Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad

[Seth]

Taking the high road, chaps?

Nope. I can take it to the gutter too, and perforce must.

[Schneibster]

It's fine with me if you want to help protect people who pork little kids, Seth.

[DaveD]

Taking the high road, chaps?

Nope. I can take it to the gutter too, and perforce must.

In your case the correct word is bring, not take.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Taking the high road, chaps?

Nope. I can take it to the gutter too, and perforce must.

In your case the correct word is bring, not take.

[Svartalf]

It's fine with me if you want to help protect people who pork little kids, Seth.

You know, a guy who chops little kids is much worse an one that just porks'em

[Schneibster]

Sure, but fortunately priests don't chop up little kids much.

[Seth]

It's fine with me if you want to help protect people who pork little kids, Seth.

"Fuck you, asshole." Arnold Schwartznegger

[Bella Fortuna]

Regarding these posts:
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad

Schneibster, these are personal attacks against another member, and as they have been repeated they border on harassment. Personal attacks are against our rules, and in conjunction with your reminder today, this is a warning that a further breach of our rules will result in a 24 hour suspension.


Regarding this post:
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad

Svartalf this post is a personal attack on another member and as such is against our rules. This is a reminder to stay within our rules.


Regarding these posts:
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad
Subject: Pope thinks child buggery isn't so bad

Seth, the referenced posts are all personal attacks on other members and as such are against our rules. In conjunction with your recent reminder and other warning today, this is a warning that a further breach of our rules will result in a 24 hour suspension.

[HomerJay]

Doh!

[amok]

I always suspected Seth was a concern troll theist. I just never thought it was Catholic.

I'm not Catholic. I'm a non-theistic Tolerist™. I just happen to know a bit about Catholicism because I have family who are Catholics, and I object to them (and the many good priests and lay Catholics I know well) being tarred with the same brush that's used to legitimately tar criminal Catholic sex predators wearing vestments.

I'm completely down with locking up child sex predators of any stripe and throwing away the key...or cutting their nuts off and branding their foreheads with "CSP" for all the world to see.

But I take umbrage at having the entirety of one billion Catholics, almost all of whom are perfectly nice, ordinary, loving people who would never harm a child or anyone else thrown under the bus of anti-Catholic bigotry and hatred as so commonly happens in Atheist forums like this.

It's my experience that Atheists are some of the most pernicious and judgmental bigots that exist on the face of the planet, and most of their bigotry and hatred is misdirected and the result of gross and deliberate ignorance of obvious facts and the truth about Catholicism. No matter how many times one points to the good works of the Catholic church or the benign nature of the vast majority of Catholics, Atheist bigots take every opportunity to demean, disparage and slander every Catholic on the planet because of the heinous crimes of a few priests 50 years ago. All the while they have absolutely no outrage, and indeed will come to the staunch defense of public school teachers, who inflict sexual abuse on children literally MILLIONS of times more often EVERY YEAR than all of the priestly abuse in the last half-century combined.

This demonstrates an egregious amount of mindless, reasonless bigotry and hatred that I choose to challenge and expose.

I've bolded the sentence that made my eyebrows rise. May I ask where you are getting this figure? I went looking for data, but other than many, many stories about individual cases, the only indepth study I could find was this one, commissioned in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Education.

http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pu ... report.pdf

If that's not the one, and there are more recent figures, I will stand corrected. If so, I believe you've misinterpreted the finding on prevalence (from page 18):

To get a sense of the extent of the number of students who have been targets of educator sexual misconduct, I applied the percent of students who report experiencing educator sexual misconduct to the population of all K-12 students. Based on the assumption that the AAUW surveys accurately represent the experiences of all K-12 students, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.

Unless I'm misreading it, I believe that means the figure of 4.5 million is spread out over each, individual 13-year period, not each year. Still a shocking figure, to be sure, but I thought I'd point that out for clarification.

Further, I believe you're doing the same thing that you're chastising other for, because that figure isn't derived from charges/convictions, but anonymous surveys asking about real and perceived violations ranging from "Made sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks" to "forced you to kiss him/her & forced you to do something sexual, other than kissing."

From page 17:

The question asked students was: During your whole school life, how often, if at all, has anyone (this includes students, teachers, other school employees, or anyone else) done the following things to you when you did not want them to?
• Made sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.
• Showed, gave or left you sexual pictures, photographs, illustrations,
messages, or notes.
• Wrote sexual messages/graffiti about you on bathroom walls, in locker
rooms, etc.
• Spread sexual rumors about you.
• Said you were gay or a lesbian.
• Spied on you as you dressed or showered at school.
• Flashed or “mooned” you.
• Touched, grabbed, or pinched you in a sexual way.
• Intentionally brushed up against you in a sexual way.
• Pulled at your clothing in a sexual way.
• Pulled off or down your clothing.
• Blocked your way or cornered you in a sexual way.
• Forced you to kiss him/her.
• Forced you to do something sexual, other than kissing.
For each behavior the respondent identifies as having experienced, she or he is asked a series of follow-up questions, including the role of the offender (student, teacher, counselor, etc.), where the incident took place, and when the incident happened. All analyses of these data are based upon the stems above, which constitute civil and criminal definitions of sexual abuse and harassment. The sample was drawn from a list of 80,000 schools to create a stratified twostage sample design of 2,065 8th to 11th grade students...

Anyway, it's a massive document (I didn't read it all) that also addresses demographics and false accusations and such, but in the section dealing with reaction, I did find a chilling statement (from page 46):

11.1 Actions of teacher unions. Until recently, teacher unions in many states have actively opposed legislation that would require positive identification (e.g., fingerprinting) of teachers convicted of sexual abuse of students. In most states, teachers who are already employed are exempt from regulations such as fingerprint identification. There is no research that documents teacher union attempts to identify predators among their members.

So I'll concede this point to Seth, in that powerful secular organizations also have blood on their hands in this matter. I'll posit that a spiritual leader (and a spiritual hierarchy) has a higher degree of culpability by its sheer power over the mental well-being of its community (historically, at least) than any secular leaders/hierachy. Not that it makes a difference to individual victims, of course, but just as a general, overwhelming weight of the whole ugly situation.

[Ronja]

Very enlightening, if also depressing, amok. Thank you!

[Animavore]

Well and good but none of this helps Seth's case. The biggest outrage against the church in this country is from Catholics, not atheists. I suppose these people are all bigots too? People like Sinead O'Connor and victims groups have been most vocal.
And why am I been shown abuse statistics from another country half way around the world? It's quite shocking but what do you want me to do about it?
Go tell the victim's groups they're been bigoted and pernicious instead of going on a big rant against me. I've barely said a word on the issue. No one ever buggered me. Sure I make fun of the church but who doesn't? So don't be reading into me what you want to because you have a pre-conceived notion of what an atheist is. I'm not even an activist against the church. The Catholics do that themselves over here.
ETA: And even more bizarre to me is any charge that I use this as an excuse to demean all Catholics when I'm a Catholic atheist. When my family and friends are largely Catholic. My brother in law is a priest. I've known some great priests in my time. Especially in the scouts. Any bigotry I've seen from atheists comes from protestant atheists who already had the anti-Catholic bigotry to begin with and have just carried it on into their world-view. Protestants themselves can be every bit opportunistic when it comes to demeaning Catholics and the Irish or both. And I'm sure many Irish Catholics wish for a scandal in the Church of England to take the heat off them.

[Animavore]

Seth has reminded me of this interview with Bill Donohue a couple of years back on Irish radio. I'm not saying his down playing is as appalling as this, not even close, but if he's listening to American Catholics it's not hard to see where his disconnect comes from.
It's applaudable how unflappable the Irish (Catholic) guys are against Bill's bluster.

[Seth]

I always suspected Seth was a concern troll theist. I just never thought it was Catholic.

I'm not Catholic. I'm a non-theistic Tolerist™. I just happen to know a bit about Catholicism because I have family who are Catholics, and I object to them (and the many good priests and lay Catholics I know well) being tarred with the same brush that's used to legitimately tar criminal Catholic sex predators wearing vestments.

I'm completely down with locking up child sex predators of any stripe and throwing away the key...or cutting their nuts off and branding their foreheads with "CSP" for all the world to see.

But I take umbrage at having the entirety of one billion Catholics, almost all of whom are perfectly nice, ordinary, loving people who would never harm a child or anyone else thrown under the bus of anti-Catholic bigotry and hatred as so commonly happens in Atheist forums like this.

It's my experience that Atheists are some of the most pernicious and judgmental bigots that exist on the face of the planet, and most of their bigotry and hatred is misdirected and the result of gross and deliberate ignorance of obvious facts and the truth about Catholicism. No matter how many times one points to the good works of the Catholic church or the benign nature of the vast majority of Catholics, Atheist bigots take every opportunity to demean, disparage and slander every Catholic on the planet because of the heinous crimes of a few priests 50 years ago. All the while they have absolutely no outrage, and indeed will come to the staunch defense of public school teachers, who inflict sexual abuse on children literally MILLIONS of times more often EVERY YEAR than all of the priestly abuse in the last half-century combined.

This demonstrates an egregious amount of mindless, reasonless bigotry and hatred that I choose to challenge and expose.

I've bolded the sentence that made my eyebrows rise. May I ask where you are getting this figure? I went looking for data, but other than many, many stories about individual cases, the only indepth study I could find was this one, commissioned in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Education.

http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pu ... report.pdf

If that's not the one, and there are more recent figures, I will stand corrected. If so, I believe you've misinterpreted the finding on prevalence (from page 18):

To get a sense of the extent of the number of students who have been targets of educator sexual misconduct, I applied the percent of students who report experiencing educator sexual misconduct to the population of all K-12 students. Based on the assumption that the AAUW surveys accurately represent the experiences of all K-12 students, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.

Unless I'm misreading it, I believe that means the figure of 4.5 million is spread out over each, individual 13-year period, not each year. Still a shocking figure, to be sure, but I thought I'd point that out for clarification.

That's the study I'm referring to, yes. Here's the section I used, and you are correct to say that it's "sometime during their school career." I'm not sure if that makes it worse or better, since there is a constant turn-over in schools with new students coming into the system all the time. The "wide range" of 3.7 to 50.3 percent is even more shocking.

3.2 Prevalence in the United States. As a group, these studies present a
wide range of estimates of the percentage of U.S. students subject to sexual misconduct
by school staff and vary from 3.7 to 50.3 percent (Table 5). Because of its carefully
drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of
students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career
presents the most accurate data available at this time.

Further, I believe you're doing the same thing that you're chastising other for, because that figure isn't derived from charges/convictions, but anonymous surveys asking about real and perceived violations ranging from "Made sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks" to "forced you to kiss him/her & forced you to do something sexual, other than kissing."

From page 17:

The question asked students was: During your whole school life, how often, if at all, has anyone (this includes students, teachers, other school employees, or anyone else) done the following things to you when you did not want them to?
• Made sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.
• Showed, gave or left you sexual pictures, photographs, illustrations,
messages, or notes.
• Wrote sexual messages/graffiti about you on bathroom walls, in locker
rooms, etc.
• Spread sexual rumors about you.
• Said you were gay or a lesbian.
• Spied on you as you dressed or showered at school.
• Flashed or “mooned” you.
• Touched, grabbed, or pinched you in a sexual way.
• Intentionally brushed up against you in a sexual way.
• Pulled at your clothing in a sexual way.
• Pulled off or down your clothing.
• Blocked your way or cornered you in a sexual way.
• Forced you to kiss him/her.
• Forced you to do something sexual, other than kissing.
For each behavior the respondent identifies as having experienced, she or he is asked a series of follow-up questions, including the role of the offender (student, teacher, counselor, etc.), where the incident took place, and when the incident happened. All analyses of these data are based upon the stems above, which constitute civil and criminal definitions of sexual abuse and harassment. The sample was drawn from a list of 80,000 schools to create a stratified twostage sample design of 2,065 8th to 11th grade students...

Anyway, it's a massive document (I didn't read it all) that also addresses demographics and false accusations and such, but in the section dealing with reaction, I did find a chilling statement (from page 46):

11.1 Actions of teacher unions. Until recently, teacher unions in many states have actively opposed legislation that would require positive identification (e.g., fingerprinting) of teachers convicted of sexual abuse of students. In most states, teachers who are already employed are exempt from regulations such as fingerprint identification. There is no research that documents teacher union attempts to identify predators among their members.

So I'll concede this point to Seth, in that powerful secular organizations also have blood on their hands in this matter. I'll posit that a spiritual leader (and a spiritual hierarchy) has a higher degree of culpability by its sheer power over the mental well-being of its community (historically, at least) than any secular leaders/hierachy. Not that it makes a difference to individual victims, of course, but just as a general, overwhelming weight of the whole ugly situation.

And that, I think is the key to the outrage, the "ick factor" of a priest doing it. Personally, I find sex abuse by public school teacher much more "icky" because children are COMPELLED to attend school by law, whereas church attendance is entirely voluntary.

But I also think it's part of a stalking-horse campaign against religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, by radical Atheists (anti-theists actually) who will overblow any scandal that impeaches the reputation of Catholicism (or religion in general) as a part of an agenda to extirpate religion from society by any means possible.

[DaveD]

I don't recall hearing about a teacher who has been suspected of molesting children being quietly moved to another school so he or she can abuse different, unsuspecting children.