Egads, I Hate JD Vance.

 

Of all the trifling twats that ever twatted triflingly, JD Vance feels like he might be both the most trifling and twattiest. The adoption of Trump's victimization fetish that the US has been "taken advantage of" is so uniquely lame and fucked up. Did Lady Liberty get railed by the big old Lumberjack? How sway? 

Trump himself conflated the Canadian trade deficit thing with our actual US debt, which this asshole put 8 trillion American dollars on. As a member of the party that DOES NOT swan about preaching "fiscal responsibility" while racking up losses by granting tax cuts to the rich at every opportunity, um. 

Fuck you. Fuck you from the soles of your shitty unspurred feet to the crown of your molting head. And what I say for Trump goes ditto (megadittoes. even!) for his mini-me. 

JD Vance tells stories. That is to say, more appropriately, he lies, and he knows and accepts that he lies. 

Let's know and accept that. too. And acknowledge how unacceptable that behavior is. 

RFK, Jr. is a Complete Shit Individual

 I had to see a bit more of RFK, Jr.'s Twitter after seeing this whole spiritual savior moralizing fuckshit:

So, I wonder if RFK, Jr. is in constant contact with God when he's pretending that he did not solicit and share nudes from a much younger reporter and does stuff like support Donald Trump when he's "critical" of the EPA because they...acted on Trump's say-so to play-down the harmful effects of various chemicals. 

Another example of the corrupt influence of industry on our government. In this case, the EPA.https://t.co/8WzOQuGlks

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 22, 2024

Who did what to whom and when matters. I don't think the whole world of Olivia Nuzzi--she managed to go far, fast, because of her looks very probably and good for her, but you have to combine it with smarts.  And courting a "digital" romance with a subject in the name of access journalism isn't smart. Especially when she gave more than she got. 

MTG and Entropy

 

The funny thing with the recent Tweet I want to highlight from perpetually aggrieved Rep. MTG is that she right off the bat starts with the most obviously offensive thing that liberals actually don't defend. She writes:

"If you are defending pedophile priests and those that protect them, groomer teachers & Disney LGBTQ propaganda, Drag Queen story time, saying it's not Satan convincing women to abort their unplanned child, and that children can be mutilated to change their gender, you're wrong."

While I'm in favor of freedom of religion, I've long deplored the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and would not ever defend it, and many people would tend to agree with that--particularly former Catholics and people who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or "none of the above" religiously. If anything, the Church's protection of perhaps 2-5% of clergy in those hopes of preserving its worldly reputation and self-defense against outside criticism has displayed the rot of an organization closed to debate. 

Where she goes from there is a peculiarly tightening circle of pronouncements of less certainty--groomer teachers? Sure, I think teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau or Pamela Joan Rogers or Debra Lefave are deeply troubling, but it seems to me that this is not exactly what Greene is referring to. She appears to be considering simply being LGBTQ-affirming with being a groomer, and with being Disney "propaganda".  

The common understandings of words like "groomer" and "propaganda" have negative connotations and she is employing those negative connotations to distort the impression of the actual things many teachers (like a teacher recently censured for putting up rainbow stickers in her classroom) might do without any malicious or nefarious intent or what Disney had done (mildly support LGBT people).

To put it bluntly, she's trying to make people agree with her wildly false interpretations of the world. And no, Marge--I know a lie when I see one. Sorry. 

She also throws in Drag Queen story time which is a thing that amuses me--wearing women's clothing isn't a problem when I (cis-gender female) do it, but suddenly becomes a problem when men do it? So weird! And yet, I imagine there's considerable overlap between the people who would consider a man wearing women's clothing wrong and who would definitely ask a woman "What were you wearing?" if she were sexually assaulted, so I guess there's that. But there's nothing really disturbing about reading by a drag performer in a well-attended public setting vs what quite normally-attired, heteronormative persons have gotten up to when quite out of sight.

Maybe her real problem is people being exposed to books in the first place. There is a GOP war against schools and libraries, after all. 

The Satan part is entirely "creation by Marge" in that she recently said women were consorting with Satan in hopes of entrapping a man with their foul ensnarements and chemical conjurings...which is some wild Malleus Maleficarum throwback which I find fairly extraordinarily on-the-nose. And last of all, her comments regarding surgery or mutilation don't display that she understands anything about the subject at all. 

But of course, people who disagree with her POV, however uninformed it might be, are the ones who are wrong. This is how a person ends up spouting weird things about Jewish space lasers--a closed system choking on its own decay. It's a fascinating thing to see so concisely within one Tweet the range from epistemic closure to entropy rapidly increasing in a thick skull.

What I Cannot Swallow

 

The US Catholic Bishops would like Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States and observant Catholic, to be barred from the sacrament of communion because he holds, as a matter of conscience, that other people should also follow the dictates of their conscience with regard to the medical termination of pregnancy.

I am unbaptized and non-believing, so I can't speak for the practice of communion as a Christian, but I studied the odd bit of theology. Sharing in the body of Christ is a reminder that God so loved us, he became flesh, and we are closer to him through that gift. In the Bible, Christ asks us to recognize that we share oneness in the body--what you do to anyone, imagine you do to Him. The leaders of the Church in America are denying a member of their body communion with that body. They are cutting him off because he cares what happens to female-bodied people trying to access reproductive health care.

I'm not a person of faith, but I've been female-bodied my whole life, and my sex is one of the reasons why I've always felt the Church had nothing for me. Where was the culture of life for the children of the Magdalene laundries, or for the women themselves? Where was the culture of life for indigenous children in the United States, Canada or Australia? Where was the culture of life when children were and are sexually assaulted by church leaders? Whre was the culture of life when women stayed married to husbands without benefit of divorce, being abused and giving birth to child after child? If they never cared to deny the sacrament to warmongerers, or torturers, or supporters of the death penalty, why pick on Grandpa Joe Biden, who just thinks maybe people can choose whether they should have kids right now, and understands that these things are complicated? Because of any number of things, tragic and not. 

I don't know how significant it is to receive communion in the form of a religious ritual, because to me, communion is when you empathize with other human beings you meet along the way--and believe me, Biden does this. He is a gregarious, people-oriented person who can't not feel for others. I think the Church is actually diminished when it stoops to this kind of low political pettiness. I would greatly prefer it leave Biden's conscience alone, and consider the Church's own.

Climate Sunday: Climate is a Moral Issue

The Pope visited the US, and particularly my own city this weekend, so I am going to frame this post in light of the Pope's visit, and his urgent message, downplayed to the US Congress, but stated a bit more forcefully to the UN--We have got to do something about this climate change.

Marco Rubio, presidential candidate and Catholic, reminds us that the Pope "is not a politician". Bless his heart.

Jeb Bush, presidential candidate and Catholic, advises us that the Pope "is not a scientist".

The Pope is the head of the state called "Vatican City" (can you say that Marco Rubio?--Knew you could!) and represents a religion whose adherents number over a billion. You tell me that guy isn't any kind of  politician, I will laugh at you for a long damn time. The Pope also is qualified to understand science. Actually, notwithstanding the Galileo stuff, the Catholic Church is pretty reality-based regarding science. Teilhard de Chardin and Gregor Mendel were notable religious who advanced the cause of human scientific knowledge. It's not unheard of for the Church to be ahead of the curve--look at all the educational facilities and hospitals the Church has created. They aren't anti-knowledge (says the Catholic-adjacent militant agnostic).

MIke Huckabee and the Class Issue

I welcome @Pontifex to America & offer my apologies that @POTUS will not offer him the warm, respectful welcome he deserves #PopeInUS

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 22, 2015

Sometimes I believe he hasn't any.

Climate Sunday: Am I the World's Keeper?

In Genesis, the brother-slayer Cain replies to God when asked where his brother is: "Am I my brother's keeper?" It's a very sarcastic and defensive question. He is trying to deflect from his culpability in slaying his brother, to ask whether he was ever responsible for making sure his brother was safe to begin with. When reading the scriptures entire, an answer to this murky question of filial responsibility emerges--"Yes, stunato, you are your brother's keeper! Not only are you not to murder him, but you should see to his thirst and hunger. You should love him as you love yourself. "

The encyclical of Pope Francis with respect to the creation goes a sensible degree further--"Yes, you are also the World's Keeper." And why wouldn't you be? You and your brother live here, and nowhere else.

The response to this simple moral entreaty to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs or to try and make the wheat grow by pulling it up by its stalks, has been greeted by some fairly thick people by labeling the Pope a Leftist if not a Communist. Why, they fret, is the Pope trying to hurt the economy? Why is he decrying greed--isn't greed good? Shouldn't people make money off of the earth? Doesn't financial success speak for itself?

I'm Sorry American History Offends You

I'm not terribly surprised that some pundits went off about President Obama referencing the ills done in Christianity's name in pointing out that the atrocities of ISIL are a result of people hijacking the name of religion to sanctify the evil they do to humanity. I'm sure the subtlety of the point missed them entirely--even some liberals thought the remarks were a misstep. But what I appreciate is that he is telling the Bog-honest truth.

I'm an atheist in practice and theory. I'm not a great one--I guess I'd be considered a "faitheist" because I still hold truck with aspects of spirituality and the life invisible, and derive moral inspiration in some of what has been written by proponents of various faiths--but on the whole, my use for organized religion is very slim and my sense that one's own dealing with matters of the soul is one's own damn business on account of one being born and dying alone pretty much settle it for me. I've never been especially angry at the "Old Man in the Sky" image people boil Himself down to. I just take it for granted that if there is a universal intelligence, I'm a cog compared to it, and even if I'm being the best little cog I can be, my opinions on the matter don't count for a lot. But being an atheist means I am well and truly exposed to the anti-religion POV. And that means a nice soaking in history and its evils--including the part religion plays.

ISIL, as I've pointed out previously, is way more nihilist than anything else. This recent burning alive of a Jordanian pilot has been declared un-Islamic by clerics. The actions of groups like ISIL or Boko Haram need to be alienated from the whole religion they are making a mockery of because it is within Islam that any reformative action against extremism needs to be made.

Just a brief "think" about Cardinal Dolan at the DNC

Hold on, I'm linking to a religious peroration:



Now, I wasn't a fan, and still am not. I am an unreconstructed atheist feminist gay-allied liberal and am fairly hardcore anti-pedophile enabler, so I and the Cardinal don't check off too many boxes in common. I agree as to the greatness of the United States in providing opportunities and admiration for the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and share in his concern--to an extent--for those languishing on distant shores to breathe free and who face torture and even death at the hands of tyrannical regimes.

And yet I could not help but notice the heavy hand with which remembrance was sprinkled on those "not yet born" and the mention of "Nature's Law"--and with that one is reminded that Cardinal Dolan is, after all, the fellow who believes that his fellow Catholics are somehow persecuted, if, as employers, the insurance companies with which they do business are compelled to offer birth control coverage without co-pay to employees (even if they experience no compunction to use or directly provide such coverage themselves). One may note, also, if one recalls, that his ideas regarding marriage equality are not merely typical of his generation and faith, but occasionally shockingly expressed. And yet one might simultaneously wonder where his concern was for "Nature's Law" when those who would harm the least of us--were given money to go away quietly and rape babies elsewhere. 

It were better a millstone were wrapped around one's neck, I think, than one ever were associated with paying off the carnal abusers of children, but I am a godless feminist gay-allied liberal. I'm funny that way. And I like to think that I belong to a party which is also not pro-rape and is anti-bigotry, which leads to to the funny old question: Who invited this guy?

Well, it happens, he invited himself and was originally told, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Which I think was how he rather would have had it. After all, Democrats were the bad people who were making institutions be tolerant of gays and (yuck!) female-bodied people in ways they weren't used to. And that was insulting his religion and himself, and you know--persecooties! Papal bull-yi-ing.

But for some reason, the DNC had him--and I get it, and actually, approve.

It's not "Uter-YOU", it's "Uter-US"!

Sexually-active female-bodied people recognize the importance of birth control and the role that it plays in family-planning, their own physical well-being, and their economic security, and support the provision that birth control be covered by insurance without co-pay.  The celibate male-bodied Catholic Bishops think this is a terrible thing, and that their religious freedom extends to telling grown human beings what kind of medical care they can seek for their reproductive organs. The very idea of providing insurance that covers birth control makes them feel so, so....dirty. 

The Catholic Church leadership is at the forefront of the argument that their non-church institutions shouldn't be "forced" to provide health insurance that covers birth control because of the aforementioned idea that this makes them feel complicit in their employees' non-reproductive sexy-times. As if they aren't already paying their employees in money, that is already being used for out-of-pocket birth control expenses, anyway.  What are they going to do next--not pay their employees?  You know, because the money can be used for "sin"?

They claim their problem has to do with "religious freedom".  How is that?

They have the freedom to disapprove. They have the freedom to preach about how they'd rather people not use birth control. But I would have a real problem, as an employee, if my employer was going to make decisions for me that effected my access to reproductive health care. That doesn't sound like my freedom to make choices about my body are being respected.  My choice to use birth control doesn't have any impact on the beliefs of any religious person whatsoever.  They, however, want to exert a "right" that would interfere in how others carry out their lives.  That doesn't strike me a real "right".  Actually, that strikes me as a self-appointed privilege that undermines the bodily autonomy of others.

In other words--no. This rejection of a simple rule regarding coverage for people who may not even themselves have any belief that birth control is somehow sinful is overstepping the authority to simply practice one's religion, to imposing tenets of it on others.  That's not okay.  I hope this rule regarding birth control remains, because it is my belief that this is entirely a private matter for individuals and the medical counsel that they seek--not their employers, regardless of the religious status of that employer.

Richard Dawkins has some blunt words for the Pope.

On the face of it, I agree with Dawkins that the Pope's comments regarding the threat of atheism are entirely a misdirection: "The Vatican is terribly sorry about the pedophilia, but hey! Look! Atheist Nazis!" I don't know if Godwin's Law is recognized by the Vatican, or if some sort of council needs to be convened for the Holy See to recognize why the pulling out of the "Hitler-Atheist" meme isn't actually going to help them. Regardless: the Pope shouldn't have gone there in the first damn place.

The question is actually irrelevant. Evidence can certainly be gathered from the writings of the authors of the Third Reich detailing their employment of the Church for propaganda, their dismantling of the various Freethinkers' organizations and their disavowal of Darwin, even down to the "Gott Mit Uns" on the SS belt buckles, that there was a distinctive Christian outlook fostered by the Nazi regime.

But they were "no true Christians", obviously, in the sense Christian believers hold dear. Or at any rate, they don't represent the best of what Christianity is alleged to stand for, according to Christians. But I fail to see how Nazis were responsible for children being sexually abused in Ireland, Belgium, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, in the Philippines, or anywhere else in the world, by ordained Catholic clergy. Maybe the Nazis "really were" deep down skeptical that a retributive God who would burn their ugly-hearted asses in Hell existed--therefore "no true Christians"--

But are we going to say also "No true Priests" assaulted children, wrecked lives, swore victims to secrecy? Because if they were "no true priests"--shouldn't they then have been cast out? They weren't. So were the Bishops and Cardinals who allowed the abuse to persist and aided in the cover-up also "no true Catholics"?

As for the claim that current-day atheists mean to eradicate religion--maybe not exactly. Diminish belief, eradicate superstition, sure. Hold up a standard of verifiability. Encourage critical thought. We aren't exactly at war with believers, after all: we mostly just want to encourage independent thought and support the rights of believers to question their own beliefs. Just as they shouldn't be at war with us....

If they thought we still had souls to save. Alleging we're as bad as Nazis isn't exactly getting on our "good" side.

Dawkins' excoriation of the Pope is harsh, but warranted. If the Pontiff means to make amends, he should address the wrongs done to his flock, before trying to warn the world of what any atheists might be about.

Ordaining Women on a Par with Pedophilia.

As if to reinforce the message of the book I reviewed in my previous post--this:

Vatican: Ordination of Women a Grave Crime

Abuse victims said the rules are little more than administrative housekeeping since they made few substantive changes to current practice, and what is needed are bold new rules to punish bishops who shield pedophiles.

Women's ordination groups criticized the new rules because they included the attempted ordination of women as a "grave crime" subject to the same set of procedures and punishments meted out for sex abuse.

The rules, which cover the canonical procedures and penalties for the most serious sacramental and moral crimes, were issued as the Vatican confronts one of the worst scandals in recent history: revelations of hundreds of new cases of priests who raped and sodomized children, bishops who covered up for them, and Vatican officials who stood by passively for decades.

In 2003, the Vatican streamlined its 2001 procedures for disciplining abusive priests, allowing them to be defrocked without a lengthy canonical trial if the evidence against them was overwhelming. The rules issued Thursday codified those procedures into church law.

Things I feel I should point out: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from which Cardinal Ratzinger was elevated, is the modern-day evolution of the Inquisition. You can Google it. Thus, his fixation on the rules. But I fail to see how the ordination of women is in practice equivalent to the cover-up of the abuse of children.

What is the worst that happens if women are treated as priests? They are considered equals? They are seen as--also human? Also capable of invoking the Divine? How is this in any way the equivalent of the abuse of children, which violates the children's personhood and their choice of how to use their bodies, and affects their relationships with other people later in life? It is absurd to consider these things equivalent.

"Noble atheism"? Well....leaves me out, I guess.

Vatican reaches out to atheists – but not you, Richard Dawkins

The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church's relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church's top theologians.


The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.

.....The foundation, he said, would only be interested in "noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins".

Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with "irony and sarcasm" and tend to "read religious texts like fundamentalists".

At bottom, I have to wonder about this "noble atheism." Do they just mean something like "polite"? Do they mean "non-critical"? Or do they mean "shame-faced, apologetic atheists who secretly wish the mean old world was a nicer place, too"?

I suspect the Church realizes that all atheists more or less reject the truth-claims of religion, but they want to be sure that their faith isn't actually called false, delusional, or (Heaven forbid!) actively dangerous, which are claims that the so-called "New Atheists" make. But I would think it entirely worse to come up against the soft bigotry of lowered expectations provided by a, shall I have to point it out? "condescending atheist."

You heard. After all, what they are looking for is a nice atheist to pour them a cup of tea and concede, "There, you are do-gooders, aren't you? We are thankless, the lot of us, for all you've done. And it's just so terrible how you have to shoulder the very serious business of dealing with God and all of that. By all means, tell us again how that nasty Mr. Hitler was really a non-believer, despite all of his public pronouncements to the contrary...." But at the end of the day, even the sweetest, tea-proffering atheist has to come down to the brass tacks of why they don't believe.

The lack of evidence. The way the universe falls together without the apparent need of a God. The way people can lose their faith without losing their ethical code. The way "revelation" is a shabby basis for anything ("Oh, it was 'revealed', you say?") The way "grace" and "epiphany" are so purely subjective as to be meaningless to someone who doesn't share them. And it should be clear that the atheist has decided not to hurt your feelings about all this but, "Thanks but no thanks, it's still a bit rubbish for me, personally. It's all right for you of course, if you need that sort of comfort and spiritual guidance and all. But, um, I'll pass."

Yeah. Condescending, isn't it? But so much less snarky!

As to the claim that the New Atheists "read the Bible like fundamentalists"--I'm working out how they expect anyone to know how to do otherwise? (Perhaps I say this as a person coming from a Protestant background....hm.) Are they claiming one needs to be theologian to pick out which bits are really, really true using arcane philosophy (ah, surely we've all heard of a la Descartes Catholics?) If faith comes as a personal grace, why is a spiritual Sherpa guide required?

Oh, so many questions. Oh, so much irony and sarcasm....

Hitchens and Dawkins aren't really arresting the Pope.

But this is what the The Sunday Times had as its headline:

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI

Which naturally grabs the attention and makes one read on:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

If your mind worked anything like mine, you'd envision a kind of "odd couple" buddy cop film: One is a mild-mannered Oxford professor, the other, a rough and tumble journalist, and together they are "Atheist Cops!"

PZ Myers (drat him and his being logical....) directed the attention of all who hadn't already checked out RichardDawkins.net, where Dawkins clears up what he actually means to do in the comments of a thread about the article. And supporting a legal challenge to a religious figure who has engaged in the cover-up of fairly ghastly abuse seems quite reasonable to me.

I still say that would be a hell of a buddy/cop pairing, though....

Insult to injury

I've already commented on how the apologists for both Pope Benedict XVI and the general conduct of the Catholic Church strike me as being a part of the problem by continuing to perpetuate the idea that the pattern of abuse that was so widespread was somehow not a big deal. But the words of Cardinal Soldano prefacing the Pope's Easter Mass strike me as representative of the worst part of the response: the insult to the victims who have spoken out, and to the critics, many of them who are still associated with the church, who want to see a grave problem addressed.

Via the LA Times:

Dressed in gold robes and shielded from a cool drizzle by a canopy, Benedict looked weary as he listened to Sodano's speech at the start of Mass in the cobblestone square bedecked with daffodils, tulips and azaleas.

In early evening, the pope, who turns 83 later this month, was to fly by helicopter to the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside retreat in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome, where he will greet pilgrims from the palace courtyard balcony on Monday.

Easter Sunday Mass was the highlight of a heavy schedule of public appearances by the pope before the thousands of faithful who have poured into Rome for Holy Week services.

"With this spirit today we rally close around you, successor to (St.) Peter, bishop of Rome, the unfailing rock of the holy church," Sodano said. "Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometimes buffet the community of believers."

Now, I'm a writer, myself, so I recognize that this AP story has a little "coloring". "Dressed in gold robes", "lakeside retreat", is this Robin Leach reporting on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infallible"? But the words of Cardinal Soldano are the damning part:

Petty gossip?

There is nothing "petty" about this discussion. I might be the wrong messenger, as a person who obviously has "issues" with organized religion, but I don't think allegations of child rape are something anyone should take lightly. The critics of the cover-up, which enabled further abuse in too many of these cases, isn't an issue where non-Catholics are simply cavilling at "those Catholic priests, who aren't so holy after all!" No, the issue is the abuse. The issue furthermore is that the victims have been made to suffer twice-over: first, in being emotionally exploited and physically violated at the hands of their abusers, and then again in being thought of as complainers, or, as the despicable Bill Donohue would have it--"gold-diggers" who are possibly lying for financial gain, or being told that their stories about abuse are nothing more than--gossip? And those newspapers and periodicals of record that publish such stories are promoters of --gossip?

Or is it more plausible that the rape of children is such an especially horrific crime in our culture, and that the church is so generally held to be a moral institution, that the possibility of such an evil being not merely harbored but given asylum by such an institution is so genuinely mind-bogglingly wrong that it has to be publically addressed>?

And as an afterthought, I'll add, that the 4000 people who melted down the phone-lines of an abuse hot-line set up by the Catholic Church in Germany weren't people who wanted to idly gossip about whether or not their parish priest might have been a bit queer or something. Is it at all possible that so many people would call for no more reason than to speculate, or just chat? In Austria, the abuse phone-lines were not so overheated, but the number of callers were still significant.

How many people have lived with a secret shame in their hearts, thinking themselves somehow damaged or ruined because of being raped while still so young that it was a major part of their formative years? How absolutely, infuriatingly insulting to call speaking out about that--"gossip". This unthinking and unempathetic response to a moral crisis undermines not just the reputation for morality, but humanity of the institution.

And if a church lacks morality or a concern for the suffering human beings who turn to it--what does it have left? Faith?

The answer that the Church has always had was that it was fruitful in positive "works". In the hospitals and schools and missions where the faithful saw to their brothers and sisters and did good things for the sake of goodness--not for faith alone, but because faith without works was dead. But this abuse, persistent in so many places, was its own kind of "works"--and those who called the pedophilia scandal the work of Satan had a point in classifying it as the personification of evil.

But that evil has a human face and not a supernatural cause, and in the end, we human beings are accountable for ourselves--and so should our institutions be held accountable. The apologies and the insults against the media and the victims are what is petty and wrong.

Those supposed vicars of Christ on Earth need to empathize with the suffering, and look on these youthful people as their supposed Saviour would have done: It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

They don't seem to get it. They just don't get it. And yet the idea of not harming children, and despising those who do should be so basic.

Regarding the Catholic apologists--a digression:

I've tendered only a handful of the posts I've started regarding the Catholic child abuse issue, largely because other people are able to cover the issue better and say things more eloquently (or more bluntly) than I would.

Amanda Marcotte dismantled Ross Douthat's apologia in the vein of "the hippies did it", by advising that the hierarchical assholes prior to the hippies by and large did it, and by the way, the hippies and the feminists were the ones who advocated openness regarding discussing sexual matters that made victims feel safe enough and confidant enough to discuss what happened, which led to the spike in revelations in the 70's and 80's regarding abuse that happened much further back.

PZ Myers eloquently shot down that evil little man, Bill Donohue.

The execrable Donohue expressed the notion that the pedophilia was the result of gays in the orders, simply because many of the victims were post-pubescent. Myers' comment:

Where to even begin? The problem is not the sex of his victims, it's that this was a priest abusing his authority, acting as a sexual predator on much, much younger members of his flock — young people who were in his charge, who were dependent on him, and who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they should trust the priest. Donohue is resorting to arguing that because a 13-year-old had pubic hair, he had the full autonomy of an adult and the abuse of the priest was simply a love affair between equals. And that is bullshit

is on the money. I am reminded of those sad cases of seven, eight or nine year old pregnant girls we sometimes hear of--and just know some sick individual, possibly even related to the child, just waited until that child had her period, and then considered her "fair game". When she was just a child. We have laws regarding the "age of consent" for a reason. If Donahue does not understand that reason, he's possibly as sick as the preists he's defending. (Sick as to his beliefs, of course! I'm implying nothing about him personally that his public appearances don't already suggest--that he is a morally confused man.)

And Andrew Sullivan, as expected, covers this issue exhaustively and well .

Which makes it hard for me to do more than comment--yeah....other people are right!

Regarding anyone who raises an apologia on behalf of the Church on this issue--just stop. You aren't actually making things better for a beloved institution, but rather, compounding a problem that has its roots in forced secrecy and shame. The crime of sexual abuse of a child is exceptionally harmful--but the cover-up that enabled the continuation of abuse in far too many instances is a form of complicity at worst, and an abdication of moral resposibility in the best case.

It might be legally defended, it might be semantically defended, but it isn't really defended until you place yourself outside the door of a place where an as yet immature person is made to feel they have to permit themselves to be violated, and made not to speak even to--especially to! parents about what occurred, all to save the harmful hide of a rapist disguised as a holy man. And imagine youself listening to the abuse taking place--what would you hope that you would do?

I think one would want to stop it and see justice done. But others have said all that better than me, so I linked to them here.