SCOTLAND
Scotsman
CATHERINE DEVENEY
ALL HELL let loose last week when Episcopalian priest Kenny Macaulay apparently admitted buying a leather collar, an eight-foot cross and a bondage table off eBay. Heavens! Isn't it refreshing to find a clergyman of such modest perversions? But what did church chiefs do? Suspendered him. I mean suspended him.
I'd have thought they'd promote him to bishop. At least his sexual tastes involve his adult partner. Perverted? Not as perverted as some other scandals to hit the Christian churches. It's not another stomach-churning child abuse scandal; not the cold-blooded evil of men who befriended single mothers in order to target their children, as priests in Boston, USA, did. The spineless, soulless, husks of men who wrapped their emptiness in a clerical collar and offered to say prayers at bedtime with children they then molested. Now that's sexual deviancy. But a kinky collar and a wooden table? Oh do me a favour.
The table has even been shoved in the garden. Father Macaulay reportedly said of himself and his partner: "We just enjoy a laugh. We laugh at life and we laugh at sex." That's where you're going wrong then, Kenny. "Church", "sex" and "laugh" do not belong in the same sentence. Not in any order.
People used to think I was joking when I told them the headmistress of my Glasgow convent school warned us that if we wore patent shoes to the school dance, they might reflect our underwear. I wasn't.