What a messed up culture we have

I've been watching some pro football the last couple of years. I don't know if I'd be watching if both New York teams were terrible, but the Giants are having a pretty good season, the Jets are kind of like the Mets as the area's Goofy Team and might also sneak in. But football for football's sake? Naah. And I have zero interest in college football.

I watch my friends struggle to get scholarship money for their college-bound children, and the only money available is for sports stars. I see the obsession in my town with youth sports and I know that at least some of this is due to parents knowing that while the National Honor Society might throw a few bucks at your kid, a sports scholarship is where the significant money is. Of course they dream of their kid being the next B.J. Raji, a local kid whose parents are soon to move into a ridiculously bigass house with corinthian columns on a through street in my area, but the more realistic parents will take what they can get if it offsets some of the mid-five-figures that college costs every year, even if it's only a couple thousand dollars for excellence in fencing.

Football gives money to a very few kids, but it brings in BIG money to colleges. And for Big Ten schools that have "legendary" coaches like Joe Paterno, the money is huge, which probably explains the cone of silence that was the result of assistant coach Mike McQueary informing Joe Paterno that he had seen Paterno's heir apparent, Jerry Sandusky, raping a boy in the shower.

But while we correctly have universal revulsion in our society for those who molest children, our revulsion seems to be selective. We confuse pedophila with homosexuality. Gay men can't be Boy Scout troop leaders, but no one hesitates to leave their son with a priest, a pastor, or a youth coach.

When a guy rapes and murders his 7-year-old neighbor, we get "Megan's Law", and there is, as there should be, universal condemnation and revulsion. Even if a child is not murdered, but "only" raped, there's universal condemnation and revulsion. It's accepted wisdom that even in prison, child molesters are regarded as the lowest of the low.

But let the abuser come from a religious framework, or from a highly-touted sport (and I'm not sure that there's a difference in some people's heads between actual religion and football, which seems to be a quasi-religion to many), and all of a sudden there's "nuance" and "extenuating circumstance."

If the guy down the street flashes a group of schoolchildren, pandemonium ensues. But if a priest sexually abuses a child, it's covered up by the Church. If a pastor sexually abuses a child, no one dares say anything. It's as if these people think that the abuse of a child is somehow sanctioned by God, or that there MUST be some kind of "explanation" that exonerates the suspect if he is a "man of the cloth". And when part of the mythos around a star sports coach is that he was "a god" at Penn State, it's not difficult to make the leap from being a figure of speech to an actual reality.

It's been interesting to listen to local progressive talk radio AND to sports talk radio the last few days. I've especially been gratified to see that the sports talk guys AREN'T falling into the "He's The Legendary Joe Paterno So I Know He Meant Well" trap. Even the biggest asshole on the New York airwaves, Craig Carton, minced no words when a Penn State journalism student tried to defend Joe Paterno yesterday by blaming the media:



Carton is a guy who was fired from his last gig for making fun the postpartum depression of the wife of then-Governor Richard Codey, and I have no great love for this guy, for all that he's weirdly entertaining and yes, Boomer and Carton is sometimes my morning drive-time guilty pleasure. But on this one he's 100% spot on.

Carton is the father of young children and as a result is correctly responding from that visceral place of "What if that had been my kid?" But even among people I know, there is clearly a struggle going on between trying to justify Paterno's actions by saying "Well, he thought he was doing the right thing by reporting the incident to the college authorities" and "What if that had been my kid?"

Most of the callers into Boomer and Carton and to Mark Riley yesterday were clearly struggling with what this incident means to Paterno's legacy and what should be done. A caller to Steve Summers last night on WFAN concocted a fairy tale in which Jerry Sandusky went to Joe Paterno and said "I have this problem, I need help", to which Summers responded "Then why didn't he get him help?" A caller less in thrall to the Church of College Football because he himself had been a player told Mark Riley yesterday morning that the entire football program at the school needs to be shut down for two years and rebuilt from the ground up, with NONE of the current staff, including Mike McQueary, allowed to stay on.

But here's what I find disturbing: Why is there even any dispute that Penn State did the right thing by firing Paterno? Aside from the fact that the entire structure deemed it appropriate to protect a pedophile rather than "damage the Penn State brand", why is there any ambiguity? Does fielding a winning football team year after year justify EVERYTHING, let alone anything? When the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman hit the news in 1994, it was the talk of the lunch table at the company at which I was working at the time. One of my colleagues refused to believe that O.J. Simpson could have possibly killed his wife, because "He's O.J., man!"

He's Joe Paterno, man!

No, what he is, or was, is a guy who helped bring in over $50 million to Penn State every year, that's what he is. And the bottom line here is that until the last few days when the story could be contained no longer, Penn State and everyone who still defends Joe Paterno, obviously believe that the rape of a ten-year-old, or multiple ten-year-olds, as appears now to be the case, is necessary and a small price to pay if it protects the cash cow that is Penn State football. It's the "Never Disrespect the Bing" school of moral relativism.

And that anyone -- ANYONE -- feels this is justified is a sad commentary on our culture.

Please. Aren't we supposed to be able to hold two ideas in our heads at once?

There are a number of reasons I haven't written about the whole Wikileaks/Assange mess. One of them is that jurassicpork is doing such a whiz-bang-up job of it, another is that I am again in work-seven-days-a-week-to-meet-a-deadline mode, and a third is that it requires more attention than I'm able to give it.

What grieves me about the blogtopia (™ Skippy) response to the arrest of Julian Assange on sex chatges in Sweden is that for a bunch of supposedly intelligent people, we sure are incapable of holding two conflicting ideas in our heads.

Isn't it just possible that Julian Assange is both a crusader for truth AND an incorrigible douchebag where women are concerned? Do we have to ignore the service that Wikileaks may be doing in getting truths out to a public from which all too much is hidden because Assange is an asshole? And conversely, do we have to automatically brand Assange innocent of sex charges just because we may value what he's done with Wikileaks?

Now, I'm on record many times as stating that I think the tendency among much of the feminist blogosphere to brand every kind of unwanted sexual attention as "rape" not only minimizes the horror of rape, but it creates a culture of victimology that makes it impossible to live a normal life. I'm not claiming to tell anyone how to respond to rape, but I fail to understand how it's empowering to call yourself a "survivor of rape" and then have every possible stimulus in the culture be a trigger for a hyperemotional response. I understand about sexism in the culture. I understand about the objectification of women. I also know first-hand what it's like to be with a guy in a fraternity house and be told that your choice is to have sex with him or have your chothes torn from you by force and thrown out the window. I went on after that to a) make a point of staying out of fraternity bedrooms; and b) live a normal life that includes a happy 24-year marriage.

Whenever we have a high-profile rape case in the news, the issue of "at what point can you withdraw consent" comes up. In an ideal world, you can withdraw consent at any time. In a real world where you're not having sex with an arrogant asshole who fancies himself an adventurer, you can withdraw consent at any time. You SHOULD be able to withdraw consent at any time. If Julian Assange is guilty of continuing to have sex after consent is withdrawn, it's definitely a type of sexual assault.

What I question is whether this particular case of sexual assault would become an international one, with involvement by Interpol, if Assange weren't pissing off some Very Powerful People. It's not all that much different from Republicans having the vapors over Paula Jones' claim of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton when many of them are doing the same thing. No one would have given a shit about what may have happened in that Arkansas room if Clinton hadn't been a Democratic president with high approval ratings. But he was pissing off some Very Powerful People. Former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who was vocal about there being no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was also pissing off some Very Powerful People. Ritter still awaits trial from a January 2010 child endangerment charge resulting from an internet sex sting. It's the second time he's been caught in a similar sting after charges in a 2001 case were dismissed.

The question is not whether Assange is a creep or Ritter is a child predator. It certainly appears that Assange IS a creep and Ritter IS a child predator. The question is whether sex charges are being pursued not to protect women (in the case of Assange) or children (in the case of Ritter), but instead for political reasons. Given the overall misogyny in the culture surrounding women and sex, and the snickering and leering that otherwise normal men do about sexy-looking teenaged girls, I question whether sex charges in cases like these would be pursued with the same vigor if there were not strong political points to be made by prosecuting such people.

If Scott Ritter is a guy who can't control himself around teenaged girls, that would make him a sex criminal. It would NOT make him wrong about Iraq. If Julian Assange has a pattern of sexual misbehavior, it makes him a shithead that women should avoid. It doesn't mean that what Wikileaks reveals is not true.

It shouldn't be that difficult for us to keep these two ideas in our heads at the same time.

Another TSA horror story

Just go read it.

Someone needs to ask Elena Kagan about this

Why is the Obama Administration siding with the Vatican on this:

I’m slammed on my day job, so invite others to write how it makes you feel to have the President of the United States side with The Vatican instead of hundreds of thousands of crime victims of the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church. It was the U.S. Solicitor General, joined by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Justice Department who filed briefs in favor of The Vatican Friday May 21st, in the lawsuit from Oregon that Jeff Anderson and other plaintiff attorneys are trying to take all the way to the Pope.

Do you agree that the .17 square miles of real estate that is the Vatican is a sovereign nation? That a mall sized pile of cement populated by leaders of a religion, who go out from that nation all over the globe propagating their message, is a sovereign nation?

Like Italy and Germany?

Am I getting this right?

The Office of the U.S. Solicitor General who wrote the amicus brief is headed by Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Hearings confirming Kagan onto the Court are scheduled for June in D.C.

OK, can we stop pretending that we're friends with these guys now?

For the last twenty years, we've heard all kinds of conciliatory crap towards Jews coming out of the Vatican. It was all horsepuckey, of course, no matter how much Rabbi Marc Gelman wanted to believe it. They believe we killed Christ, they've always believed we killed Christ, and when he comes back, we'll get him again!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Now I'm not one of those people who sees anti-Semitism around every corner, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall talking about someone saying "Jew eat?". But all this nicey-nice stuff from the Vatican always struck me as creepy. I knew the shiv was there at the ready, and so it is:

A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism, considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is.

The comments, which have been denied by the bishop, follow a series of statements from Catholic churchmen alleging the existence of plots to weaken the church and Pope Benedict XVI.

Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: "They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers."

He's not all wrong. We do NOT want their church. Even those of us who are nonobservant as Jews want no part of a church that throughout its history has stood for persecution of heretics, the amassing of power, the cynical abuse of mankind's quest for meaning, and harbors and protects pedophiles.

If you believe that Y'shua of Nazareth actually existed, it doesn't matter whether you believe he was divine or just a cool guy with a message that we should all be nice to each other. The fact of the matter is that the deeply corrupt organization housed in Italy and populated by creepy old men does their messiah no service and pays him no tribute.

New Rule: A pedophile protection racket shall have no say over U.S. policy

None. And yes, Bart Stupak, I'm talking about YOUR church:

Catholic priest who has been criminally charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota six years ago is still working in his home diocese in India despite warnings to the Vatican from an American bishop that the priest continued to pose a risk to children, according to church documents made public on Monday.

The documents show that the American bishop warned the Vatican that the priest was accused of molesting two teenage girls whose trust he gained by promising to discuss their interest in becoming nuns.

A county attorney in Minnesota is seeking to extradite the priest from India in a criminal case that involves one of the girls, who said the priest had forced her to perform oral sex and had threatened her and her family.

The case took place during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, who has recently come under fire for his role in cases of sexually abusive priests in Germany and Wisconsin.

The case was handled after the Vatican clarified and streamlined its procedures in 2001 to respond to accusations of sexual abuse by priests. In the midst of a growing scandal, the Vatican has sought to defend the pope by pointing out that he was both an architect and a promoter of these procedures.

But the Vatican also says it defers to local bishops to decide how to treat accused priests, leaving it exposed to criticism that the church is not doing enough to rein in sexually abusive priests.

In 2006, the Vatican recommended that the priest simply be monitored, a document shows. A lawyer for the Holy See said in a statement that the Vatican had recommended that the priest be defrocked, but that canon law specifies that the decision rests with the local bishop. The bishop in India sentenced the priest to a year of prayer in a monastery rather than seeking his removal from the priesthood, according to documents and interviews.

It's time to bring the current head of this ring to justice.

It isn't just Father Raniero Cantalamessa

Father Raniero Cantalamessa is the Franciscan who yesterday compared criticism of of Pope Pedophile Protector to anti-Semitism. The underlying outrage here is not the trivialization of anti-Semitism, something with which the Vatican is very familiar, given the Church's history of forced conversion and adherence to Catholic doctrine during the Crusades. the Spanish Inquisition, and Bart Stupak. The outrage is the implication that hating those who protect pedophiles is sort of like hating Jews, which means that Jews therefore protect pedophiles.

THIS is why Jewish groups are outraged, it has little to do with trivialization of the Holocaust. And it isn't just Cantalamessa either. Today I took a break from an entire weekend spent working (for a change; this is all I do these days...I don't even know how to cook anymore) and went for coffee with a friend I hadn't seen in a long time. She is in her 60's, and Roman Catholic. I asked her what she thought of all this, and she said that her faith is not rooted in the Pope or the Vatican (which of course makes her not really a Roman Catholic, but I didn't want to tell her that), but in her belief in God. Then she said that there is a place for forgiveness, and just as the faith of the Jews was not shaken by what they went through in the Holocaust, her faith isn't shaken by what the Church has done.

That's when my head exploded, leaving a mess all over the wall behind me.

I had to drop it right there, because otherwise I was going to have to confront her on drawing parallels between keeping one's faith when one is targeted for mass genocide, and keeping the faith when the leaders of your church for the last 40+ years are exposed as having either been or protectors of people who rape children.

So here we are.

Enjoy your chocolate bunnies tomorrow.

Shorter Pope Ratzi: "My faith allows me to continue to protect pedophiles in my ranks"

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, but at the Vatican, a narcissistic Pope decided that instead of this season being about the tribulations of Jesus, it's really about his own:

While he did not directly mention the scandal involving sexual abuse of children by priests, parts of his sermon could be applicable to the crisis.

The pontiff said faith in God helps lead one “towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”

He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”

One prayer asked God to help “the young and those who work to educate and protect them,” which Vatican Radio said was intended to “sum up the feelings of the Church at this difficult time when it confronts the plague of pedophilia.”

So the children who are, and why have in the past been, preyed upon by priests were told yesterday to just pray for the protection of God (who's also supposed to protect the ones who go after them). Because this Pope sure as hell isn't going to do anything to help them.

US, Germany, Ireland...and now Italy

It seems that Pope Ratzi spent a whole bunch of years being very, very busy covering for child predators:

Pope Benedict XVI is facing growing pressure over his handling of paedophile priests as new cover-ups come to light in Italy, the country with the greatest concentration of Roman Catholic clerics.

After the latest allegations – that Benedict took no action in the US when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's enforcer – the church is now "terrified" as more victims stand up to be counted in Italy, according to Roberto Mirabile, head of La Caramella Buona, an Italian anti-abuse group. "With the scandals erupting abroad, we will see a huge growth in victims' groups in Italy in coming weeks," said Mirabile yesterday. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict handled abuse cases at the Vatican for 24 years before he became pope in 2005.

"We are likely to discover that the Vatican worked even harder in Italy with bishops than elsewhere to hide cases, simply because the contact was closer and the church is so powerful in Italy," Mirabile added.

Sergio Cavaliere, an Italian lawyer who has documented 130 cases of clerical paedophilia, also believes that the Vatican's backyard could follow Ireland, the United States and Germany in producing a wave of abuse revelations. "The cases I have found are just the tip of the iceberg given the reluctance of many victims to come forward until now," said Cavaliere. "And in no single case did the local bishop alert police to the suspected abuse."

Another startling development is how recent most of the allegations are, unlike the decades-old cases in Munich and Milwaukee that Benedict was last week accused of failing to act on.

At what point does this man become viewed by the world as we view other corrupt heads of state and become a pariah?

UPDATE: Don't miss Matt Taibbi's take on New York's Archbishop Timothy Dolan's apologia in the Sunday New York Times for the Pope's inaction on child sex abuse.

Who would Jesus molest?

As we head towards Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter, it will be interested in seeing if the media continues to provide their customary hushed, reverential coverage of Pope Pedophile Ring's presiding over this most holy time of the Christian year. It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if he continued to receive coverage as if he has a direct conduit to God now that it seems clearer every day that he was actively involved in protecting sexual predators:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish.

An initial statement on the matter issued earlier this month by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising placed full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties on Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber. But the memo, whose existence was confirmed by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest’s reassignment.

What part he played in the decision making, and how much interest he showed in the case of the troubled priest, who had molested multiple boys in his previous job, remains unclear. But the personnel chief who handled the matter from the beginning, the Rev. Friedrich Fahr, “always remained personally, exceptionally connected” to Cardinal Ratzinger, the church said.

The case of the German priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, has acquired fresh relevance because it unfolded at a time when Cardinal Ratzinger, who was later put in charge of handling thousands of abuse cases on behalf of the Vatican, was in a position to refer the priest for prosecution, or at least to stop him from coming into contact with children. The German Archdiocese has acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of Father Hullermann, though it attributed those mistakes to people reporting to Cardinal Ratzinger rather than to the cardinal himself.

Church officials defend Benedict by saying the memo was routine and was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” according to the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese. But Father Wolf said he could not rule out that Cardinal Ratzinger had read it.

[snip]

A key moment came on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1980. Cardinal Ratzinger presided that morning over the meeting of the diocesan council. His auxiliary bishops and department heads gathered in a conference room on the top floor of the bishop’s administrative offices, housed in a former monastery on a narrow lane in downtown Munich.

It was a busy day, with the deaths of five priests, the acquisition of a piece of art and pastoral care in Vietnamese for recent immigrants among the issues sharing the agenda with item 5d, the delicate matter of Father Hullermann’s future.

The minutes of the meeting include no references to the actual discussion that day, simply stating that a priest from Essen in need of psychiatric treatment required room and board in a Munich congregation. “The request is granted,” read the minutes, stipulating that Father Hullermann would live at St. John the Baptist Church in the northern part of the city.

Church officials have their own special name for the language in meeting minutes, which are internal but circulate among secretaries and other diocese staff members, said Father Wolf, who has a digitized archive of meeting minutes, including those for the Jan. 15 meeting. “It’s protocol-speak,” he said. “Those who know what it’s about understand, and those who don’t, don’t.”

Five days later, on Jan. 20, Cardinal Ratzinger’s office received a copy of the memo from his vicar general, Father Gruber, returning Father Hullermann to full duties, a spokesman for the archdiocese confirmed.

Father Hullermann resumed parish work practically on arrival in Munich, on Feb. 1, 1980. He was convicted in 1986 of molesting boys at another Bavarian parish.

Betty Friedan is responsible for Catholic Church pedophiles? WTF???

It's interesting to watch just how terrified and timid the mainstream media has been about covering the massive and spreading sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Look, I understand how difficult it is to separate out the Vatican from the faithful. This more than any other religion is inextricably linked with a hierarchy of men that is as much corporation as church, which makes it difficult to bring the "hate the sin, love the sinner" doctrine to bear. I know many, many Catholics, of varying degrees of faith. Most of them by and large buy the idea of the Pope as a kind of direct conduit to God, though the Vatican doesn't play all that much of a role in their day-to-day faith. I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to have the very foundation of what you have been told since childhood is Absolute Truth be exposed as what is essentially a criminal enterprise at this point.

But in its attempts to deal with what many people thought after Pope Ratzi ascended in 2005 was in the past, the Vatican is reaching a level of crazy that is unlikely to fly in an era where we no longer burn witches:

When you're one of the most powerful institutions in the world and you've got an escalating series of sex abuse scandals erupting in such far-flung locales as Ireland,  Germany, Brazil and beyond on a near daily basis, how do you even begin to do damage control? If you're the Catholic Church, maybe you say you're going to investigate. You issue a few letters. And then just to cover all your bases, you do a little Satan blaming. In a bold and arguably wack move, the Vatican's normally press-shy exorcist Don Gabriele Amorth has been granting interviews left and right lately, and they are a treasure trove of WTF moments.

You say you hadn't been aware the Vatican even had an official exorcist? Thought that stuff was just for Linda Blair movies? That's likely because, prior to last week, the Vatican had permitted its exorcist to grant one interview in the entire last century. Now, suddenly he's doing the rounds like he's got a new rom-com with Gerard Butler opening Friday.

Speaking to La Republica last week, Amorth, who in fact does have a new book, "Memoirs of an Exorcist," to shill, said, "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia." A few days later, he told the UK Times, "All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including pedophilia." He also added that contemporary culture has "given in to the Evil One. You see it in the lack of faith, the empty churches, the collapse of the family. Compare the world of today to when I was a boy in Modena: families and parish communities were strong, women did not go out to work."

I keep hearkening back to this Kevin Smithian notion of God and Satan playing Skee-Ball for giant stuffed animals down in Keansburg, New Jersey, and Satan getting bonus points for getting Christians to fall to temptation. We've seen no end to the blaming of
The Horned One for everything from infidelity to, well, child sex abuse. As someone who lives a relatively moral life without a Great White Punitive Alpha Male, I don't understand this at all. But the idea that child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and gay prositution rings run out of the Vatican are the fault of NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE listening to what these people have to say and of women having jobs, ought to destroy whatever credibility this institution has left.

As is often the case these days, the timidity of the media in exposing the criminal enterprise that is the Church hierarchy is not shared by what is becoming the last bastion of investigative journalism in the country: comedians:

And Chris Hitchens (but you already knew that):

Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing—indeed endless—scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made "to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse." He stupidly went on to say that "those efforts have failed."

He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: It has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the topmost level of the Roman Catholic Church is a process that has only just begun. Yet it became in a sense inevitable when the College of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly responsible for the original cover-up. (One of the sanctified voters in that "election" was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.)

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing "abuse"?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for "therapy" by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger's deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to "pastoral" work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.

It is, of course, claimed, and it will no doubt later be partially un-claimed, that Ratzinger himself knew nothing of this second outrage. I quote, here, from the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a former employee of the Vatican Embassy in Washington and an early critic of the Catholic Church's sloth in responding to child-rape allegations. "Nonsense," he says. "Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He's the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he's trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope."

This is common or garden stuff, very familiar to American and Australian and Irish Catholics whose children's rape and torture, and the cover-up of same by the tactic of moving rapists and torturers from parish to parish, has been painstakingly and comprehensively exposed. It's on a level with the recent belated admission by the pope's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, that while he knew nothing about sexual assault at the choir school he ran between 1964 and 1994, now that he remembers it, he is sorry for his practice of slapping the boys around.

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)

Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger's office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church's jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, "begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18^th year of age" and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice. "You can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10, the priest will get away with it."

Look, I have no problem with anyone needing some kind of belief system in an attempt to make life make sense, especially in these days when I expect frogs to come pouring out of the skies any day now. But given the huge role that people like Bart Stupak have given the Catholic Church in writing legislation that will affect all of us, I think it's not unreasonable for those of us who do not regard these guys as having a direct conduit to God to point out just how little moral authority they have.

Why are the media not touching this story?

Look, I realize that ultimately this is about the faith of millions of people. I recognize that Roman Catholicism as a religion speaks to a great many people. I know that there are a lot of people who hold with papal infallibility; perhaps not most American Catholics, many of whom pick and choose from the menu, but many. I also understand that when you're talking about religion, you have to step carefully.

But I'm not talking about Catholic doctrine here, or if I am, it extends only to the doctrine of papal infallibility. But I'm sorry, if your religion requires that you hold a man who aided and abettted the sexual abuse of children as infallible, perhaps it's time to become an Episcopalian:

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal last night as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The cleric went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as a priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for therapy in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, who was then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as H, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined DM 4,000 (£1,800 today). There have been no formal charges against him since.

The church has been accused of a cover-up after at least 170 allegations of child abuse by German Catholic priests. The scandal broke in January but the claims, which continue to emerge, span three decades. Critics say that priests were redeployed to other parishes rather than dismissed when they were found to be abusing children.

Again and again and again and again. Case after case after case -- only this time in involves this particular pope directly.

Fifty years ago a presidential candidate had to assure voters that were he elected, the Pope would not be making policy. It's a step forward that such steps are no longer required, but for the last six months, a Catholic Senator has been almost single-handedly blocking health care reform in this country; a man who is willing to deny health care to actual children over the Church doctrine on abortion. We are not a Roman Catholic nation, whether Bart Stupak likes it or not, and his lies about abortion funding serve neither him, nor the country, nor the Church. (Well, maybe they serve the interests of the Church.)

But while the media are willing to be all Eric Massa, all the time, because it is a salacious story, they are unwilling to cover this reality of systematic beatings and sexual abuse of children in monasteries BECAUSE IT WILL OFFEND PEOPLE? On what altar are we sacrificing children to the interests of a corrupt hierarchy masquerading as the keepers of the religious flame? Does it serve Christ to protect pedophiles while children suffer a lifetime of shame and psychological damage? Are the media there to serve the Vatican or to inform? Why does the Vatican get a free pass on activities that would get anyone else thrown in prison for a long, long time?

Can we please stop this charade now that the Catholic Church has any kind of moral authority?

For that matter, can we please stop this nonsense that ANY religion has any kind of moral authority?

On the evangelical side, we have closet case and meth user Ted Haggard, embezzler Jim Bakker, hooker-fucker Jimmy Swaggart, and on and on and on. While the ex-Nazi Pope goes around the world lecturing us on the evils of abortion, his minions in Ireland have been committing child abuse for decades -- and the Church hierarchy did nothing:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions,” the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was “endemic.”

The report, by a state-appointed commission, took nine years to produce and was meant to help Ireland face and move on from one of the ugliest aspects of its recent history. But it has infuriated many victims’ groups because it does not name any of the hundreds of individuals accused of abuse and thus cannot be used as a basis for prosecutions.

[snip]

In a litany that sounds as if it comes from the records of a P.O.W. camp, the report chronicles some of the forms of physical abuse suffered in the boys’ schools:

“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods, made to sleep outside overnight, being forced into cold or excessively hot baths and showers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.”

Some of the schools operated essentially as workhouses. In one school, Goldenbridge, girls as young as 7 spent hours a day making rosaries by stringing beads onto lengths of wire. They were given quotas: 600 beads on weekdays and 900 on Sundays.

Girls were routinely sexually abused, often by more than one person at a time, the report said, in “dormitories, schools, motor vehicles, bathrooms, staff bedrooms, churches, sacristies, fields, parlors, the residences of clergy, holiday locations and while with godparents and employers.”

The Vatican had no response. But leaders of various religious orders — who often argued during the investigations that the abuse was a relic of another time, reflecting past societal standards — issued abject apologies on Wednesday, taking care to frame the problem as something that is now behind them.

Aborting babies = bad.
Abusing them after they're born = perfectly OK.

Tens of thousands of children subject to the most foul kinds of abuse -- and the response is to "face it and look forward"? What about those who were abused? What about justice for them?

When you think of the self-righteousness of this ex-Nazi head of this so-called religious hierarchy with as foul a history as we've ever seen, going around the world preaching about morality, it's difficult to imagine how anyone on the face of the earth can embrace a theology put forth by such people. But when criminals in high places commit the most vile of crimes, we're supposed to "face it and look forward." But if you get caught stealing a case of baby food from Wal-Mart, you're going to go to jail. If you get caught smoking a joint in your house that's within 1000 feet of a school, you're going to jail. But if you put on a clerical collar and you have the power of the Vatican institution behind you, you can abuse children with impunity -- and when the facts come out, well, there's nothing to be gained by prosecutions. It's all just so icky, can't we just let bygones be bygones and just move on from here?

No, we can't.

If you want to know why those of us clamoring for investigation and prosecution of Bush Administration officials are doing so, THIS is why. I've long talked about a "tipping point of evil" -- a point at which the doings of an institutional structure are just so foul that they stretch our ability to face that our species and the institutions we think of as authoritative are capable of such things. When one man abuses one child, we can wrap our minds around that and want to stone him to death. But what do we do when hundreds of people abuse tens of thousands of children under the auspices of an institution that holds itself up as having a direct conduit to God? What do we do when the President and Vice President of a country that holds itself up as a beacon of decency and freedom and opportunity to the world order the most foul torture of people captured on a battlefield even AFTER they've given up whatever information they have?

I'll tell you what we don't do. We don't say "Well, it's behind us now, let's move on." We seek justice. And we never, ever take the claims of authority of these institutions at face value ever again.

New York Magazine Came Today....

Discuss....

Elliot Spitzer...Its Hard Out Here for a Pimp...

Note to Elliot Spitzer: There is no wiggle room for you in things like Prostitution Rings!! What the fuck were you thinking? Text messages, emails?....
This is the tragic end of another career...and either he is being set-up by someone who has a grudge, or he is totally out of his mind!
Now I have heard everything.
Waiting now for the press conference, I have to say that if this isn't some major misunderstanding, then we've got a much worse problem than just evil wingnuts doing what hey decry...Jesus this is bad....
International prostitution ring...money laundering...
How exactly was he involved?

HuffPo via The Smoking Gun quoted the description of the Emperor's Club:

An international call girl ring that solicited wealthy male clients via a web site that rated its hookers on a scale of diamonds (and charged accordingly) has been busted by federal agents. The operators of the New York-based Emperors Club were named in a felony complaint unsealed today in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Dan Abrams is absolutely sputtering...
Crashing website mirror here: Emperor's Club

More about what this could possibly mean, to come.....

Update 3:15 PM EST
Spitzer's very short press conference:

…He failed to live up to the standards he set for himself and his office…sorry to his family etc…

And he needs some time now to rebuild the trust that he has wrecked up….

Alan Derschowitz on Phone to MSNBC : men think with a different organ of the body…and when men think that way they make terrible mistakes….

Dershowitz Claims that Spitzer was surely just a John, and that it has nothing to do with money laundering or tax scams...but how do we know that? I guess old Alan has his crystal ball out; or has known about this for some time and knows what the worst thing that they have on Spitzer is.

Tucker Carlson, the newly dethroned boy-prince of MSNBC, expressed his disgust at the specter of a grown man going to a prostitute! Prediction: Tucker is next getting caught in a men's room, or the like....
Tucker is gonna buy popcorn and go sit and wait for Hillary Clinton's statement on this. Heh...

If Spitzer thinks that this is only about him regaining the trust of his family...well...

Now...sources say that he is going to step down...

The shock is palpable!

Texts AND Wiretaps!...

c/p RIPCoco

NOW can we please stop pretending that these people have anything to do with virtue and morality?

Another moralizing creep bites the dust:

A Utah retailer of family-friendly tapes and DVDs - Hollywood films with the "dirty parts" cut out of them - has been arrested for trading sex with two 14-year-old girls.

Orem police say Flix Club owner Daniel Dean Thompson, 31, and Issac Lifferth, 24, were booked into the Utah County jail on charges of sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity with a 14-year-old.

CBS Station KUTV in Salt Lake City reports that the shocking discovery came when a mother found a $20 bill in her daughter’s room last week and questioned her about where the money came from.

The girl confessed that she and a friend had been paid for sexual favors by an older male.

Lifferth was additionally charged with patronizing a prostitute and was also in possession of a prescription drug medication without a prescription.

Thompson's Flix Club was one of several Utah-based video outlets that traded in edited versions of R- and PG-13-rated films, catering to clientele who wanted to watch hit movies without nudity, sex, language or graphic violence.

Such video editing operations came under the gun of Hollywood studios and the Directors Guild of America.

In a case brought by the DGA, a federal judge ruled in 2006 that editing out material (such as Kate Winslet's bare breasts in "Titanic") violated copyright laws. The decision was against a Utah company called Clean Flicks.

Thompson, who was a franchise operator for Clean Flicks, opened Flix Club last year, similarly trading in edited videos but claiming that such editing was for "educational use."