Bill Donohue Says "Relax, It's Just Sex."
Tim Cavanaugh | November 12, 2004, 3:59pm
Just when I think I'm over Catholic League president William Donohue, he wins me back. Today's Donohue nugget:
"Why are so many in the entertainment industry angry with the less than one percent of priests today who have been accused of sexual molestation—almost all of whom are homosexuals, not pedophiles—when their favorite sexologist is a sado-masochistic, child-abusing homosexual? Why are the same people so enamored of a film that shows a ten-year old boy stripping naked so he can join an adult woman in a tub? The former reference is to the movie, 'Kinsey'; the latter, 'Birth.'"
Hey Bill, I'll take a crack at that one: Because the projects Cardinal Law greenlighted for John Geoghan and Paul Shanley involved actual underaged American citizens out here in "meatspace." The two movies are simulations that won't be seen by anybody who doesn't want to see them (and in both cases, even if underaged citizens want to see them, they must be accompanied by a parent or guardian). Relax, it's just a movie!
Also, pay attention to the papers for God's sake: Birth got panned by the anti-Kidmanites in the liberal media.
Why I'll always love Bill Donohue.
raymond | November 14, 2004, 4:38am | #
Most of the incidents were not "pedophilia" - from what I've read in the news. Seminarians, for example, who had sex with priests are not victims of pedophiles. They may be victims of abuse of power, but that's a different matter entirely.
What burns me is the widespread effort by church leadership that kept covering up the problem to the extent that they moved known repeat offenders into new parishes, providing them a fresh crop of victims.
The Church is all about sin and forgiveness. Forgiveness of sin is why Christ came.
60. Q. Did God abandon man after he fell into sin?
A. God did not abandon man after he fell into sin, but promised him a Redeemer, who was to satisfy for man's sin and reopen to him the gates of heaven.
61. Q. Who is the Redeemer?
A. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the Redeemer of mankind.
102. Q. Which are the chief effects of the Redemption?
A. The chief effects of the Redemption are two: The satisfaction of God's justice by Christ's sufferings and death, and the gaining of grace for men. (Baltimore Catechism)
In the Church, God forgives sin through (usually) His ministers - who are bound by the "secret of the confessional". / Once a sin is forgiven, it's forgiven.
Extra-marital sex is - for all sorts of reasons - "sinful".
Any sinful act - criminal or not - can be forgiven. Man is capable, with God's grace, of being saved. "Go, and sin no more."
...the widespread effort by church leadership...
I don't know that that's a fair formulation of the situation. It seems to me that individual bishops dealing with individual priests tried to do "the right thing"... individually. Did the "church leaders" in the news actually do the right thing? Well, obviously many of them blew it. But that doesn't mean there was some sort of conspiracy.
...church leadership that kept covering up the problem...
Avoiding scandal was one reason for the "cover-up", I should imagine. Keeping the nose of the state out of Church affairs was probably another. The manpower shortage was a third. (Misplaced) compassion, a fourth.
Another consideration is the believability of the accusation. Not all accusations are founded in fact. Not all the people accused of sorcery by the innocent children of Salem were actual witches.
...providing them a fresh crop of victims.
Inadvertently, I'm sure.
Those are the folks that most deserve to rot in prison.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Some of them may deserve to lose their administrative posts because of their ineptitude, but prison? Surely not.
Torquemada | November 14, 2004, 8:15pm | #
See some statements by John Bancroft, Director of the Kinsey Institute, at
http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/publicstatements.html
These statements, by one of Kinsey's own supporters and the head of his Institute, implicate Kinsey in (a) scientific fraud, and (b) a cover-up of pedophilia that makes the Roman Catholic cover-up look like (pardon the phrase) child's play. Some excerpts:
"I decided to check on the sources of this information [in the first Kinsey Report] and found that, without any doubt, all of the information reported in Tables 31-34 came from the carefully documented records of one man. From 1917 until the time that Kinsey interviewed him in the mid-1940s, this man had kept notes on a vast array of sexual experiences, involving not only children but adults of both sexes.
"Kinsey was clearly impressed by the systematic way he kept his records, and regarded them as of considerable scientific interest. Clearly, his description in the book of the source of this data was misleading, in that he implied that it had come from several men rather than one, although it is likely that information elsewhere in this chapter, on the descriptions of different types of orgasm, was obtained in part from some of these other nine men.
"I do not know why Kinsey was unclear on this point; it was obviously not to conceal the origin of the information from criminal sexual involvement with children, because that was already quite clear. Maybe it was to conceal the single source, which otherwise might have attracted attention to this one man with possible demands for his identification (demands which have now occurred even though he is long dead). It would be typical of Kinsey to be more concerned about protecting the anonymity of his research subjects (and convincing the reader of the scientific value of the information) than protecting himself from the allegations that eventually followed."
TWC | November 15, 2004, 12:15pm | #
As Jesse said, people who have sex with teenagers are not, by definition, pedophiles. They might need a serious beating but unlike those who defile little kids, it isn't necessary to leave their mutilated bodies in the desert for the vultures and coyotes.
Granted, teens may sometimes be easily manipulated, particularly when some trusted priest is invoking God while performing the Sacrament of the White Owl. OTOH, every teen knows that something just ain't quite right when the priest sticks his hand down your pants. After the second or third time it happens there has to be some degree of meaningful consent that simply doesn't cognitively exist when the priest does the same thing to a child of six or eight.
Tim's right about the choices viewers make about movies but Donahue is right as well, Hollywood, taken as a whole, leans toward raging hypocrisy. Given that entertainers often have big mouths (in Julia Robert's case that would be literally and figuratively) it is important for others to mention the hypocrisy from time to time.
Too bad that Donahue had to point that out from his glass basement while showering but I haven't quite gotten past the free ride that Mahoney and the rest of the CatLickers gave to that 1% of priests who took the blood of Christ and promised to do right in this world.
But then again, in practice, Catholics can do pretty much whatever they want so long as they fess up every Saturday.
Suck a kids dick? Hey, I'm just a sinner and God will forgive me come Saturday night. Do it again next week? Click on Auto Repeat....
And you guys think fundies are sickos?
