Posts Tagged ‘culture wars’

Well here is some Chruch news that didn’t make the national media

Posted: January 6, 2011 by datechguy in catholic
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But you can read about it here:

In a stunning ten-page declaration recently submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, veteran attorney Donald H. Steier stated that his investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have uncovered vast fraud and that his probes have revealed that many accusations are completely false.

Counselor Steier has played a role in over one hundred investigations involving Catholic clergy in Los Angeles.In his missive Mr. Steier relayed, “One retired F.B.I. agent who worked with me to investigate many claims in the Clergy Cases told me, in his opinion, about ONE-HALF of the claims made in the Clergy Cases were either entirely false or so greatly exaggerated that the truth would not have supported a prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse” (capital letters are his).

Mr. Steier also added, “In several cases my investigation has provided objective information that could not be reconciled with the truthfulness of the subjective allegations. In other words, in many cases objective facts showed that accusations were false.”

I would have thought something like this might have gotten a headline for two but nope the first time I hear about it is when I’m checking out this story at Lisa Graas on a different subject (Andrew Sullivan and excommunication a good read btw), where I found this tidbit from October that I missed as well:

…in a report titled “Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth” released earlier this year, a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found an astonishing 10.3 percent of more than 26,000 youth held in state-operated and other large juvenile facilities complained of a “sexual incident” involving facility staff in the previous 12 months.

A few years ago, The Associated Press examined sexual abuse of students by public school teachers. Although reporters couldn’t quantify total complaints, they did discover “more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.” Perhaps more disturbing, “The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse . . . . In case after case the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed,” while “deals and lack of information-sharing allow abusive teachers to jump state lines, even when one school does put a stop to the abuse.”

In other words, school districts were engaging in the same sort of institutional treatment of offenders that characterized a number of Catholic dioceses in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, and which did so much to damage the church’s reputation.

Well that must be nothing compared to what’s going on in the church today right?

In 2009, by contrast, a total of only six “credible” allegations were lodged against U.S. Catholic priests or deacons for sexual abuse of a minor occurring that year, according to statistics gathered by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s in a church with more than 41,000 priests and 17,000 deacons. Assuming the clergy will never be staffed entirely by saints — what profession is? — this figure may be about as low as it is likely to go for such a large organization.

that works out to about .58 per 1,000 clergy.

And Lisa has even more interesting numbers in a post from last month.

The newspaper that most attacks the Catholic Church on this issue is the New York Times. According to Laurie Goodstein, “Decades of Damage; Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese,” New York Times, January 12, 2003, Section 1, p. 1., based on their survey, 1.8 percent of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 have been accused of child sexual abuse. The Associated Press found that approximately two-thirds of 1 percent of priests have charges pending against them.

Let’s compare this to Protestant ministers.

According to Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 50 and 81, between .2 and 1.7 percent of priests are pedophiles. Among the Protestant clergy, the number is between 2 and 3 percent.

How about Jewish Rabbis?

According to the Awareness Center, the Jewish community is by no means exempt.

How about Public School Teachers?

According to Daniel Wishnietsky, “Reported and Unreported Teacher-Student Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Ed Research, Vol. 3, 1991, pp. 164-69, in New York City alone, at least one child is sexually abused by a school employee every day.

This will never make the national news because as the leading opponent of both Gay Marriage and Abortion in the nation (along with opposing the hook-up culture etc etc etc) the Church is and remains the leading opponent of liberalism embraced by the MSM.

The Ultimate in counter programing

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in blogs, culture, media, oddities
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While the rest of us on the right pick apart Colman McCarthy over this Washington Post column Robert Stacy McCain decides in a brilliant bit of counter programing to tackle the issue that has sadly been ignored, namely the best tactics to ahem; stimulate the economy of the movie industry:

The question of what it takes nowadays to get people to go to the multiplex and pay $9 to see a movie they can catch a few months later on HBO or Netflix is a perplexing question for Hollywood. But when a chick says to her boyfriend, “Hey, you want to go see a ballet movie?” it’s kinda helpful if she can follow that up with, “You know, the one with the Natalie Portman lesbian scene.”

He then follows up 20 paragraphs on the cultural history of the “lesbian scene” in print and film including this gem:

It would be a worthwhile project for some “cultural studies” grad student to go through the 1971-79 Penthouse archives and count how many girl-on-girl pictorials they published. And you could probably get a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do that research.

The irony of course being that you likely could get a grant from the NEH for such research and this is precisely the type of scholarship that our Mr. McCarthy would prefer our kids in college study as opposed to ROTC and the like.

This is usually the hit starved season for bloggers but Stacy knows that the phrase “natalie portman lesbian scene” will generate hits for years to come in search engines not yet invented to shore up his slow days. Why comment on the news of the day when you can make a long-term investment that will guarantee you hits and page views forever?

Update: Nothing like an Instalanche to start the new year, between the 63 (so far) at my party and this it’s quite a start. Don’t forget to tune into WCRN AM 830 tonight at 9:30 for DaTechGuy on DaRadio with DaScienceGuy and Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom. And remember two weeks from tonight Glenn will be my guest on the show (Jan 15 9 p.m. ) Mark that on the calendar! Listen live here. And if you are a business or a blogger looking for hits, you can’t do better than that for a draw.

And Europe’s post Christian era continues: “Let’s repeal Incest laws”

Posted: December 15, 2010 by datechguy in oddities
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48 hours ago I commented on a post at the Volokh conspiracy on incest saying this:

The fact that a respected lawyer is actually making the case tells me this is already coming down the pike.

And 48 hours later here comes the news from Europe:

The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law decriminalising sex between consenting family members which must now be considered by the government.

There have been only three cases of incest since 1984.

Switzerland, which recently held a referendum passing a draconian law that will boot out foreigners convicted of committing the smallest of crimes, insists that children within families will continue to be protected by laws governing abuse and paedophilia.

If you are surprised by this you just haven’t been paying attention.

Professor Volokh takes on the “ick factor”

Posted: December 13, 2010 by datechguy in culture, the courts
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Way back in the early days of the Blog I talked about Gay Marriage and Richard Cohen’s self=righteous hit piece:

Personally on a religious level I can’t support gay marriage but this is not a valid argument for a non-religious person. On a non-religious level it seems to me you can not rationally say that gay marriage is ok and should be legal without also allowing either polygamy and incest between consenting adults. Both have a longer and more accepted cultural history worldwide.

And PLEASE don’t give me the “ick” factor argument about these other things being accepted. Ick is just an argument about culture. It is the same argument that one would have heard concerning gay marriage less that 20 years ago. It is particularly galling when gay people are subject to state sponsored murder in places like Iran and ick is invoked beside Islam.

Via Glenn we have Eugene Volokh being a lawyer with some interesting items in the news has expanded on this bigtime:

(1) Should it be illegal, and, if so, exactly why? Is it just because it’s immoral? Because legalizing incest would, by making a future sexual relationship more speakable and legitimate, potentially affect the family relationship even while the child is underage (the view to which I tentatively incline)? Because it involves a heightened risk of birth defects (a view I’m skeptical about, given that we don’t criminalize sex by carriers of genes that make serious hereditary disease much more likely than incest does)?

(2) Given Lawrence v. Texas — and similar pre–Lawrence decisions in several states, applying their state constitutions — what exactly is the basis for outlawing incest? Is it that bans on gay sex are irrational but bans on adult incest are rational, and rationality is all that’s required for regulations of adult sex? Is it that bans on gay sex don’t pass strict scrutiny (or some such demanding test) but bans on adult incest do? Is it that Lawrence rested on the fact that bans on gay sex largely foreclose all personally meaningful sexual relationships for those who are purely homosexual in orientation, whereas incest bans only foreclose a few possible sexual partners?

Go and read his whole point but let me say that a Judge named Antonin Gregory Scalia saw this coming a mile away as did an awful lot of us. When I made the argument saying that you can’t logically ban polygamy while allowing gay marriage in a discussion on Center of Mass podcast this year my host insisted that it was totally different.

I’ve talked about the ick factor in the past. And let me quote myself one more time:

This is a republic. If the people who support gay marriage can move enough of the public in the individual states or on a national level to support it in an actual vote then the more power to them. That is how a republic works. With the media’s help they are well on their way to doing so, but let the people vote for it and if you win, you win. If your argument holds water it should be capable of doing so and you should be able to make that argument stick.

Take out the word gay marriage and enter anything you want instead and the argument holds. The fact that a respected lawyer is actually making the case tells me this is already coming down the pike. And let me leave you with some John Nolte in terms of changing the culture with the help of the media:

And this is how cinematic propaganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s motivations are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thoughtful people to start second guessing themselves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held captive by the powerful sound and fury of the moving picture. First we’re led to identify and sympathize with a particular character, then that character does something designed to challenge our belief structure

None of this is a bug. It’s a feature.

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