So what does Philip Kennicott think of his paper’s Roy Moore coverage?

By George Neumayr | 17 November 2017

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR — Philip Kennicott, is a “Pulitzer Prize-winning” staff writer at the Washington Post, specializing in criticism of art and architecture. A former editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennicott has also commented on politics from time to time in the paper’s Style section. Given the paper’s breathless coverage of the Roy Moore story and its loudly advertised intolerance of anything approaching underage sex, I was curious to see if Kennicott’s completely ignored defense of pederasty was still on the paper’s website. It is.

Kennicott penned his defense of pederasty back in the days of the Congressman Mark Foley scandal and at a time when the show To Catch a Predator was popular. Kennicott disapproved of the moral outrage over Foley: “… the question of sex between adults and teens is so explosive that it refuses to remain just a subplot of any narrative it appears in. The e-mails and instant messages that then-Rep. Mark Foley sent to teenage male pages should have been a very minor story, when compared with the daily carnage of Iraq or memories of Katrina or debate about issues such as stem cell research, in the unfolding of the last election.”

Kennicott, reflecting on the movie The History Boys, praises its accepting approach to “minor sexual contact between a teacher and his students — most of them 17 or 18 years old.” Kennicott feared that audiences, owing to a “climate of fear about adolescent sexuality” in America (manifest, he said, in the Foley scandal), would reject the movie. Kennicott lauded the British director Alan Bennett for making an “instructive” movie and quotes his defense of pederasty approvingly:

But it’s not just the attitude toward homosexuality that distinguishes this play from anything that could be written in the United States during the age of programs such as NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” or fallout from the Foley scandal. Bennett, in an interview in an English newspaper, said (of the sexual encounters between Hector and his students): “I think I’ve been criticized for not taking this seriously enough. I’m afraid I don’t take that very seriously if they’re 17or 18. I think they are actually much wiser than [the teacher] Hector. Hector is the child, not them.” That acceptance of a gray area about sexuality involving late adolescents is all but impossible in this country, where the sexual predator has become an absolute category, a universal figure for evil and nightly fodder for pursuit and punishment on programs such as “Law and Order: SVU.” The collective response from society — concerned that sexual abuse is being ignored — is a vigilance so strict that there is no room for exceptions of any sort, even if the abused are all-but adults and don’t feel particularly victimized.

Kennicott saw Mark Foley as similar to the teacher in The History Boys:

If the Foley scandal hadn’t become political fuel so quickly, however, one might have gleaned a very similar sense of child-adult role reversal from a close reading of the sexually charged e-mails and instant messages that became such a huge story only weeks before the election. In one infamous exchange, Foley’s language and spelling are straight out of a high school playbook. His prurience has a juvenile, locker-room quality, in strange contrast to the tone of the boy’s messages, which indicate someone more interested in homework and sleep than dirty talk. The boy, who mentions a girlfriend, seems mostly amused by Foley’s evident sexual interest. One of the great mysteries of this exchange is why it was preserved and what the boy was thinking.

Imagine the Post today writing a paragraph like that about Roy Moore. The staff would quit en masse, the ombudsmen would be rending their garments. […]

---

Art Critic Wants Virgin Mary Defiled

By Bill Donohue | 5 December 2014

Bill Donohue comments on the reaction of Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott to an exhibition, “Picturing Mary,” that opened today in the National Museum of Women in the Arts

CATHOLIC LEAGUE — Kennicott is furious that the exhibition offers a reverential treatment of Our Blessed Mother. He likes his Virgin Mary adorned with feces.

In his Washington Post article, Kennicott blasted the museum for not including Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” in the exhibit. That piece was unfurled at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999: a portrait of the Virgin Mary was laden with elephant dung. Kennicott calls this crap “perhaps the most famous image of Mary painted in the last quarter century.” Really? Wonder what he would say about an African-American exhibit that featured a picture of Rev. Martin Luther King with human excrement in his mouth? Would that be a classic as well?

I led the protest against the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999 and got plenty of support from Catholics, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Africans. The latter took umbrage at the idea that putting elephant dung on pictures is considered honorific by Nigerians. Indeed, the Nigerians I spoke to called that understanding racist (it was usually made by liberal white boys). […]