Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Gates of Hell 1, Catholic Church 0


The Catholic Church -- the institutional church, at least -- in this country is finished. The gates of hell, we are assured by scripture, will not prevail against the church everywhere, but they have here.

I say this after reading a "little" story from Pennsylvania uncovered in today's grand jury report on the spiritual, ethical and legal cesspool that is the Catholic Church there. The entire document is here. Maybe you have the stomach to tackle it in its immensity -- I do not.

But this one snippet from a massive global scandal and sacrilege is instructive. A huge story begins to just become a jumble of factoids and statistics, but the horror is best appreciated in looking at just one thing.

JUST ONE destroyed life. Sorry, make that two . . . because abortion. Just one mutilated soul. Just one sociopathic prelate.

This, from Diocese of Scranton in the 1980s, is just one in an unbelievably long parade of horror from just one American state since World War II. Here is the account from the local newspaper today, the Times Leader:

You can be assured that what the grand jury -- various grand juries over recent years -- uncovered in Pennsylvania will likewise pop up out of the clerical swamp in every diocese from sea to shining sea.

You also can be assured that most of our shepherds are wolves in chasubles and mitres.

I feel as if I should have more to say about this, something eloquent, profound and original. I don't.

Perhaps it's the cynicism I've clung to for the last 16 years as a coping mechanism. It's not ideal, but it seems to work for me and keeps me somewhere within Christianity instead of screaming "F*ck you!" as I storm out the door into . . . what? Nothingness?

Yeah, probably nothingness. And then the pointy-hatted motherf*ckers could notch yet another lost soul onto their liturgical staffs.

And yes, I just said "pointy-hatted motherf*ckers." The great scandal of American clericalist Catholicism is that all the "right" faithful will be a lot more scandalized by my phraseology than by priests raping young boys and girls, homosexual brothels disguised as Catholic seminaries and "princes of the church" aiding and abetting all of the above.

If you are offended, go say a rosary for my damnable soul . . . on the grave of an abuse victim who killed himself or herself after the misplaced shame and the unceasing torment became too much to bear.


Some of us will remain Catholic in the wake of this filth. I don't know which -- the jury's still out for most of us, I suspect. But I do know this: Whichever way we find to keep the faith, such as it is and assuming we do, it will not be the way we have kept it in the past. At all.

The collapse of the institutional church will follow the collapse of the hierarchy's reputation and credibility, a process begun in earnest in 2002 and finally completed today with the Pennsylvania grand jury's scathing 900-page report. The collapse of that credibility flowed out of the collapse of episcopal integrity, the visible sign of God-knows-how-many collapsed episcopal souls.

May God have precisely as much mercy on them as they showed their flocks.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Don't mess with Cokie


You can take the girl out of Louisiana, but you can't always take the Louisiana out of the girl.

And, you know, that ain't always a bad thing.

I suppose I need to follow This Week more carefully, because I totally missed this gem of a moment from early October, when veteran ABC and National Public Radio correspondent Cokie Roberts gave a short, blunt and quite reasonable answer to the question "How do you solve a problem like Polanski?"


REALLY, there's a certain rough elegance to prescription written by the daughter of two Louisiana members of Congress -- just take Roman Polanski out and shoot him. While we can argue about state violence and the death penalty -- which I'd just as soon abolish -- it takes a moral midget (of which we have plenty) to equivocate about the gravity of what the acclaimed director did.

He took a 13-year-old girl, plied her with drugs and champagne, then had his way with her. The law calls that rape. Most also would call it pedophilia. And what he has coming would pretty much involve taking him out and shooting him.

And though I would like the state to operate on a plain slightly above "He needed killin'" . . . well, sometimes, it just has to be said.

Thursday, October 08, 2009

The military-industrial complexities of rape


Nebraska's junior U.S. senator, Mike Johanns, is all about lowering the boom on anti-poverty organizations that advise faux pimps and hos how to game the system.

But when it comes to stopping defense contractors from legally abusing female employees who have been raped by co-workers and then held against their will -- by their employer, by the way -- to keep them from yelling "rape" . . . not so much. As a matter of fact, Johanns is dead-set against requiring Pentagon contractors not to deny victims of sexual assault their day in court through terms of an employment contract.

HERE'S the amendment offered by Sen. Al Franken, which passed 68-30 Tuesday:
Sec. 8104. (a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any existing or new Federal contract if the contractor or a subcontractor at any tier requires that an employee or independent contractor, as a condition of employment, sign a contract that mandates that the employee or independent contractor performing work under the contract or subcontract resolve through arbitration any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention.
OBVIOUSLY, SIMPLE JUSTICE must be one of those radical, pinko-commie notions the Democrats are trying to ram down the throats of God-fearing patriotic Americans. I mean, get a load of this 2007 report from ABC News on the case that inspired Franken's amendment:
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as sparely furnished with a bed, table and lamp.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones' case. In recent testimony before Congress, employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees said that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.
I'M NO constitutional scholar, but I'm fairly confident that document doesn't begin "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, do ordain and establish the right of Employers to contractually deny their Employees any of the Rights enumerated herein, especially when Employees have suffered an Offense against their Virtue."

Of course, I am not patriotic and smart like Republican senators such as Mike Johanns. I am a mere pinko, commie-lib like Al Franken, and thus cannot grasp how it is far worse to be ACORN and give legally dubious advice to pretend pimps and hos than it is to be Halliburton and cover up an actual gang rape.

And when you're unable to get your mind around something as simple as that, trying to figure out how anybody could be against the Franken amendment is doubly discombobulating.

I suppose we must just have faith that there was nothing at all remotely creepy about the Nebraska senator being on the same side of this issue as the esteemed john from Louisiana, David Vitter.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Bobby Jindal: Cafeteria Catholic

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is furious that the U.S. Supreme Court told his state, "No, you can't execute child-rapers," but plans to do nothing about it -- beyond affecting outrage in a bid to placate Bubba -- so the justices have no excuse to strike down his reform agenda.

WHAT THE GUB'NA has failed to address is that Louisiana's penchant for killing murderers -- and trying to kill those who rape kids -- seemingly has done nothing to lower the stratospheric rate at which its citizens assault, maim, bugger and slay one another. In a state where life already is cheap, government policy has been to make it even cheaper by dispensing death sentences like so many Chiclets out of a penny gum machine.

And in a state where educational achievement has always lagged, Louisianians never have figured out, exactly, that death + death = more death. Not respect for life.

Neither have they figured out that kiddie rape + death = one dead rapist plus a lot more live ones in the pipeline. Death is no "deterrent" to people already sick enough to rape children. And the state's murder of killers and rapists capable of being punished and removed from society without use of the death penalty is not justice . . . or punishment.

It is vengeance. The modern state has no business in the vengeance business. The vengeance business is the monopoly of the Almighty.

YOU'D THINK SOMEONE who styles himself as
something of a Catholic apologist would know that. And you'd think that someone who goes around writing essays about the Catholic Church being The Church would pay a little bit more attention to its clear teaching:

2265
Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.

2266
The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.

2267
Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

[Emphasis mine -- R21]

INSTEAD, THIS is what we get from Louisiana's holier-than-thou chief executive, who suddenly discovered the joys of "cafeteria Catholicism," where you get to pick and choose the moral truths that suit you:
"I am outraged by the Supreme Court's decision. It is an affront to the people of Louisiana and the jury's unanimous decision in this case. The opinion reflects a clear abuse of judicial authority, trampling the constitutional authority of states to act through the legislative process. The Court found, 'there is a distinction between intentional first degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other. The latter crimes may be devastating in their harm, as here, but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, they cannot be compared to murder in their severity and irrevocability.'

"The Supreme Court is dead wrong. It is fundamentally improper for the Supreme Court to base an important decision like this on its 'independent judgment' about a perceived 'national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape.' The opinion reads more like an out-of-control legislative debate than a constitutional analysis.

One thing is clear: the five members of the Court who issued the opinion do not share the same ‘standards of decency' as the people of Louisiana. One Justice said that 'the death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child.' That is incredibly absurd. The most repugnant crimes deserve the harshest penalties, and nothing is more repugnant than the brutal rape of an eight-year-old child.

We will evaluate ways to amend our statute to maintain death as a penalty for this horrific crime."
IF SOME SICK S.O.B. brutally raped a daughter of mine, would I want him dead? Would I be capable of killing him myself, in cold blood? Probably so.

And I would expect that, in a civilized and just world, I would be arrested and put away for a long, long time. My desire to see that rapist dead -- and my ability to make it a do-it-yourself project -- is not a reflection of my goodness, but instead of what a fallen, wretched and sinful creature I am.

The state exists to help save me from myself and -- failing that -- to save others from my baser instincts. Even crooks.

When the state decides it's against only some baser instincts -- and not only that, but decides it will codify some of our baser instincts . . . provided they're carried out only against the "right" people -- the barbarians no longer are at the gate, but are running the show.

You'd think that an Ivy League-educated, Catholic-apologist governor would know that. But, like his empty promises of "transparency" and "reform," that would be just another "bridge too far."