It was a good week for retrograde explanations of human behavior.

First, there was the story in Psychology Today which "empirically" established that black women were less attractive than other women. It was, of course, a ridiculous piece of research. And one that I would love to spend time riddling with holes if Akiba Solomon didn't already do such a fine job. It's hard to top something like that, but the Catholic Church found a way. A report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops pinned the blame for decades of documented child rape on the U.S. counter-culture movements of the 1960's and 70's.

That's right. You read that correctly. The devil made them do it. Those licentious, wanton, wayward heathens--maybe The Doors? Jimi Hendrix?--forsook the righteous path, confusing the poor, otherwise pious priests. The ill-prepared and beleaguered priests just couldn't tell right from wrong. To support this idea that it was the unstable culture that destabilized the priests' morality, the report goes to great lengths to point out that sexual mores change over time.

The age of consensual sexual relations, for example, was 16 up until the late 1970s. Humans are regularly married off in traditional cultures as soon as they hit puberty, etc, etc. The only problem is, that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Pedophilia was illegal in the United States in the 1960's too--no matter how many tabs of acid were involved. And the popular idea of constant key parties in the 1970s didn't change the fact that raping a 10-yearold boy was more than strongly frowned upon by one's friends and neighbors.

No, none of that matters to the authors of this report, because the devil made the priests do it. Nevermind that the European Catholic Church has faced similar scandals of late. Did American hippies infiltrate and confuse the European clergy too?

Nevermind that the report relies on the regularly debunked idea that the counter-culture movements of the 60s and 7's created problems, rather than responded to them. Women sought liberation from domestic patriarchy because they were oppressed, not because they were bored. Blacks fought for a seat at the table because they didn't have any seats at the table, not because they were looking for trouble.

And while I might buy the argument that instances of consensual pre-marital and homosexual sex increased after the 60s, the main difference between the United States, pre- and post- 1969, is that people stopped hiding what they were already doing. In fact, the Catholic clergy has a long history of abusing its power--as does every other human institution by the way. The Borgias, the Medicis, indulgences, pederasty, mistresses, illegitimate children, the list of Catholic transgressions is so long that we might count ourselves lucky that the instances of child rape aren't higher.