The Conservative Political Action Conference has rescinded its invitation to Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos after he appeared to defend pedophilia in video clips that emerged on social media Sunday.
“Due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference,” chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement.
“@ACUConservative has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at #CPAC2017.” pic.twitter.com/sVWGnPCW7C
— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) February 20, 2017
In the video clips that surfaced Sunday, the alt-right figure defended relationships between young boys and men.
He said that older men can “help” young boys “discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”
“It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me,” a man responds.
“And you know what. I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him,” Yiannopoulos says, referring to oral sex.
In a separate video, Yiannopoulos claims he was the predator when he had a sexual encounter with a priest when he was 14 years old.
Yiannopoulos defended himself on Facebook, blaming the controversy on “sloppy phrasing” or “deceptive editing.”
“I do not support pedophilia. Period. It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst,” he wrote. “There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a co-ordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.”
He claims his sexually explicit comments about the priest was “an edgy” response to his own sexual abuse as a teenager.
“I *did* joke about giving better head as a result of clerical sexual abuse committed against me when I was a teen,” he wrote. “If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that’s my prerogative. It’s no different to gallows humor from AIDS sufferers.”
Schlapp said the Facebook post is “insufficient.”
“It is up to him to answer the tough questions and we urge him to immediately further address these disturbing comments,” Schlapp said, noting that CPAC does not endorse “everything a speaker says or does.”
“However, there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.”
Monday, after being disinvited from CPAC, Yiannopoulos said:
“I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors … But I do understand that these videos, even though some of them are edited deceptively, paint a different picture.
“I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy.’ I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.”
