How infuriating is pedophilia? After four years of writing as a journalist about the child sex abuse cases in the US Catholic Church, the fiery outrage within me burned away my ability to believe as a Catholic. Though once a convinced conservative Catholic, I left the Roman church in 2006 spiritually shattered by what I had encountered there.

At the beginning of my investigations, a good priest who fought child abusers in the clergy warned me that writing about this subject would take me to places darker than I could imagine. I thanked him for the warning, but told him that we Catholics had been silent for too long about this evil. He agreed, and offered to help me, but again cautioned me that this would be a pilgrimage through Hell.

I did not take him seriously enough, and lost my faith because of it. For me, the worst part wasn’t confronting wicked priests who molested children and minors. It was coming to terms with the fact that so many bishops—men who were not driven by sexual compulsion —made excuses for these crimes and behaved with more concern for the criminals than their victims.

To talk to victims of this kind of abuse, and their families, is to be shaken to the core of your soul by damage this evil does to a child, and to families. To fail to take it seriously is itself a form of depravity.

I share this personal background to let you know how seriously I take child sex abuse. In fact, my anger over it is so intense that I have had to train myself to wait a few days before reacting to news about the topic. Rage makes one blind.

In his State of the Nation address last weekend, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wasted no time in speaking about the political crisis that has gripped Hungary this month. He called the pardon scandal that has claimed the jobs of President Katalin Novák, former Justice Minister Judit Varga, and most recently Reformed Bishop Zoltán Balog, ‘a nightmare [that] is taking a toll on us all’. Nevertheless, he said of the resignations of Novák and Varga, ‘we must acknowledge that in this situation what happened was what had to happen’.

He’s right. As fond as I am of Novák and Varga—two of the brightest stars in the Fidesz firmament—

there can be no compromise on matters of child sex abuse. None.

As much as I regret that these good women lost their careers over this scandal, justice was done—and Hungary will get even stronger child protection laws out of it.

And we can say this much: if the men who lead the Catholic Church cared as much about public opinion as the Fidesz party does, many more negligent bishops would have resigned too. If Zoltán Balog, the Reformed bishop who quit in disgrace, had grasped the true nature of child sex abuse, he never would have requested clemency for Endre K., and none of this would have happened.

This scandal is a self-inflicted catastrophe for Fidesz. The prime minister plainly understands this, and is taking concrete steps to reform. Yet the idea that the political and cultural Left in Hungary is trying to capitalize on this crisis to sell itself to the Hungarian people as the real protectors of children is a farce—and a dangerous one.

If it were up to the left-wing parties, Hungarian children would be taught gender ideology in school, and would be subject to the same kind of relentless propaganda aimed at American kids. Are Hungarian mums and dads prepared for cartoon Pride parades led by animated drag queens? This is perfectly normal on American television. The US news media often feature uncritical reports on transgender children, and even celebrate ‘drag kids’ little boys who dress as women to entertain adults.

In Germany, young children are taught about various forms of sexuality in their school lessons. But Germany has long been morally insane on questions of children and sex. From 1973 to 2003, German authorities knowingly placed orphaned boys in the custody of pedophiles. German politicians today, including those on the Left, denounce those experiments; the Green Party, one of Germany’s largest, apologized for its past of openly supporting pedophilia. The Green Party—one of Germany’s largest—had to apologize for its role in the scandal. Yet this evil program emerged from a left-wing culture that regarded sexualizing children as progressive.

Sadly, this is not something from the bad old days. In Spain two years ago, the Socialist minister for equal opportunity said that children should have the right to consent to sex with adults. This is the logical end point of the Left’s obsession with sexualizing children.

If you say this, left-wing activists and politicians accuse you of hysteria and bigotry. They want everyone to think that Drag Queen Story Hour, for example, is something fun and innocent. Don’t you believe it. Drag Queen Story Hour is about breaking down taboos in little children. This is happening in thousands of schools in North America. The popular X account ‘Libs Of Tiktok’ regularly exposes this—and is often denounced in the mainstream media as a bigot who despises LGBTs.

Take it from an American who watched this movement to sexualize children from the beginning:

it always starts with the Left saying they only want to make children safe.

In the year 2000, a couple of concerned parents in the state of Massachusetts attended a conference, funded by taxpayers, in which LGBT teachers and activists taught students how to do various perverted kinds of sex, including inserting fists into their partner’s rectum. The conference was sponsored by GLSEN, a well-funded activist organization whose purpose was to spread LGBT ideology in schools under the guise of, yes, safety.

The idea is that LGBT kids deserve to be safe in schools, and free from bullies. Who can object to that? GLSEN’s strategy was to fight bullying not by punishing bullies, but by teaching LGBT ideology at every level of the school curriculum. If you disagreed with this method—say, you pointed out that it is possible to protect LGBT kids by punishing bullies, without indoctrinating them into radical sexual ideology—GLSEN and its supporters denounced you as uncaring about the safety of children.

This is what happened to the Massachusetts parents who recorded the obscene teaching session, and made it public. Activists and local media accused them of hatred and bigotry. A local judge silenced them. The entire liberal establishment in that very liberal state turned against these parents.

I wrote about this scandal as a journalist at the time. I noted that GLSEN’s chapter in Boston, the Massachusetts capital, had the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation. ‘As goes Massachusetts, so may go the rest of America,’ I wrote then.

Twenty-four years later, it has happened, exactly that way. The corruption of American children by this progressive ideology is quite advanced. LGBT activists and their left-wing political allies, as well as their allies in Big Business, still use the same strategy: accusing anyone who opposes them of indifference to bullying, and even trans youth suicide. It has worked for a quarter-century, so why should they stop now?

This is exactly what the Left will do to Hungary if it gains power. Are you angry at Fidesz politicians for going soft of child sex abuse in the case of Endre K.? Fine—it is justified. But do not lose perspective.

The kind of sexual corruption involving children we saw in the recent Endre K. scandal is bad, but still within the range of normal. It appears to have been a case of a well-connected criminal taking advantage of his social network to lessen his punishment. It should not have happened, and now, thanks to legal reforms, it probably won’t happen again.

The kind of sexual corruption involving children advocated by the Left as ‘safety’ is far more subtle, and far more dangerous. Nobody believes that pardoning an accessory to pedophilia is right—which is why it happened in secret. But very many left-wing people, including powerful politicians and cultural figures, believe that sexualizing the minds of children is something good and important.

Today, as the result of decades of advocacy by the American Left, one in four US high school students identifies as LGBT. In the year 2000, only about three per cent of American adults identified as gay or lesbian, and transgenders were almost totally unknown. Today, of the generations raised in the pro-LGBT media and educational environment, 11 per cent of the Millennials (born 1980 to 1996) identify as LGBT, and a shocking 20 percent of Zoomers (born 1997 to 2004) do.

This is what happens when you believe that the Left can be trusted with child safety when it comes to sex and sexuality. This is what happens when the Right is too afraid of being called bigoted to take a stand for common sense.

What happened in Massachusetts spread across America. What happened in America is spreading across Europe. It is going to come to Hungary too, unless Hungarians refuse to be tricked.