Homosexuals in high political office -- the saga of Irish senator David Norris (Part I)

By Randy Engel

Introduction

For most Americans, the name of the Irish politician David Norris probably won't ring a bell.

For one thing, Norris holds office in the Seanad, the Upper House of the Parliament of the Republic of Ireland, not the U.S. Senate. But, perhaps, more to the point, Norris isn't Catholic and he doesn't wear a Roman collar. He is a white, liberal, Protestant, pro-abort, "gay" Irish Senator. Hence, it's unlikely that you would see his face along with his controversial comments on the virtues of Greek pederasty (aka, sexual acts between an adult male and an underage male adolescent) splashed against the front page of The New York Times any time soon, even though these public revelations were damning enough to force Norris' withdrawal from the race for the office of President of the Republic in 2012 on the Independent ticket.

David Norris' Early background

David Patrick Bernard Norris was born on July1, 1944, in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. David came to Ireland as a young child, age 6, following the untimely death of his English sailor/engineer father who was a decorated World War I hero. He was raised by his mother and a stern, over-protective aunt who according to Norris, "being a midlands woman distrusted and was fearful of the sea." Piano lessons would serve her charge better, although it is obvious from Norris' writings that she was never entirely successful in wiping out the young man's life-long romance with the sea. These biographical details are worth mentioning because the early loss of a father and being raised in a father-absent, female-dominated environment are two of the many causal factors associated with development of same-sex attraction in the young man child.

Norris' official website biography states that he attended school at St. Andrew's College and The High School. He then entered Trinity College at the University of Dublin from which he received a B.A. in English Literature and Language. At age 24, he became a lecturer with a professional interest for all things James Joyce. He continued his academic career until 1996. Seven years earlier, in 1987, he entered the world of secular politics as Ireland's first openly "gay" Senator representing a politically-limited liberal constituency from the University of Dublin in the Seanad. He holds that seat up to the present.

Norris and the Irish "Rights of the Behind Movement"

David Norris got in on the ground floor of organized perversion in Ireland, and was one of the early leaders of the Irish "Rights of the Behind Movement," a term coined by the hopelessly "homophobic" Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. Engels, in sharp contrast to Norris, was particularly critical of anything that smelled "Greek."

According to an investigative report by the Irish Daily Mail Online, National Library records show that on May 10, 1975, the 31-year-old Norris addressed the first meeting of the Union for Sexual Freedom in Ireland. During his talk, Norris reportedly claimed that "as a child it had been his greatest desire to be molested so he, more than most people, knows the rarity of the homosexual child molester."

One does not need to be a trained psychiatrist to discern that the young David Norris was simply looking for attention and genuine affection from a father figure and male role model in his life, not a sadistic sexual encounter with a predatory sodomite feigning "friendship" for the young boy. As for Norris' comment on the rarity of homosexual molestation of underage boys, I doubt that he would try and float that verbal sewage downstream in Ireland today

Norris is credited with being a founding member of the National Gay Federation formed in the late 1970s as a "public charity" for the purpose of promoting homosexual "rights" including "gay partnerships," "civil unions," and of late, "gay marriages," and providing "gay" media events such as "Gay Prom Night" where a dyke is crowned king and the male homosexual, queen; Pride parades which celebrate "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer life" in Dublin; and a "Gay Switchboard" to advance homosex relations and contacts especially for youth and visitors to Ireland. In 2009, Norris received the "Molly Malone Irish Gay Icon of the Year" award from the N(L)GF.

Norris also helped establish the International Gay Association (IGA) which was formed alongside the political action group Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1978-79. The IGA, which eventually morphed into the International Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Intersex Association, has been waging an on-going war against "gender-stereotyping" and "homophobia," and "transphobia" ever since.

On June 17, 2011, speaking from ILGA headquarters in Brussels on the occasion of the release of the United Nations Human Rights Council Statement condemning abuses and violations of persons based on their "sexual orientation" or "gender-identity," Co-Secretary General Renato Sabbadini lashed out at "the mistaken sense 'of tradition' or 'natural order,'" which fosters discrimination against perverts, labeling such criteria as "the last crumbling pillars of a patriarchal order which belong with other dark pages of our past, like slavery and the Inquisition." All the while, Norris is assuring the Irish people that homosexuals are family friendly.

In its formative years, when Norris was in a leadership position, the IGA maintained a close relationship with the London-based Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) created in 1974 for the purpose of lobbying for intergenerational sex. In the 1980s, the IGA passed two motions in favor of PIE, one calling for the abolition of the age of consent, the second calling for an international solidarity campaign on behalf of PIE, whose leadership at the time was being hauled before the Old Bailey, seat of Central Criminal Court in London, for promoting indecent acts between adults and children. In the 1990s, political pressure from various United Nations agencies to which the IGA sought membership, forced the agency's Board to officially sever its ties to the North American Man Boy Love Association, an American version of PIE which had formally disbanded in 1984.

Norris Brings Down Anti-Sodomy Laws in Ireland

On 22 April 1983, Norris with support from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, along with co-litigant Tonie Walsh, President of the N(L)GF from 1984-1988, entered into a constitutional action (Norris v. Attorney General [1984] IR 36) against sections 61 and 62 of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, and s. 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 which criminalized intercourse between men. Norris claimed that the anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional and not part of Irish law. His claim was rejected by a majority of the Supreme Court, but in 1988, Norris brought a successful challenge to the law before the European Court of Human Rights, Norris v. Ireland no. 10581/83. Five years after the ECHR decision, Ireland decriminalized homosexuality.

An intriguing point of interest is that the first legal advisor for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, and one of its founding members, was Mary McAleese, whose religion is officially noted as "Roman Catholic. She is the current President of Ireland.

Mary Robinson, who served as the Republic's first woman president from 1990 to 1997, also served as legal advisor for the Campaign. Robinson, a baptized Catholic and a Trilateral, who went on to become the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was a former classmate of Norris. She also served as Norris' Barrister in the ECHR Case.

The Ezra Nawi Yizhak Affair

Norris' infatuation with Ezra Yizhak, a working-class Israeli plumber and pro-Palestinian activist, who lives in Jerusalem, began shortly after they met in Dublin in December 1975. Their "romance" went on for ten years, until Norris, disgusted with Yizhak's promiscuous soirees with "a string of 24-year-old football players in the background when he [Norris] was not there," called for an amiable "separation" of sorts. The two men, however, remained close friends and continued their visits between Dublin and Tel Aviv and their correspondence and phone contacts into the new millennia.

At one point in time, immigration authorities contacted Norris and asked if "an Israeli woman named Ezra Yizhak was living with him illegally," but Norris fended them off by denying he was living with the woman or that he had ever encountered a woman by that name. David Norris is a very clever boy.

Yizhak Sodomizes Palestinian Youth

In 1992, Yizhak began a sexual relationship with an underage Palestinian boy. The boy was 15. Yizhak was 40 years old. When the boy's parents learned of it, they contacted the authorities. Five years later, in 1997, despite repeated pleadings and interventions by Senator Norris, Ezra Yizhak was convicted and sentenced to three months in jail by the Israeli Courts for statutory rape.

However, it was not until August 1, 2011, that the Irish people and Norris' political supporters for his Presidential candidacy learned about the Senator's involvement in the Yizhak case. The revelations did not go down well.

Norris Paints Yizhak as a Victim
Not a Perpetrator of a Crime

Documents published in the Irish press showed that on January 22, 1997, Norris wrote a short clemency appeal with a character reference for Yizhak and an offer to act as a guarantor or sponsor for his former sex partner. The two letters, one to Yizhak's attorney and the other addressed "To whom it may concern," were written on official Seanad stationary and signed Senator David Norris, Bureau Member Irish Foreign Affairs Committee.

In May 20011, Norris traveled to Israel to be present when the Yizhak case was heard and the judgment rendered. He offered to be a witness for the defense, but Yizhak's attorney Mr. Reuven Bar Chaim declined the offer.

On August 29, 1997, Norris sent another substantially longer clemency appeal in care of Yizhak's legal team, but directed to the judges of the High Court in Jerusalem on the occasion of his former sex partner's sentencing. Norris let the judges know that he was a member of the Upper House of the Irish Parliament; that his name had been widely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in the forth coming elections for the Presidency of Ireland; and that he was "a person of some consequence whose views are not arrived at lightly or for no good reason."

Norris said he knew Mr. Yizhak to be "an intelligent, honest, trustworthy, good and moral person for whom the present difficulty is quite uncharacteristic." He said that Yizhak's plumbing clients "speak in terms of high praise of his honesty, integrity, efficiency and courtesy." This, despite the fact, that Yizhak charges his clients exorbitant rates in order to finance his projects for the Bedouin people of the South Hebron area of occupied West Bank, including a summer camp program with swimming facilities for their children.

According to Norris, Yizhak was the real victim in this case. Indeed, a victim thrice over. First as a victim of an abusive father; second, as a homosexual who suffered discrimination as a citizen; and third, a victim of police entrapment. Norris stated that his dear friend was under the care of a psychotherapist, and that he feared that "lasting and perhaps permanent damage will be done to Yizhak's psychological and material welfare by being imprisoned." Norris recommended either dismissal of the case due to legal irregularities, or at the least, "a non custodial sentence."

About the young Palestinian boy sexually abused by Yizhak, Norris had little to say except that by pleading guilty when he was arrested, Yizhak magnanimously "spared the young man who is the other party to the incident from the traumatic necessity of giving evidence," and that, "secure in the knowledge that Mr. Yizhak will not offend again in the same way, he (Norris) was willing to make financial compensation available to the young man involved."

To their credit, a number of Irish organizations representing victims of sexual abuse came out swinging when details of the Norris-Yizhak became public. Their reaction forced an apology from Norris who said he regretted "giving the impression that I did not have sufficient compassion for the victim of Ezra's crime."

In an interview with the Sunday Independent, Norris claimed that he had not known the full details of the charge at the time he wrote the character reference, and that he was "shattered" when the full truth emerged. Yet, in his letter of August 29, 1997, Norris assured the judges of the Israeli High Court that he had "direct knowledge of the events surrounding the case," and had transmitted those details to Mr. Yizhak's lawyer in a letter dated May 27, 1997.

Norris' Support for Pederast Cathal O'Searcaigh

One of the many fallouts of Norris' apologia for his friend's crime of statutory rape was that of dredging up Norris' public support in 2008 for the well-known Irish poet and openly homosexual, Cathal Ó Searcaigh.

The award winning 2007 hour-long documentary Fairytale of Kathmandu, directed by Neasa Ni Chianáin, was originally planned as a tribute to Ó Searcaigh for his "charitable" efforts to provide street urchins and poor young boys and men and their families in Nepal with decent housing, food, bicycles and clothing. The film, however, turned out to be something quite different than the original proposal after the Irish-born Miss Ni Miss Chianáin learned that Ó Searcaigh was routinely sexually exploiting the boys he as purportedly "helping." She also learned that the poet had informally adopted a Napalese youth who he had brought home to Ireland.

The Irish Director charged Ó Searcaigh with being a "sexual tourist." The 50-year-old Ó Searcaigh retorted that he was nothing of the kind, that he did not abuse the boys, most of who were at the most 16, and that he did not coerce them or sodomize them.

On May 11, 2008, David Norris jumped into the fray, by using his position as an Irish senator, with full immunity from any civil or criminal liability for his statements, to viciously attack Ní Chianáin and accuse her of "systematic creative editing" and of trying, sentencing, and crucifying Ó Searcaigh in the film. Although Norris admitted he only knew the poet casually, nevertheless, from the floor of the Seanad, he said, "I have always found him to be open, honourable and generous." Was there a pederast that Norris did not always find "open, honest and generous?"

Later, when a group of artists claimed in the Irish Times that the film "was feeding homophobic stereotypes of gay men," Norris exclaimed, "Gloriously, the artists of Ireland have supported Cathal Ó Searcaigh as they previously did in the case of Oscar Wilde. Wilde, need I say, was but another internationally famous pederast who Norris obviously approved of.

Norris' Campaign for Presidency Implodes

Shortly after the Ezra Nawi Yizhak story made the Irish headlines in early August 2011, seven members of the Senator's fifteen-strong campaign force, including his Director of Elections and his Director of Communications were said to have resigned on the grounds that Norris had not made them aware of the Yizhak affair when they joined his team. But this explanation turned out to be not the whole or real truth.

The "rats were fleeing the sinking ship" because Norris had shown his staff letters and materials which confirmed his opposition to any age of consent law and his favorable opinion of pederasty as practiced in ancient Greece.

Stay tuned to Part II of "Homosexuals in High Political Office — Irish Senator David Norris and the Greek Thing."

© Randy Engel