SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right provocateur whose scheduled speeches at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Davis were canceled this year amid violent protests, has now been kicked off the national stage by conservatives because of controversial remarks and jokes he made last year about the sexual abuse of minors.
His comments on a podcast were posted on YouTube more than a year ago, but excerpts resurfaced Sunday on social media, quickly causing an outcry.
On Monday, Conservative Political Action Conference organizers confirmed that the 32-year-old would no longer be invited to speak at the prominent four-day event in National Harbor, Md., which will feature President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and other big-name conservatives.
While the conference is a forum for controversies and disagreements among conservatives, said American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, "there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children."
In the Drunken Peasants podcast, Yiannopoulos, who is gay, suggests that some boys _ teens who are sexually active _ should be able to give consent younger than they currently can under the law. He said pedophilia, in his view, is an act against young children who have not hit puberty.
"In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men _ the sort of coming-of-age relationship _ those relationships in which those older men help those 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," he said.
Then one of the hosts interrupts, saying that "sounds like Catholic priest molestation."
Yiannopoulos responds with a crude joke about having been sexually abused by a priest that he later described as "gallows humor."
Yiannopoulos _ banned from Twitter last year _ took to Facebook to defend himself, with a post titled "A note for idiots."
"I do not support pedophilia. Period," he wrote. "It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. 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."
