Now's not the time to protect children

Cardinal Mahony helped pederast priests escape punishment, we've just learned.

But, of course, it's too soon to protect boys (and girls) from the penises of the wicked priests.

We should consider the mental health of the sexual abusers first.

There are laws on the books about where a priest can put his willie. We should enforce those first.

Most priests are completely honorable. Why should they have suffer for the vile acts of a few?

It's craven opportunism by those who want to destroy the Catholic Church to raise any issues about the priesthood at a time like this - and that goes double for the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Besides, Mahony was a liberal, so we obviously need more Latin mass and less Latino mass.

More priests would have stopped the bad priests.

The only person who ever stopped a bad priest with a stiffie was a good priest with a hankering for justice.

Why not apply NRA logic to child sexual abuse?

Repeal the Enlightenment

Andy Borowitz reports on Rick Santorum:

At the first stop of his ambitious journey, Mr. Santorum restated his reason for seeking the White House: “I am running for President today because the position of Spanish Inquisitor is no longer available.”

There is no Vatican number higher than I. Latin Mass, yea!

Opus Dei of America

It looks as though Rick Santorum (R-pre-Vatican-II) may luck out in Iowa. He was so far below the radar no one thought to gin up massive attacks of killer ads against him.

His particular conservative Catholic nullification - to go with Ron Paul's opposition to basically all civil rights legislation - is to deny Griswold v. Connecticut, which established our right to keep the state from interfering in our sex lives. You don't want Santorum in your bedroom? Don't have sex of any kind unless you're willing to play procreation roulette.

Throw papa from the temple

It wasn't the crime researchers' fault. Nothing in their education or institutions should be changed to make them more resistant to being paid to prostitute their credentials in the service of a long train of criminal conspiracies and abuses.  Poor little victims of society...

They were surrounded by a culture of bullshit, and they were insufficiently trained to deal with the huge appeal of making shit up and pawning it off on credulous readers as if it were factual.  It's not just that 87.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.  They were far more methodologically sound than that.  They took in voluminous data from the very hierarchy that protected the perpetrators and accepted it as gospel.  And I don't mean that metaphorically.

With everyone around them taking the money to produce a thin tissue of rationalization, why wouldn't they join in?  Take the money and run, babeee!

Never mind when secondary sex characteristics become visible.  Those altar boys had increasing levels of testosterone - it's scientific! - and the poor entrapped victim priests simply couldn't resist it at a time when college kids were openly lustful and the one true unalterable word of the lord was, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Ten years old?  No longer a child!  Oral sex with a fifth grader couldn't possibly be pedophilia.  Any sensitive man of god could tell he was about to break out in adolescent acne any day now.  Isn't that a little peach fuzz in the armpit?

The so-called researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice - what a misnomer! - concocted rationalizations for the very same fig leaf theory their sponsors had made up of whole cloth.  What a coincidence!  No, they were paid to uphold these despicable lies.  Until John Jay College dismisses the authors of this study, it has made itself the Heritage Foundation of boy-buggering, an institution with zero credibility and even less moral worth.

And what could redeem the Catholic hierarchy?

Sins of the mommies

Long-lived institutions have a choice: adapt or die.

The path of rigidity - the conservative path - can work well, sometimes for quite a while, especially if the institution is willing to change by small degrees. But the path of absolute rigidity - saying no to everything, for instance - is the path of senesence and death. Just ask the Shakers, and they were only rigid about a few things.

The Catholic Church right now is in an existential crisis. With a billion adherents, the church might seem safe from doom. After all, it has survived previous crises - non-sexual child abuse in its schools and orphanages, acquiescence to fascism, the commonplace selling of absolution, the Inquisition, to name a few - that would have killed a less persistent, poorer, or less canny institution. Of course it doesn't hurt that the church claims every Sunday to have god on its side.

But buggering children and criminally covering it up practically everywhere is a different matter. It impeaches every claim to divinity or infallibility. And that billion already includes many who are one generation more away from merely having Catholic ancestors.

Even now, there are Catholics, both lay and priest, who apparently believe that the anti-gay passages of their bible are some of its most important. These doctrinaire Catholics still react to the idea of admitting to parochial school a child of a lesbian couple with statements like this:

“The real question here is why two people who radically repudiate the moral teachings of Catholicism would want their child educated in a Catholic school,’’ [C.J. Doyle, executive director of Catholic Action League of Massachusetts,] said in a statement.

“It would seem that they are either looking for an excuse to litigate or an opportunity to embarrass the church in the court of public opinion.’’

Doyle actually took the trouble to write this bit of unsubstantiated attack down! He didn't deliver it off the cuff and accidentally reveal his fear of attack. Instead, he made two bullshit claims for which he has no justification.

This sort of defensive reaction matches the tenor of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The inability to address one's own shortcomings when they're plain as day to ordinary people can be fatal to credibility.

People like Doyle imagine that the dogma of the modern church is the identical doctrine that the church has always advocated and lived under. But this is not true, and how he can escape knowing that is an object lesson in denial.

Doyle is not the only voice on the subject. The archdiocese of Boston has tried to make amends and deserves credit for that even if it's PR, and prominent business Catholic Jack Connors has this plaintive comment:

“But,’’ he said, “I am disappointed that . . . this faith that I love seems to find new ways to shoot itself in the foot.’’

Despite the willingness of some parishoners and priests to adapt, it's an open question whether the church hierarchy can change fast enough to retain its believers. How they've done it so far is beyond me.

But

I'm an atheist from a Protestant background. Still I can see the good works of the Catholic Church. I've known priests who were good men. The Church gives comfort to many people, including loved ones.

But...

Guilt for the child rape scandal pervades every level of the Catholic hierarchy, up to and including the pope. In practically every diocese where there has been sexual abuse by priests, their monsignors and bishops have covered it up, many by acts of commission. The higher priests, even if not pederasts themselves, have looked first and last to protect their fellow priests, rather than the children in their charge. Far from being punished and defrocked under canon law, the enablers in the hierarchy - I'm thinking of Bernard Law, formerly archbishop of Boston and still Cardinal - have been protected.

The church authorities - to put their own best spin on it - were concerned about the damage to their institution that revealing priests' misconduct would have done. Instead, they have allowed it to rot from within, and this belies all their claims to special knowledge of and access to god.

The doctrine of papal infallibility was obviously self-serving bullshit in the first place, but this ought to put the last nail in its coffin. If the holy spirit will protect popes from all doctrinal error when they merely say they're serious, don't you think it would at least protect the church from conspiring to put thousands of children at risk of being raped? It might be beyond the power of god to keep the first child safe in god's own house, but a god, supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, that would permit the second child to be raped is no god I could ever respect, much less worship.

And if he has a problem with that, may he strike me dead.

Update (3/15): Judging god:

[Eva Wankerl, 61,] also said it was time that the church stopped hiding abuse cases and questioned why priests seemed to be held to a less strict standard of morality than ordinary parishioners. “If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can celebrate Mass for the rest of his life,” she said.

A foolish inconsistency

Imagine the doublethink that makes this possible:

In 1954, Congress added the words "under God," at the urging of the Knights of Columbus and other groups. ...

"This decision is a victory for common sense," Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson of the Knights of Columbus said in a news release. "Today, the court got it absolutely right: recitation of the pledge is a patriotic exercise, not a religious prayer...

If it's a purely patriotic act to pledge allegiance, Carl, why'd you clutter it up with your religion in the first place? Well, duh. You wanted to conflate religion and country. You still do.

As an aside, anyone who holds the title "Supreme Knight" gives me the willies. To a boy like me who grew up in the South, it just has too many unintended associations. Even if the Catholic K 0f C would have been a victim of the KKK in that period at least, not an ally, maybe some of the K of C's allies in 1954 did get busy because of Brown v. Board.

Personally, I was always able to defeat the single evangelical phrase of the revisionist Pledge simply by omitting it.

Faith and proof

The Shroud of Turin is a proven fake. Proven. It's not a coincidence that the face looks like a 14th century painting. That's exactly what it is.

Faithful believers simply cannot be dissuaded from a story they like. No amount of scientific evidence is adequate.

Witness what a thin tissue of bullshit suffices to overturn definitive radiocarbon dating:

[Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives,] asserts that the words include the name “(J)esu(s) Nazarene’’ - or Jesus of Nazareth - in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

This fails on level after level. Frale's opinion of what a forger would do in no way answers to the word proof. A "Princess Bride" rejoinder is tempting.

But even Frale's rationale - fear of heresy - is utterly unconvincing. The forger was concocting a holy relic for, no doubt, profit. He was already a heretic. He was already a mortal sinner. He would have been at great pains to make a convincing forgery. The people he was trying to fool weren't such naifs as Frale; they would have noticed the contemporary usage that she claims a forger would have been too afraid to avoid, and that very usage would have clued them to the forgery.

The press, of course, is ever pleased to purvey more bullshit to the credulous in its audience. They're happy to push Frale as a researcher and only in passing to note that she's a historian, that she has no qualifications to dispute the science.

Click image for details on public domain image.

Update (5/8/2010): Here's a story in much greater detail that shows how obvious the so-called shroud is actually a painting. (h/t Pharyngula)

Obviously

... the problem must be heterosexual priests.

How did ascetic traditions become so powerful and popular in Christianity? What was their attraction in the first place? Was it that sex in pagan Rome was such a weapon of the ruling class and then it snowballed from there?

Hint: I'm not looking for a theological explanation. I'm trying to understand why free people would choose to confine their sexuality so narrowly.

Pro-labor

Some people demand that everyone else make the same choices they make about sexual mores.

Currently, Revere High School students who have parental approval can receive free condoms and prescriptions for birth control pills.

Nailing down the constituencies

Newt Gingrich is a Fox contributor, natch! Any hoary old wingnut conservative can get a soapbox on that propaganda bullshit bin. CNN has been trying to get in on the compost action, too, for no obvious reason other than that they know him.

Newtie looks to be nailing (down) the core Republican constituencies. Why not? Like March's face of the Republican Party, he's an outdated, corpulent, pasty-faced gasbag - and those are his good points. Today he decried Obama's appointment of Harry Knox to "the White House advisory council on faith-based initiatives." For Newt, the appointment of this gay non-denominational preacher is proof that the Obama administration is "anti-religious."

Like Newt's religious! He's only pandering to fundamentalist Christians to try to immunize himself against his own repeated adultery and divorce. Oh, sure, Newt has converted to Catholicism, which is weird. Isn't he automatically denied communion because of his multiple marriages?

Newt still thinks he can be President, though, and he has also been appealing lately to the paranoid bullies and the anti-tax know-nothings who'll do the bidding of the wealthies.

In order of importance

I can understand why the Catholic Church would deem abortion worse than sex slavery. I don't agree - ensoulment at conception is not only made up of nothing, there's no evidence or rationale for it - but I can understand.

What I can't understand is how the Church could possibly deem mere birth control worse than sex slavery. Most of their parishioners practice it, and not by the rhythm method either.

My tax dollars are funding this moral blind spot.

Why Jerome Corsi has work

Why is Jerome Corsi on your television and in the New York Times? He has been caught writing things under a pseudonym that would normally exclude him from ever showing up on TV again. He's a "reporter" for WorldNetDaily, a wingnut font of heavily aerated liquid bullshit (I wouldn't link to them for hard, cold cash). I don't mean the lies and innuendo against Democrats (John Kerry's a communist, fer chrissakes) - they're always fair game in a way that Republicans are not. I don't mean Muslims, either. He has said hateful things about Catholics.

Yet he's still on Larry King Live.

Corsi is a lunatic, but he knows how to work the media system:

• As they do with all their vicious pets, Republicans will help him out even if he claims not to be one of them. After all, Mary Matalin, mainstream Cheneyite operator who can always be counted on to defend wingnut lies, published this book. If the GOPers have to, they'll drop him like a hot potato - but they'll keep paying him.
  
• There will be no consequences for him personally. Libel is virtually impossible for a public figure to prove since New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan even if his actual malice toward Obama is stated explicitly in his book.
  
• Wingnut interest groups (Richard Mellon Scaife, anyone?) will buy his scurrilous books in bulk and thrust it high on the NYT bestseller list. Who cares if anyone reads it?
• Bulk purchases provide a nice payday so that Corsi can continue the manufacture of sleaze.
  
• More important, they guarantee his presence on the TV screen. The media can't turn down a bestselling author, no matter how odious or dishonest.
  

Why would Simon & Schuster permit their brand to be sullied by association with these lies and all the other lies Matalin has thrust into print? Don't be a dummy! Money, nothing else. They'd ship boxes full of styrofoam peanuts if they could invoice a dozen copies per box of this rotten tripe.

So, why is there nothing like this on the left?

• The right pays better.
• Training by the American Petroleum Institute and the Tobacco Institute hews to the right.
• Democrats still think that politics is about ideas. How stupid is that! (Of course, I keep pretending that, too.)
• The left cares about fairness. Sometimes our caring is vestigial and compromised and incomplete, but that's what motivates us. The right cares about retaining the power to prevent their being called to account for their unfairness.