Go to a Pagan Gathering-- any Pagan Gathering-- and start grousing about religious extremists. A chorus of voices will join you; you'll hear complaints about Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, and of course the topic-of-the-millenium, Muslims. You'll hear stories from folks who weren't allowed to do anything fun while they were kid and folks who have faced bigotry, oppression, violence, or just plain stupidity. But what you won't hear is complaints about your fellow Pagans.

Oh, you'll hear people criticize other Pagans, but not in the context of religious extremism. Usually you'll hear rants about specific people, but it's their behavior that gets called out, not their religious beliefs and practices. Even when whole groups get attacked, it's not about religion-- it's about what pompous bastards we Wiccans are, or something like that. As irritated as I can get with the growing anti-Wiccan sentiment, at least they're actually having the decency to attack our personalities, and not our religious beliefs.

With the exception of the occasional intertraditional rift, Pagans by and large will not criticize the religious practices of other Pagans. It's not a bad code-- let's face it, some us are real whackos, but most are harmless enough. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred there's nothing to be gained by it. However, this code may yet prove to be the biggest liability that Pagan Community faces.

First of all, we don't apply it equally. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to make fun of people who believe in Christ, but the folks who believe that they're the reincarnations of fictional characters are off limits. I won't rant on about this, it's fairly self-explanatory.

Second of all, it seems to be a condition of this rule that no common sense be exercised in its application. And that's the real problem folks. This is probably the closest thing we have to a universal rule among Pagans, and we've managed to take it to an extreme. I know, I know. It's a good thing. How can a good thing be taken to an extreme? It happens all the time. Christianity and Islam are only two examples-- and we really need to stop talking about what they do and look at ourselves.

Several months ago, I was in a conversation with several Pagan leaders. The subject of the moment was creating a positive presence in the Pagan Community and giving local government and law enforcement a reliable source for information. I made the comment that we should be able to be on hand to counteract propaganda and to let them know that, no, Pagans don't believe in child molestation. (I don't remember my exact words-- I think the phrase was "sex with twelve year olds".)

Someone corrected me. They pointed out that you can't make statements like that about the whole Pagan Community. The structure of the conversation prevented us from chasing down that particular tangent, and I've been trying to wrap that topic into a coherent column ever since.

I've decided that I don't want to be in a religious community that forbids you from making statements about it. I very specifically will not consider myself part of a religious community that cannot say that it does not condone child molestation. I'm all for broadmindedness, but for crying out loud, we're talking about a practice that's illegal in every part of the civilized world. Oh, I don't have a problem with teaching compassion for such people, as long as you're not enabling or assisting them in their practices.

Here's the problem. It is my belief that each person is totally responsible for everything that they choose to do or not do, regardless of what influenced those choices. So if I choose to participate in a religion that forbids something I find ethically necessary-- then I am responsible for my own ethical breach, and no religion can absolve me of that failure.

If I sit by while some deviant uses my religion to justify rape, then I bear a measure of responsibility for anything that justification buys him. I am also responsible for the stain on the reputation of my religion that this freak leaves in his wake. This is a religious conviction-- my personal interpretation of the Wiccan Rede.

Here's a rule of thumb. If you're extending your openness and tolerance to child molesters, you've gone way too far. I'm not saying that you shouldn't give them compassion-- but to make them feel welcome in the context of being a child molester? We don't want these people to feel that we're going to be tolerant of such behavior. I don't know about you, but I'm perfectly comfortable with the concept of a child molester being worried that I'm going to beat him to death with a claw hammer if he tries anything with my kids.

This is an ethical compunction backed by a religious tenet. While the tenet in this case is specifically Wiccan, many Pagan traditions have similar key values. So you've got to ask yourself, from a moral standpoint, which is worse-- the hubris of making the blanket statement that Pagans do not endorse child molestation, or the hubris of telling someone that they have to disregard not only the safety of their children, but a key religious value, to avoid offending child molesters.

Naturally, this isn't as simple as I'm making it out to be. Declaring a hard-coded limit to the scope of Pagan Tolerance isn't an easy thing to do, but we've got to. The Pagan Community of today will be the foundation for the Pagan Community tomorrow, and we've got to start thinking about how what we do and say now is going to affect the future.

Tolerance is important, don't get me wrong, but it's not a Universal Constant. To just say "Hey, they can do their thing, I'll do mine" doesn't require a lot of ethical exercise, but what if "their thing" is thirteen year old girls? We're teaching ourselves-- and our children-- not to draw any ethical lines. We've got to snap ourselves out of this, or the foundation we're building will crumble. We will become a haven for people who want to use Tolerance as justification for just about anything, and these people will hamper any efforts for the Pagan Community to be a positive force in this world.

I don't want to be a part of a community that cares so little about its children or its future. So I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I'm not. I've been attacking the sacred cow of "Anything Goes" and shouting at the top of my lungs that we need to think about our actions rather than just bypassing the effort of making ethical decisions. I've suggested a lot of things that I expected to get me yelled at, but I haven't been.

To date, the only hate mails that I can recall receiving consist of one e-mail that just said I was a freak and a conversation with someone who was once a friend who didn't like the way I had described a falling out we'd had in the introduction to Manifesto of a Disheveled Activist.. So I think there's a lot of room in the Pagan Community for the kinds of things I'm saying.

We're not morally lazy, although a very loud minority of us scream that we should be. I'm not going to let these people bully me into giving up the future of the Pagan Community, and there are a lot of people who feel the same way. So I'm going to stand up for my right to have ethics, and I encourage the real Pagan Leaders-- the ones who are actually getting stuff done and not just writing columns about it-- to do the same.

© 2004 by Cather "Catalyst" Steincamp