to \u201csex education\u201d \u2014 derived from the discredited work of pedophile Alfred Kinsey<\/a> \u2014 portraying homosexuality as just another flavor of the day. It\u2019s that now we confuse them not just about sex, but the sexes, as we tell them they can be a boy or girl or any one of scores of \u201cgenders,\u201d as their little misshapen hearts desire.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve often pointed out, probably more than regular readers care to hear, that the \u201ctransgender\u201d agenda is wholly unscientific. If a psychiatrist recommends a person for euphemistically named \u201cgender-reassignment surgery\u201d \u2014 which is mere mutilation \u2014 the diagnosis is \u201cgender dysphoria.\u201d But there\u2019s no medical test whatsoever for it. Rather, as PsychCentral.com\u00a0puts it<\/a>, it\u2019s based on \u201cstrong and persistent cross-gender identification\u201d; in other words, strong and persistent\u00a0feelings<\/i>\u00a0that you actually are a member of the opposite sex<\/a>. This is no more credible than claiming a mental patient should live as the Queen of England because she feels she is, a BIID sufferer is right to amputate his legs<\/a> because he feels he should be without them, or that a patient with clear arteries should be given a bypass operation because he feels he has heart disease. As former \u201ctranssexual\u201d Alan Finch put it<\/a>, \u201cTranssexualism was invented by psychiatrists.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet on this fanciful basis very young children have been allowed to live as members of the opposite sex; their schools have treated them as such, even allowing them to use the opposite sex\u2019s bathroom; and the media identify them by their preferred pronouns.<\/p>\n Have we lost our minds?<\/p>\n We wouldn\u2019t let a young child choose his diet and eat ice cream for dinner or choose to dispense with schooling and play all day merely because those things feel right. But we\u2019re going to let the babe make a life-rending decision based on psycho-babble fashions that, like \u201cgender neutrality\u201d theory before them, will soon pass away?<\/p>\n Worse still, some schools have put all their students through \u201csensitivity training\u201d to ensure they\u2019ll participate in one child\u2019s sexual delusion. Can this yield anything but a deluded generation? Children need standards just as trains need guiderails, and removing them down the track leads to disaster. To say there\u2019s no preferred normality is to normalize the abnormal.<\/p>\n The main reason we trouble over molested children is the prospect of molested minds. Physical injuries heal, but as sexual-abuse victims attest, psychological and emotional scars can last a lifetime. Will the child become an abuser himself? Will he properly bond with a spouse? Will the child\u2019s sexuality develop normally?<\/p>\n Quite fittingly, the Cult of the Body worshippers who birth federal nutrition guidelines and the babe-in-bubble-wrap mentality are the very people giving us legalized child sexual abuse. It leaves the body alone and goes straight for the mind.<\/p>\n
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