Pick Your Scandals
By Mitch Berg
Sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is the flavor of the month.
Sexual abuse of children in public schools is SQUIRREL!
Other sources confirm this problem is big—“far more common” than you want to believe. Further, just like the Catholic problem, public schools “continue to conceal the actions of dangerous educators in ways that allow them to stay in the classroom.”
Further, one study says that between 1 and 5 percent of teachers sexually harass or abuse students. Given that there are 3.2 million school teachers, those numbers represent between 32,000 and 160,000 predators in the schools.
Despite this startling problem being laid before the U.S. Department of Education in a 2004 study entitled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of the Literature,” it was related to me that there are no updated stats or studies. Despite the overwhelming indications, there have been no national or even statewide studies of student experiences of educator sexual misconduct. Fifteen years have gone by since this study!
The difference, of course, is that Big Left detests all that Catholicism stands (or at least stood) for, while teachers are Big Left’s shock troops.
August 27th, 2018 at 7:10 am
RE: “the Catholic problem”
If any other organization had covered up so many crimes it would have been dissolved long ago.
August 27th, 2018 at 8:24 am
The people who matter on the Left send their kids to private school.
August 27th, 2018 at 8:42 am
“If any other organization had covered up so many crimes it would have been dissolved long ago.”
You mean like the Democrat Party? Or maybe you mean Democratic Socialists?
August 27th, 2018 at 8:43 am
Fine
“If any other organization had covered up so many crimes it would have been dissolved long ago.”
You mean like the Democrat Party? Or maybe you mean Democratic Sociali$ts?
August 27th, 2018 at 10:19 am
MacArthur W, Crimes? On the left? What could you possibly mean by that?
Besides, if the crimes are well-known but simply ignored, are they really crimes?
August 27th, 2018 at 11:26 am
Kel: Religion is useful to society because it provides a template and structure for making day-to-day moral and ethical decisions; it provides a quick reference guide to right vs. wrong, and how to treat other people. You don’t need a philosophy degree; religion can be taught to very young children, and then re-taught in more sophisticated ways as children grow to adults. How do we deal with birth and death, marriage and sex? How do we treat strangers, and the poor? What constitutes unacceptable behavior? What are our obligations to our fellow man? Religion, for all of its faults, is useful because it provides answers to those questions, and encourages non-violent solutions to society’s day to day problems.
Yes, the Catholic church is guilty of unforgivable arrogance in not holding their priest child molesters to account; those priests should have been turfed out of the church and sent to jail; I don’t see how that clergy is going to regain our trust and respect after this, particularly with the reluctance to purge today those who facilitated child abuse through their inaction yesterday.
But religion was essential in creating our complex societies. We need rules and guidelines to navigate through the moral and ethical decisions of daily life. Laws and police forces, while necessary, are too blunt an instrument to be sufficient for a society to function. So while we can abandon belief in supernatural beings, and abandon the clergy, we are left with a need for the moral and ethical structure that religion provides or provided. So Swedes still interact with each other in a recognizably Lutheran way, and the Irish are recognizably Catholic in their interactions. Acting on cultural autopilot is in some sense normal, and cultural differences are not a bad thing, but without a replacement for religion as a driving force for civility, charity, and comity in our society, are entropic forces making us less civil, less charitable, less friendly to each other? We have struggled to create a system of morality and ethics which can be taught both to children and adults, but does not rely on a supernatural god figure or a clergy. Do we have a secular system of morality and ethics more sophisticated than the one delivered to our children through Disney movies and children’s TV? Not obviously, and I don’t think Disney morality is enough for a society; a lot of hard questions are avoided. If we had such a system, some of the cultural holdovers from religion would disappear. Their continued presence is a sign of our failure to replace religion with something secular to fill its role in our society.
August 27th, 2018 at 11:42 am
Emery, Where’d you cut and past that from, I’m too busy right now to look it up myself?
August 27th, 2018 at 1:16 pm
Need some ointment for that burn Emery?
August 27th, 2018 at 1:18 pm
It is quite simple, the media chooses what is a scandal and what isnt. The only reason we even knew about the Clinton email scandal is because the conservative media forced the MSM to cover it.
August 27th, 2018 at 1:58 pm
Deflection and obfuscation. Haven’t done this for a while. It’s still fun:
Yes, the
Catholic churchpublic education system is guilty of unforgivable arrogance in not holding theirpriestteacher child molesters to account; thoseprieststeachers should have been turfed out of thechurchschool system and sent to jail; I don’t see howthat clergythe public education establishment is going to regain our trust and respect after this, particularly with the reluctance to purge today those who facilitated child abuse through their inaction yesterday.August 27th, 2018 at 2:05 pm
Bill C for the win!
August 27th, 2018 at 2:35 pm
The biggest problem I see now for the Catholic Church now is the supposed #1 is rumored to been part of the cover-up and a active participant in it which is beyond damning. The public school stuff really needs to get more press but the NEA wont allow it because it will make them look anywhere from foolish to criminal.
August 27th, 2018 at 3:06 pm
All this Catholic bashing from the left is gonna leave a big, nasty wound on the homo constituency.
80% of these abuse cases are fags chasing young men and boys; 80%. And of the remaining 20% the majority are instances of inappropriate, but consensual liaisons between adults (married women & parish priest).
There’s no way around the truth. 30% of male homosexuals have had sex with underage boys or young male children. They are a pestilence, a rabid threat to public health. They need to be monitored carefully, and taken out of circulation when found to be predators.
I’m taking a hiatus from the Church, until there has been a wholesale washdown starting right at the top.
August 27th, 2018 at 11:14 pm
It’s time to put a Lutheran in charge of the Catholic church. Hear me out — Lutherans (other than myself) are famous throughout history for having ridiculously low sex drives. They don’t even understand pedophilia. It makes as much sense to them as going to prison for shoplifting jigsaw puzzles from garage sales. I don’t think Scandi homosexuals ever actually have sex.
WTF? “Yah, people are weird. Better go in there and clean it up.” There will never be a Lutheran Gilles de Rais.
August 28th, 2018 at 9:43 am
Regarding leftists putting their kids in private schools, there have regrettably been a lot of scandals there, too. That noted, let loose the dogs of war on the public schools if they’ve been doing an MSU/Baylor/ABWE/Vatican/etc., on this. Let them loose.
Two of the victims; my next door neighbors growing up. The teacher was found out when one of those neighbors gave my brother and I an impromptu sex ed lesson and our parents started asking some hard questions. Let loose the dogs.
August 28th, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Woolly: The Catholic church has caused the deterioration of the teachings of Christ with their pro-establishment doctrines, their money collecting methods and their Paternal system of governing.
They have had two thousand years to get their Religion consistent with the teachings of Christ and have evaded the issues in order to Enhance their power over people and do little to improve their condition.
It is all about the Church and very little about the teachings of Christ.
August 29th, 2018 at 7:45 am
God help me I agree with Emery 100%, it one of many reasons I bailed on ther Catholic Church at 19 and never looked back. Granted I never felt at home there and never liked basically forced into being Catholic but I am much more comterable being a non-denominational christian