Catholic Church protects child rapists and covers up their crimes, new at 11

(via Pharyngula)

Unsurprisingly:

Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.

But think of all the poor people the church fed before raping them and beating them up, all right?

‘The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,” it said.

”The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.

”The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.”

The thing is, the CC is just like any hierarchical institution ever. It cares about power and its share in the religious market. A couple, a hundred, or even several thousand abused children are not a problem for a powerful institution, but a couple of people demanding information about its inner workings is, because it potentially undermines its authority. People demanding that a powerful insitution be held accountable are a threat to the institution’s power, too, so the institution will preemptively try to minimalize the danger the easiest way, which is, obviously, to hush everything up.

Cardinal Connell was credited for instigating two secret canon law trials which took place over the 30-year period and led to two priests being defrocked.

THE CC DID ALL IN ITS POWER TO OH WAIT-

The taking out of insurance was proving knowledge of child sex abuse as a major cost to the Archdiocese and is inconsistent with the view that archdiocesan officials were still ‘on a learning curve’ at a much later date, or were lacking in an appreciation of the phenomenon of clerical child sex abuse,” it said.

Of course they would know, and of course they wouldn’t react. They were protecting the institution. There were also despicable human beings and cowards, bravely facing very little to no difficulties in their intrepid quest to upheld the status quo.

In other words, fuck you, CC.

It would seem…

…that everybody is racist on the internets today, so I’m looking at wombats.

Wombats!

Oh, everything’s better with wombats.

(If only they would grow claws and teeth and eat Hollywood, the dumb Heroes guy, and basically all the people I’m too lazy to mention? They could also transform into giant robots, sort of like Kim Dzong Il)

I mean, wombats! Adorable!

 

Linkspam time!

1. Via a Camels with Hammers commenter:

John’s Scalzi’s trip to the Creation Pseumuseum + photos. The post includes delightful scatological imagery, such as this:

The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.

Yes, please. I might have to pick up his books one day, after all.

Also, creationist commenters and their typically overblown dramatics:

274. John Scalzi on 13 Nov 2007 at 9:43 pm
Joe:

“Re: the Ark and Dinosaurs isn’t big a deal when you realize that the DInosaurs didn’t have to be full grown to be on the Ark.”

I’m sorry, I’m getting the giggles again, here.

275. Joe on 13 Nov 2007 at 9:54 pm
John, to think, my mom told me I wasn’t funny. I guess she was wrong. Put a gun to my head and tell me to renounced Christianity or you’d shoot me…Pull the trigger because I am not doing that. It isn’t because I am stubborn..trust me, I don’t like being shot at, it’s because I fear God, not man.

Heh heh. The evil Scalzi, shooting poor persecuted creationists in the head again. Which makes a little sense, after all, since it’s not like they use them all that much anyway. I bet he also had Christian-baby-porridge for breakfast!

(Commenter number 300 also claims that Scalzi is so mean, because he’s just like Ann Coulter, heh heh. Heh heh!)

(A few comments down, Joe also proudly announces that he 1) never met Pascal, 2) gambling’s not for him. I’d think TROLL TROLL TROLL, only Poe’s law)

Also, I’d like to maybe repeatedly emphasise that there are 101 photos. With captions. Go, now!

2. A truly bizarre article about the oppression of women in fundamentalist regimes. On the one hand, it raises several important points, on the other:

The use of women’s naked bodies to market commercial products in the West is merely another application of the idea that women are commodities. Anyone who visits the redlight district in Amsterdam can see for himself how wretched prostitutes, completely naked, are lined up behind glass windows so that passers-by can inspect their charms before agreeing on the price. Isn’t that a modern-day slave market, where women’s bodies are on sale to anyone willing to pay?

Yeah, right. Because being oppressed by men with political and religious power is just like deciding to be a sex-worker.

I’m not saying everything is legal and perfect in the blessed land of socialism and sexual permissiveness, and that there’s no human trafficking and that sort of stuff. It’s just that apples and oranges, dude.

What’s also quite disturbing is how women/feminists/activists who are supposedly against the sex industry and pornography for the sake of the women always end up blaming the sex-workers anyway, and not maybe suggesting the logical solution, which would be “so let’s convince people that paying for sex is uncool or something“. Because, seriously, demand and supply, dudes!

3. My Randroid special this week: how the Market (blessed be His name) works when nobody’s looking.

4. Twitter novel. The Japanese, of course, have been there first.

5. WTF is wrong with this dictionary? It should come with trigger warnings D:

6. Concordat Watch‘s got stuff on the creepiest of concordats out there. Like the one in Dominican Republic:

Back in 1954 the dictator, Trujillo, concluded a concordat with the Vatican which is still in force. On 11 July 2006 representatives of the Dominican Republic’s more than 1,600 Protestant churches filed an appeal against this concordat with the Dominican Supreme Court (SCJ). They claimed that it is unconstitutional. However, over two years later on 22 October 2008 the Supreme Court upheld the concordat. In its ruling it states that although the State assumes the obligation to teach the Catholic religion and moral education in elementary and secondary public schools, in no way prohibits that education by another religion in their establishments, nor has evidence been contributed that demonstrates that this has been prevented by virtue of what is agreed to in the Concordat.

No to mention the outrageous one in Cote d’Ivoire.

7. I’m reading Merodach–Baladan‘s kudurru! Posts about Assyrian/Biblical propaganda coming soon, yay!

8. ALSO, I CAN HAS A LEXICAL LIST ZOMD. (They look like that, but mine is smaller and much harder on the eyes. Ow!)

Don’t discriminate against the little grey persons, says Bob the little grey person

Guys, I must admit I’m ashamed of myself. When I first saw this picture:

Visual aid 1: the ad in question

I admit I was a little irritated. What’s wrong with those people, I thought to myself, do they really believe this is what the ideal of female beauty looks like? With  her head bigger than her torso? With grotesque stick-like hands and legs, vaguely reminiscent of the Arachnida class?

But then, Bob the Little Grey Person from the Campaign for Equal Rights for Little Grey Persons Intgl, sent me a passionate e-mail:

How can you say all those hateful things about a beautiful Little Grey Person female? Do you not see how speciecist that is? Don’t you realise how that makes us feel? We are sentient beings too, and, in fact, our culture considers big, (adorable) heads, and so-called “stick-like” hands and legs highly erotic.

Why are you so dismissive of paradigms of beauty different from the one you’re most accustomed to? Nowadays, with humanity (and by the way, do you even realise how alienating it is for us, Little Grey People, to always be excluded from the humanity‘s progress and accomplishments?) striving to be more and more accepting of plus-sized models, models with disabilities, and even dead models, one can’t help but wonder what the source of the deep-rooted prejudice and systematic discrimination against Little Grey Person models, and Little Grey Persons in general, might be.

Wow. I must say, this blew me right out of my seat. I never realised the extent of prejudice against Little Grey Person models, Bob. I’m terribly sorry for what I said, and I urge my readers to be as ashamed as I am.

Little Grey Person models are just as beautiful as other models are, and our human standards should not be applied to Little Grey Person models. I’m sorry I was such a speciecist arsehole :(

Important visual aid 2: Bob the Little Grey person and his human ally (note the uncanny resemblance to the female of the species)

Meanwhile, in China… Linkspam!

1. The things happening to LGBT people in Iraq are horrifying. I hope at least they seek asylum in some western countries easily (if they manage to escape, that is) (via Camels with Hammers):

On a bright afternoon in late March, an 18-year-old named Fadi stood in a friend’s clothing store in Baghdad checking out the new merchandise. A worker in a neighboring store walked into the boutique with a newspaper in his hand and shared a story he had just read. It was about “sexual deviants,” he said. Gay men’s rectums had been glued shut, and they had been force-fed laxatives and water until their insides exploded. They had been found dead on the street.

And this is just the first paragraph.

All of the men who had escaped Iraq were still very fragile. The evening after I arrived, I met a slim man in his late twenties named Mukhaled. A driver for a Baghdad delivery company, Mukhaled had been in only one relationship in his life, with a man named Ali whom he met in high school. Ali was a year younger than Mukhaled. They lived in the same neighborhood and, as far as anyone knew, were just friends.

One day in April, armed men burst into Ali’s house and shot him dead. There were incriminating photographs of Mukhaled and Ali in Ali’s bedroom, and other personal information that could lead the death squads to Mukhaled. For the next two and a half months, Mukhaled slept at the homes of different friends, and sometimes in a park. He lost twenty pounds. His black hair became streaked with gray. He worried that people were following him and planning to kill him. And then one day a woman named Rasha called him. She said she had been given his name and number by a gay friend of his. She said she was from New York, but was phoning him from a safe city inside Iraq, and asked if he needed any help. Mukhaled left Baghdad for the safe city inside Iraq on July 3, and moved to the second refuge city shortly after that.

There are no words.

2. Something of which I have been completely unaware is that in a developed and civilised western country like the Australia* 90% of women with intellectual disabilities were abused at some point in their lives, and many of them by their care-givers.

Women with disabilities, unlike their non-disabled counterparts, are much more likely to be the victims of other crimes of violence, such as assaults and theft. In South Australia, Wilson and Brewer (1992) found that women with an intellectual disability were more than 10 times as likely to be assaulted as other women.

Other statistics indicate that 90% of women with intellectual disabilities have been sexually abused. 68% of women with an intellectual disability will be subjected to sexual abuse before they reach 18 (Frohmader, 2002).

There is a dearth of research in Australia about the relationship between gender, violence and disability. Research into the extent of violence against women with disabilities in Australia is also limited by the lack of data collected on disability by law enforcement agencies and violence support services (Cattalini, 1993; Sobsey and Doe, 1991). Traditionally, much of the literature on violence against women with disabilities has tended to focus particularly on sexual abuse and mainly in relation to people with intellectual disabilities (McCarthy, 1996; Sobsey and Doe, 1991).

Overseas studies have found that women with disabilities, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or class are assaulted, raped and abused at a rate of at least two times greater than non-disabled women (Sobsey, 1988, 1994; Cusitar,1994; Stimpson and Best,1991; DAWN 1988).

Sobsey (1988) suggests that 83% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. A qualitative study by Nosek, found approximately one third of women with physical disability had experienced sexual abuse at some stage in their life (Nosek, 1996). Similarly, in Doucette’s study of Canadian women with disabilities, 40% experienced abuse and 12% had been raped (Nosek, 1996).

There are relatively few studies into the incidence of physical violence and rates vary widely. A study for the Canadian Ministry of Community and Social Services in Toronto found 33% of women with disabilities were assaulted mostly by their husbands compared with 22% of non-disabled women (Nosek, 1996). Feuestein estimates that upward of 85% of women with disabilities are victims of domestic violence in comparison with 25% to 50 % of the general population (cited in Waxman, 1991).

This is, incidentally, why humans should have been replaced by cockraoches a long time ago.

Also, this pdf, too.

Also, USA.

3. When you’re naive and young you might think to yourself that there’s no way a commercial for raising breast cancer awareness could ever be so very very very wrong you’ll want to pull your hair out when you see it.

But it can!

You see, because women’s tits are only here for other people’s entertainment.

Where by “people”, I mean “men”, of course.

(Also, every woman enjoys having her tits ogled. It means she’s appreciated!** And we, wimminz, the shallow and vain creatures that we are, cannot possibly live without that sort of validation***)

Article, vid:

4. The Catholic Church proudly announces that the abuse and rapes of children perpetrated by Catholic priests were all because of the ghey. You see, there were no paedophiles in the CC! Also,

He said: “Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90 per cent belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

Tomasi added that it would be “more correct” to refer to ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males, than paedophilia.

Um. Personally, I always find people who go on prattling about how it’s oh-so important to keep paedophilia and ephebophilia apart a bit skeevy. It’s almost as if they were suggesting that ephebophilia is like the lesser evil or something.

That or too much Plato.

Also: Yay, CC, we know you hate us already. Shut up, you’re boring.

He added that “available research” showed that only 1.5 to five per cent of Catholic clergy had been implicated in cases of child sex abuse.

Hahahaha. YES PLEASE SHOW US YOUR LEARNINGS RESEARCH!

5. Crazy things happen when cheerleaders are no longer allowed to use Bible quotes o.O (via Camels with Hammers again). Watch the vid! It’s, like, at first it seemed to me to be a 1) joke, 2)Confessions of a Hardened Criminal or something, but the guys are actually proud of themselves. Wow.

Um, wow. Jut wow.

6. The pope weighs in again, this time on materialism. IN AFRICA.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA!

Dude, when you pee on a golden see it’s maybe a tad hypocritical to criticise for materialism people whose HDI so low almost their entire continent is in red red red on this cute little map? But no.

Food is evil, and so are the condoms.

* This was completely unironic.

** I’d like the person who thought of the commercial to choke on their own dick, or a giant dildo.

*** *Froths at the mouth*

I just wanted to express my wholehearted approval for this post:

Łechtaczka na muszce, czyli jak to z Romusiem było (Sporothrix FTW)
Run it through Google Translate or whatever. That post proves that all sanity has not been lost in the Land of Fail.
By which I mean, Poland, of course.

Meanwhile, Krzysztof Zanussi, a pro-Catholic hack director of really crappy movies, for which he somehow keeps getting awards and accolades, proudly proclaims that Samantha Geimer had it coming anyway, what with her being an underage prostitute, and therefore, it was all her fault.
Do you need moar orders, Zanussi? Or another consult for the Pontifical Council for Culture, would it be enough for you to revert to moderate-but-nevertheless sanity, again? I mean, it MUST help when you can ALMOST TOUCH THE POPE*?

Ha, not so.

(Zanussi also said that “there’s nothing more pleasant for the gawking plebes than when someone is knocked off their pedestal”. For real. Watch the vid. HAHAHA GUYS WE PLEBEEES. Why thank you, Mr Zanussi — or should I say, you fuckwad — that’s much more plebeian, right? I’ve never been prouder of my working class heritage, by the way.)

The French meanwhile join my compatriots in their race for the golden douche fail with their petition in support of Polanski here. While that sort of tribal mentality no longer surprises me, it did surprise me to see Salman Rushdie‘s name there. Salman Rushdie!

That hurt.

I mean, I loved loved loved Midnight’s Children so much it hurt, and although his later books were preachy and unreadable,  Salman Rushdie was someone you respected. Well, apparently, not anymore.

At least, I won’t.

Also, not Wong Kar Wai too. NOOOOOOO!

However, Luc Besson remains sane, and the Polish Prime Minister is unenthused about making official protests about freedom for, basically, a child-rapist. Polish sexologist disses Polanski on behalf of the whole profession, and Polish intertubes is not amused by Polanski’s rapey antics. There’s a sane commentary in the Washington Post, of all places, and Grauniad saves Europe’s face by being reasonable, too. German intertubes is also not amused, and mostly doesn’t see where the problem is, because, Polanski confessed, and therefore, hullo jail time! The article in the Spiegel is much less involved, but totally weirdness-free, and has some really faily quotes from various French officials. I’m only reading Spiegel from now on.

Previous Polanski fail here and here.

*This will only make sense if you know that Zanussi is sort of a professional Moral Authority in Poland, constantly working himself up into a permanent moral outrage.

Mostly about abortion and contraception. BUT IT’S A-OK if you hurt children that are bigger than sperm, TOTES OK!

The fail must go on!

Before we start, let me present you with a clear timeline of events:

25-09-2009: The Polish parliament votes 400:1 FOR the introduction of chemical castration for pedophiles (also making the production of any materials with communist and fascist symbols or emblems illegal and punishable with up to 2 years of prison, which is censorship, but a wholly different matter).

28-09-2009: The Polish minister of foreign affairs says: I think that anybody who admires his (Polanski’s) movies as much as I do, will agree with me that mercy can always be shown in case of sin (the sentence is so clumsy, ’cause he used a contamination of two separate Polish idioms, and I didn’t quite know what to do with that).

Cut for mentions of child abuse.

OK, no (shame on you, Europe)

OK, I must confess I’m flummoxed.

So, they arrested Roman Polanski in Switzerland. This is because in 1977 he raped a 13-year old girl in the US, and then fled to France having previously plead guilty.

Oops.

And by the way, why are media consequently writing “had sex with a 13-year old” instead of “raped her”? Because, this is how it happened:

Geimer later agreed to a second session, which took place on March 10, 1977 at the Mulholland areaJack Nicholson in Los Angeles. “We did photos with me drinking champagne,” Geimer says. “Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there.” She recalled in a 2003 interview that she began to feel uncomfortable after he asked her to lie down on a bed, and how she attempted to resist. “I said, ‘No, no. I don’t want to go in there. No, I don’t want to do this. No!”, and then I didn’t know what else to do,” she stated.

So, dudes, if you’re one of the local creeps who firmly push forward the idea of creepy old men having unrestrained access to 13-year-olds for sexual purposes, if only they look old enough? Well, even you can’t seriously defend Polanski, because he bloody fucking had a unconsensual sexual intercourse with a kid.

As in, raped her.

So, why are people in Europe (shame on you) reacting like this is completely incomprehensible to me:

“I think this is awful and totally unjust,” French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand told reporters.

“Just as there is an America which is generous and which we like, so there is an America which is frightening – and that is the America which has just revealed its face,” he said. (Source)

WHY? WHAT? IS HE INSANE? Unjust how? The only person to blame for Polanski’s troubles is… Yes! Polanski! Who raped a 13-year-old first, and then fled the country that wanted to prosecute him to avoid taking any responsibility for his actions.  Unfathomable, right?

Or are we too used to blaming everything on America around here? For real.

Robert Harris, a British novelist who said he had been working with Polanski for much of the past three years writing two screenplays, expressed outrage over the arrest.

“I am shocked that any man of 76, whether distinguished or not, should have been treated in such a fashion,” he said in a statement, adding that Polanski had often visited Switzerland and even had a house in the resort of Gstaad.

“It is hard not to believe that this heavy-handed action must be in some way politically motivated,” he said. (Same source)

Man of 76? How about a girl of 13? For real, have you no shame at all? Not to mention, politically motivated? You’ve gotta be kidding me.

His ties with Poland are still strong and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said he might appeal directly to the United States over the case.

“I am considering approaching the American authorities over the possibility of the US President proclaiming an act of clemency which would settle the matter once and for all,” Mr Sikorski was quoted as saying by the PAP news agency. (same source)

Oh ho ho. I’d say something funny, except I did expect nothing less, and by “nothing less” I really mean “nothing less batshit” from our delusional right-wing crazy minister of craziness foreign affairs. Shine on, Sikorski, shine on!

Poland’s filmmakers association has also risen to Polanski’s defence.

“We do not understand why the Swiss invited Polanski to a film festival, where he was to have received a life’s achievement award, and then arrested him,” said association president Jacek Bromski.

“We regard that as a scandalous situation and an example of incomprehensible overzealousness.”(same source)

Oh, right. Compare: Polanski’s overzealousness to have sex with a woman before she was actually a woman, and before she agreed.

How droll.

In short: Polanski’s made some awesome movies, but he also raped a kid and was a complete douche about it. He’s no martyr. Let’s save the martyr spot for some real martyr deserving of the martyr spot who will troll in shortly, as some country or other will decide to start an ethnic cleansing or something, and someone brave will try to stop them. Seriously, guys, NO.

Two men (one asshat), some Marxists, one saved kitten, and a whole lot of schadenfreude

(I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!)

Nothing feels better than having your literary dislikes validated.

As it happens, I’ve hated John Irving and his books for at least a decade. I hated every word of Garp (blargh), when I started reading it being a fifteen-year-old almost-but-not-quite nice person. I still have no idea how and why, why on Earth did I finish it at all. Suffice it to say, there was pain, and suffering, and fail fail fail fail fail fail, and it might have made me hate USian literature for a couple of years*.

A lot of things happened  in the intervening decade.

I learned like six languages or so.

I shaved my hair, and it was fun, and all my professors were afraid of me until it grew back.

(I still regret that it had to grow back)

I realised I was gay**.

Poland became a member of the EU.

I realised I will always vote for the most leftist party that has any chances of actually getting into the parliament.

There was a war in Afghanistan, and another one in Iraq.

However, during all those years, I never wavered in my passionate hatred for John Irving and his crappy shitty piss-poor excuses for books. I never forgot about my disdain for all things John-Irvingish.

ONLY TO BE FINALLY VALIDATED WHEN JI TURNED OUT TO BE A COMPLETE ASSHAT:

“My response is as brutally upper class as I can make it,” he (John Irving) has said, adding later that Vermont “has a high degree of knee-jerk presumptions against the rich” and against people “who weren’t born here. There’s a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that’s rich people.”

LOL PLZ SAY IT AIN’T SO.  It must be so terribly, terribly hard being rich, what with all those money causing you migraines whenever you don’t know how to spend it, which happens frequently, especially since they started adding all those security features to the bills, and they don’t burn quite as prettily as they used to, so you can’t well be making cigars out of them anymore.

I weep with you, brother, and I weep for you.

And all that because a US state decides to divide its taxes  more efficiently, so that children from poorer towns have an equal access to education. How terrible! How outrageous! How Marxist!

I’m seriously not making this up.

(Also, Marxists. Bwahaha. IF ONLY!)

In the other corner, we’ve got Eddie Izzard who ran around the UK to raise money for charity. He even saved a kitten.

Two conclusions follow:

1. Eddie Izzard > John Irving srsly

2. Eddie Izzard needs to have a superhero comic written about him saving kittens, with lots of kittens in dangerous life-threatening situations, and Eddie Izzard pulling death-defying stunts to get them off all those trees at last.

KITTENS OMD CUUUTE *flails*

* Not really. Do we need a rec post? I could do one! I’m easy!

** As far as realisations go, this one wasn’t very exciting. It mostly went like “LOL TITS YAY”. Then I trolled off to read something, most likely.

I don’t even remember anymore. That’s how unexciting it was.

I’d want to say that I realised that I was an atheist, too, but (un)fortunately, that had happened much earlier than ten years ago.

A good week for atheism!

1. Philip Pullum is writing a book, and Vatican is throwing a hissy fit already. Can’t wait to read the book!

Can’t wait to see more hissy fits! Guys, you’re hilarious.

2. Over in the US, poor oppressed theists are throwing hissy fits, too:

I cringed. I was disgusted at the same time.

I said how dare you take the scriptures and twist it to fit your needs.

Ahahahahaha. My irony-meter needs to be replaced like now. Why the outrage? Somebody made billboards quoting the Bible, you see. More importantly, the outrageously disgusting parts that don’t tell you to go get the queers:

David loved Jonathan more than women (II Samuel 1:26)

LOL THE EBOL MANIPULATION.

3. Transphobic shenanigans in Malaysia. The Imams, or whatever, should stop being so perversely interested in other people’s fashion choices and sex lives, and maybe, start a crusade against woo or something.

I’d watch that.

4. In Mali, a pro-women’s rights law is blocked by religious wackos. Meanwhile, in Kenya a gunman attacks an exclusively female village. The police refuse to do anything, because it a “domestic issue”. FAIL.

5. Catholic priests who abuse and rape children are courageous for anonymously coming out with their stories when they know nobody will punish them, but civil unions for the gayz are still evil, says the Catholic church (news at 11).

6. I must be a very sad person, because I actually want to see that trainwreck. C’mon, Sharia-complaint super heroes? Instant hilarity.