I wish I had a more fun, cheeky thing to post on before a holiday weekend, but I can’t just let this new sex tape scandal thing slide. In the past, I’ve suggested that men who film women (with their consent) having sex and then release it (without their consent) are committing a form of sexual assault---not legally rape, of course, but indistinguishable from other forms of rape in that the intention is to use sex as a weapon to hurt and humiliate the victim. I feel that releasing a sex tape without the permission of everyone involved needs to be elevated to the level of a crime, because it has so much in common with other forms of violence against women, and simply making it a matter for the civil courts isn’t doing enough to stop this practice. The victim in this case is Kendra Wilkinson, and the story is really illustrative in this case of my point.
I had to look the woman up, because I had no idea who she is. Turns out she’s a reality TV star and former Playboy model. As you can imagine, her history in sex work is creating confusion around the issue, due to the myth that sex workers can’t be raped. I was frustrated to see this line of reasoning trotted out at Broadsheet without a firm denunciation.
Kendra Wilkinson expects the leak of her private sex tape to be “really hard”—“probably the hardest time” of her life. It might seem surprising from a woman who has already posed naked in the pages of Playboy and co-dated Hugh Hefner with two other women. Such a woman is expected to gamely catch the wave of publicity and ride it out to her own benefit. It’s what she’s been working toward all along, right?
I don’t think Tracy Clark-Flory sees it this way, but she’s also not bringing up the fact that this is the same argument always used against victims of sexual violence, particularly sex workers, the old “non-virgins can’t be raped” myth that should really have been put to rest centuries before the video camera was even invented. Again, to be clear, I’m not saying that releasing a sex tape is the same thing as rape, but it certainly falls on the scale of sexual harassment and assault, as far as I’m concerned. And it should be treated as such by criminal courts. If Justin Frye, who sold the tape, and the folks at Vivid, who bought it, were facing criminal penalties for this, I’m sure they would have thought a lot more carefully about violating this woman’s right to control her own body and sexuality.
Ta-Nehisi blogs about one of my all-time top pet peeves: people who swear they would have been the brave ones joining up the resistance to some horrible historical injustice. As Ta-Nehisi points out, most of us are really, truly cowards. Not to go evo psych on anyone, but if we didn’t have a strong survival instinct, human beings wouldn’t have gotten this far, after all. In the wake of Rand Paul’s ludicrous claim he would have marched with Dr. King in favor of laws that he would have then voted down, you saw the even more egregious version of this---people claiming they would have been brave warriors for civil rights, when you know damn well they would have been avid supporters of segregation back in the day. (To hear people talk about it, you’d think no one was a supporter of segregation, that it just happened without anyone really pushing for it.) If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve all seen something unfair go down right in front of us and we did nothing---it’s not like acts of public bullying are that uncommon. And when it’s institutionalized bullying? Good luck. Most of us can immediately think of all those who are dependent on us, and we really can’t just threaten our stable lives just like that.
Similar thoughts were banging around my head recently when I saw some of the reactions online to these videos from the TV show “What Would You Do?"---a show that’s basically based on these kinds of questions. For those who don’t know, the show basically is about having actors act out certain scenarios in public, and they secretly record people’s reactions. In this episode, they acted out a scenario in a restaurant where a woman comes in looking battered, and then they have her fake boyfriend verbally abuse her and grab her. The question: Would you intervene on the woman’s behalf? In the first scenarios, while most people didn’t intervene, some did.
So they introduced a “reason” for the man to batter his girlfriend, one that reflects public sensibilities about what kind of rights a man has over his partner’s body.
What I found interesting was how many people on the internet were 100% certain they would step in if they saw a man abusing his girlfriend in public, whether she was dressed demurely or they realized he was attacking her for a perceived slight to his honor with her sexy clothes. I’m personally not so sure. In the scenarios where people did intervene, it was under very specific circumstances---they were with another person and they were able to work on each other to get their courage up. Most people rationalized their non-involvement by suggesting that it wasn’t their business. And let’s face it; it’s not unreasonable to avoid getting involved because you suspect the abuse victim will turn on you, or even scarier, that the batterer will. Or both. As much as people play dumb, we all know domestic violence is common enough that we understand its contours immediately, and know that victims aren’t going to leave until they’ve decided to quit living in denial that the man they love isn’t interested in loving but in controlling. (This is hard enough to accept if you’re not attached to someone who swears he loves you and has carefully depleted your stores of self-esteem.) That said, it’s still a rationalization for non-involvement. We all know that an intervention from a stranger might be the catalyst a woman who is thinking of leaving needs. You never know what a catalyst will be.
I feel bad picking on people for imagined bravery, because in a way I think imagined bravery can lead to real bravery. It’s a well-known psychological trick that picturing an event before it happens can make your reactions better. For instance, if you actually imagine a blow out on your car before it happens, when it does, it’s a lot easier to calmly slow down and pull to the shoulder, instead of freak out and jerk the wheel. So, imagining yourself intervening probably can make it likelier to happen. But I think the whole process would work better if you don’t blithely assume you will, but instead assume your inclinations are all wrong, and you have to mentally practice beforehand so that you create the courage to tap into.
The bizarre, feeble attempts to beat back the scandals that are collapsing the Catholic Church continue, and in this piece by the AP’s Nicole Winfield, we get a peek at the man closest to Pope Benedict, a man with him for over a decade, who rarely turns up in the media other than in stories about how hunky he is, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein.
Benedict’s personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, spoke out Tuesday for the first time since the scandal broke, defending the pope’s prolonged silence on the German cases and charging that Benedict had done more than anyone else to crack down on abuse.
“It does not make sense, nor is it helpful, for the Holy Father to comment personally on each case,” he told the daily Bild, Germany’s highest-circulation newspaper. “It is overlooked too fast that various bishops and bishops conferences carry responsibility.”
According to the NYDN, ”with his chiseled face, blond-brown hair and crisp attire he is fast becoming the poster boy of the Catholic Church.” and “Designer Donatella Versace described his austerity as “very elegant” and said he was the inspiration behind her line of clerical-collar-style hunky black jackets.”
But back to the coverup damage control. There seems to be a fantasy in the Vatican that if they just gas up the Papal jet and fly somewhere to meet the victims raped and molested by the church’s pedophile priests that it will make things all right—as long as he doesn’t have to deal with ”media pressures.”
The revved-up strategy comes as the Vatican tries to stem the damage from weeks of revelations about priests who raped and molested children - and the church officials who kept it quiet - before the pontiff’s visit to Malta this weekend. Abuse victims on that majority Roman Catholic Mediterranean island are seeking a papal audience and apology.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi declined Tuesday to confirm whether Benedict would meet with victims, but didn’t rule it out. The pope is prepared to meet with victims, Lombardi said, but “in a climate of meditation and reflection, not under media pressures.”
Before previous foreign trips, Lombardi has declined to confirm meetings with abuse victims until after they were held.
There was one hilarious revelation that I had not heard before in terms of the official blame game. Apparently the vastconspiracy to destroy the Catholic church regarding its criminal pedophile protection enterprise boils down to...advocates of marriage equality and the right to choose.
Initially, the Vatican responded defensively, with Vatican officials and cardinals accusing the media, the Masons, pro-abortion rights and pro-gay marriage supporters for plotting attacks against the pope. Recently, the Vatican has shifted course, still complaining about an anti-Catholic campaign but also promising more transparency and taking initiatives to at least give an impression that change is afoot.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the role of the vow of celibacy in the priest child rape scandals. It ranges from the irresponsible (suggesting that rape is the result of sexual frustration, instead of the will to dominate) to the more interesting (that celibacy contorts sexuality, or that celibacy attracts criminal deviants who need cover). But most of this speculation misses the point, because it focuses on the role celibacy plays for offenders. It gives defenders of the Catholic church---who are becoming one with rape apologists very quickly---ammo to minimize the situation, because they can point to churches without celibacy requirements that nonetheless have child rape problems. And it turns attention away from the biggest issue here, which is the institutional support and protection the Catholic church has offered to child rapists. Rapists are extremely opportunistic criminals, and are far less likely to offend if they think they’re going to face consequences. So if you, like the Catholic church, offer protection and support, you’re basically encouraging rape.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t look at celibacy as a reason this has all happened. But I’d like to think big picture. Instead of talking about how celibacy affected individual rapists, let’s talk about how celibacy encouraged institutional protection for rapists.
It’s not a secret that the Catholic church has a staffing issue. It’s pathetic how desperate they are for priests, even trying to talk up the “cool” factor---as if!
The banners hanging in the main corridor of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers declare, “Through Faith We Grow.” The class portraits that line that very same corridor tell the opposite tale. Half a century after the halcyon days when several hundred men at a time studied to be ordained as priests for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, only 22 are enrolled.
In the U.S., there has been a precipitous drop in the number of priests as there’s been a huge rise in the number of actual Catholics. In other words, they’re in the same situation the military is in. The demand for soldiers remains high and is even growing, but the number of people willing to do that job is rapidly declining. And so the military has been forced to lower its standards, accepting more and more people with criminal records. In fact, according to this article, even though it’s technically illegal for the military to recruit criminals, issuing special waivers has become routine---nearly 12% of new recruits at the time of writing three years ago.
But this isn’t to debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. (After all, a lot of them may not be violent criminals.) The issue here is simple---the military had a standard, and it had to drop it in face of declining numbers of volunteers. The Catholic church is in the same boat, though I’d argue the situation is even more serious for them. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a major reason many Catholic men are saying no thanks to joining the priesthood---even though it’s a pretty perk-heavy job, if you think about it---is the vow of celibacy. With declining numbers of new recruits, therefore, the church is especially disinclined to let go of existing priests, and that desperation has a lot to do with why they don’t immediately give the ax to child rapists, but instead just reshuffle them and try to cover it up.
That concern is written all over this letter from Pope Ratz that Pam blogged about. Oh sure, his ostensible concern is that defrocking a priest for the apparently piddling transgression of child rape would somehow be bad for children, who would get disillusioned with the church. But that is obvious bullshit. What comes through loud and clear is his extreme reluctance to let any warm body go. And we can look at celibacy as a major reason they’re having so much trouble replacing dying or disgraced priests.
So why not give up the vow of celibacy? It would be a really swift way to fix a lot of their problems, it would seem. But beyond just the fact that the Pope and all his minions are extreme right wing nutjobs who resist change at all costs, you also have the problem of how the Catholic church brands itself. It’s like any other free market issue. When people have choices between different products---in this case, not only different flavors of Christianity, but also different religions and the choice not to believe anything at all---competing products have to make it clear to would-be buyers what makes them unique. And the Catholic church is just getting more invested in selling severe sex-phobia as its brand. It actually makes sense to stake out this territory. The evangelicals own the argument that sex is good if it only occurs under tightly controlled circumstances. The Anglicans are the option if you like the pomp but aren’t interested in the body hatred. But if you’re morbid and have major sexual hang-ups, the Catholic church is the church for you. Think of converts like Ross Douthat, and it’s easy to see why the Catholic church sees sadism as its selling point. Celibate priests can be the sacrificial lambs for a flock that is uneasy and hateful about sex, but doesn’t want to stop having it themselves. But fewer and fewer people are willing to play that role for them.
The Pope can’t blame a NYT conspiracy or rumor-mongering this time. Whatever “woes” the Catholic Church is experiencing is a result of the multitude of cases of child-raping priests left free to run amok mount, leaving the church looking more like a crime syndicate than a bastion of faith.
The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including ‘’the good of the universal church,’’ according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.
The correspondence, obtained by The Associated Press, is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican’s insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office.
The letter, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the Diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle.
The Vatican confirmed Friday that it was Ratzinger’s signature. ‘’The press office doesn’t believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations,’’ the Rev. Federico Lombardi said.
Love how this all drops on Friday, the traditional drop day for really, really bad news. This is truly an apocalyptic development now, and the Vatican knows it.
The letter also revealed quite specifically that Ratzinger wanted to protect the church, not the victims.
In the November 1985 letter, Ratzinger says the arguments for removing Kiesle are of ‘’grave significance’’ but added that such actions required very careful review and more time. He also urged the bishop to provide Kiesle with ‘’as much paternal care as possible’’ while awaiting the decision, according to a translation for AP by Professor Thomas Habinek, chairman of the University of Southern California Classics Department.
But the future pope also noted that any decision to defrock Kiesle must take into account the ‘’good of the universal church’’ and the ‘’detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly considering the young age.’’ Kiesle was 38 at the time.
Another big shout-out for criminal enterprise-defending Bill Donohue—in this particular case, the pedophile priest molested a young girl in his Truckee home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison. How does that fit into your “homosexual problem in the church” meme, Bill? These priests are engaging in deviant criminal behavior.
This is the man Benedict sought to protect and keep in the flock:
‘’He admitted molesting many children and bragged that he was the Pied Piper and said he tried to molest every child that sat on his lap,’’ said Lewis VanBlois, an attorney for six Kiesle victims who interviewed the former priest in prison. ‘’When asked how many children he had molested over the years, he said ‘tons.’’’
In another report , Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesbot, acknowledged that the Church had lost public trust and reiterated Pope Benedict’s willingness to meet more victims of abuse.
Meeting more victims of abuse isn’t going to cut it. The Pope, the cardinals, the bishops and all who know about the church policy on covering this whole mess up, deserve an indictment, not a chance to stand before victims.
If that’s the route they want to take, then then every victim the Vatican plans to have Benedict meet needs to ask the Pope directly to answer what he knew and when he knew it before cameras, since it won’t happen in a court room.
A couple of people sent me this story from the NY Times decrying the panic over mean girls---female bullies---as a hoax. I actually respect where the authors of this piece were coming from, especially when pointing out that female adolescence is far from catching up to male adolescence in terms of cruelty to others, but I have to turn readers to Sady Doyle’s spot-on criticisms. The biggest issue is that the authors rely on crime statistics to bolster their claims, which misses the mark for two reasons. The first, which Sady points out, is that a lot of bullying doesn’t really fall under prosecutable offenses. The second, which I pointed out earlier, is that even when it does, it’s often treated more like a school and parental discipline issue and less like a law enforcement issue.
We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to girls bullying girls, a behavior that can leave life long scars in its victims. Or worse, as the Phoebe Prince story shows. Sady:
Unfortunately, cruelty between girls can’t really be measured with the hard crime statistics on which Males and Lind’s argument relies. That’s part of what makes it so insidious. As Rachel Simmons wrote in “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Teenage Girls,” bullying between teenage girls expresses itself as physical fighting less often than it does as relational aggression, a soft and social warfare often conducted between girls who seem to be friends. You can’t measure rumors, passive-aggressive remarks, alienation and shaming with statistics. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t damaging or common—or, you know, mean. There’s a difference between being cruel and being violent—a difference that the Times piece seems not to recognize, actually—but cases like that of Prince, or Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being harassed by Lori Drew on MySpace, show that the consequences can be distressingly similar. Girls may not murder people very often, but neither Prince nor Meier were murdered; they were taunted and bullied to the point that suicide seemed like their only option.
She goes on to note that the problem of female bullying, in high school and beyond, gets a disproportionate amount of media attention, and speculates to reasons why. I recommend reading her piece; I won’t reinvent the wheel. But I will say that the focus on “mean girls” often misses the way that sexism is a major factor. Worse, it often comes across as anti-feminist denial that there’s a problem. “Women can be cruel, too,” the argument seems to go, “So obviously sexism isn’t the problem here.”
Wrong, on two counts. I went out with the blogger Pilgrim Soul and others last night, and we talked a little about high school bullying, because of the posts. I pointed out that when I was in high school, the girls could be evil, but they rarely reached the levels the boys could reach in terms of violent abusiveness. I never had a girl grab my ass or throw something at me. Most physical bullying was absent, in fact. And you don’t have a lot of girls ganging up and sexually assaulting their victims. You don’t have a lot of boys go that length, either, but when it does happen, it tends to be boys way more than girls.
Pilgrim pointed out the other aspect of this, which is how much female bullying is about the boys. Boys conferred social status on girls---if the popular boys didn’t like someone, she was socially done for, even if her female friends didn’t want to eject her from the group. The most vicious bullying girls engage in is over boys, fighting for their approval and attacking girls who are seen as getting attention or some other boy-provided goodies that the girl is assumed not to earn. (Which is, from what I understand, a major issue here.) The focus on mean girls rarely acknowledges this issue, instead acting like fights over boys and boy-related issues like clothing and looks, have nothing to do with what the boys want or do. We’re in love with the image of the doofy jock who has no idea what a meanie his girlfriend is to the girls---think of the dynamic on the show “Glee"---but the ugly reality is that boys often cheer this behavior on, and they often have as much social control over the mean girls as the mean girls have over other girls.
After all, there’s a lot for which girls will compete in high school. There’s grades, sports, extracurricular activities, even jobs. I competed with my peers on many fields in high school. But bullying only occurred in the context of fights over popularity, and popularity is about boys, and who does the best job at being the kind of girl that the boys are supposed to like. You wouldn’t see a girl hounded by bullies until she committed suicide because she beat some mean girl at the debate championship. It was the mom of a wannabe cheerleader, not a wannabe track star, that put a hit out on the competition’s mother in Texas all those years ago. Sadly, at the heart of these incidents is always boys and popularity. So yes, I blame the patriarchy.
Finally the media realizes that there is a very long paper trail that goes back decades documenting the Catholic Church’s hierarchy was well aware of its little rape and molestation problem and did nothing except keep matters secret and play the “shuffle the priest around” game. While children were being raped by the “loving” spiritual leaders in their communities, Pope Paul VI was notified about the ritual abuse—that was in 1963.
The head of a Roman Catholic order that specialized in the treatment of pedophile priests visited with the then-pope nearly 50 years ago and followed up with a letter recommending the removal of pedophile priests from ministry, according to a copy of the letter released Wednesday.
In the Aug. 27, 1963 letter, the head of the New Mexico-based Servants of the Holy Paraclete tells the pope he recommends removing pedophile priests from active ministry and strongly urges defrocking repeat offenders.
The letter, written by the Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald, appears to have been drafted at the request of the pope and summarizes Fitzgerald’s thoughts on problem priests after his Vatican visit.
...The letter proves that Vatican officials knew about clergy abuse decades ago and should have done more to protect children, said Tony DeMarco, an attorney for clergy abuse victims in Los Angeles.
And knowledge of the problem goes back even further than that. The NYT has a letter to a bishop that is dated Sept 12, 1952.
With Bill Donohue taking his pedophile defense publicity tour around the cable channels, the wheels are coming off of his wagon. Even the Vatican is circling its wagons around Papa Ratzi, who most certainly knows about all of these documents under wraps. Why? He’s being named in a lawsuit and the plaintiffs seek to depose Benedict under oath.
Dragged deep into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defence that it hopes will shield Pope Benedict XVI from a lawsuit in Kentucky.
The Holy See is trying to fend off the first United States case that determines whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself.
The case was filed in 2004 in Kentucky by three men who claim they were abused by priests and claim negligence by the Vatican.
Their lawyer is seeking class-action status, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.
The Vatican is seeking to dismiss the suit before the Pope can be questioned or documents subpoenaed.
One of the most interesting trends of the past few years is the rapid way that bullying has been redefined as an inevitable part of young life, and being treated as a problem that we should see as fixable, or at least addressable. The latest bully-related tragedy is that of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old girl who appears to have been driven to suicide by her classmates who bullied her relentlessly. What’s interesting about this case is that law enforcement isn’t just shrugging its shoulders, but instead hitting everyone involved with legal charges from statutory rape to criminal stalking.
Pilgrim Soul has some concerns about this, mostly that the statutory rape charges are going to be more slut-shaming of the now-dead girl and that other charges won’t stick. Personally, I’m not so worried about the statutory rape charges. I have larger issues with statutory rape as a crime, but I do understand that law enforcement often uses it as a fallback position when other charges (like actual rape or harassment) won’t stick. I suspect that’s what’s happening here; if the boys involved weren’t part of the harassment campaign against Prince, I’d be very surprised indeed. I recall a lot of bullying at my high school involved young men mocking young women they claimed, either truthfully or not, to have had sex with.
I’m much more worried that these charges won’t stick. I understand why juveniles should be treated differently than adult criminals, but that doesn’t mean that entire crimes they commit shouldn’t be treated as crimes. Unfortunately, a large part of bullying involves activities that, if they happened between adults or people that aren’t classmates at school, would absolutely be considered criminal behavior. Stalking, physical assault, and sexual assault are all part of bullying. There is also a lot of bullying behavior that, if it happened in the adult world, would open the harasser up to lawsuits. Think of libel or slander laws, for instance. We shouldn’t treat juveniles like adults, but that doesn’t mean we should let juvenile victims simply suffer levels of abuse that can be traumatic, either. Involving the criminal justice system seems like an important avenue to take to stop this behavior.
The obstacles facing those who oppose bullying remind me a lot of the problems facing those who first raised the alarm about domestic violence. At first, people thought the relationships between victim and victimizer somehow made the crime lesser, and there had to be a great deal of education in order to get people to see that in fact, being unable to be safe in your own home is often more awful and traumatic than being assaulted by a stranger. Same story with bullying. The “they’re just being kids” thing obscures the fact that the victims don’t feel safe in school, and often resort to skipping school or self-harm in an attempt to minimize the trauma. With domestic violence, you also saw/see a lot of authority giving the behavior their blessing. A lot of bullies feel emboldened because adults around them don’t do anything about it, sometimes because the adults also don’t like the targets of the bullying. This isn’t just playing around, and law enforcement can send the signal that society takes bullying very seriously.
I want to stop posting on this Catholic child rape scandal, I really do. But the flagrant blame-shifting and rape apologism from devoted Catholic pundits who can’t imagine not having a church to justify their seething fear of female sexuality just keeps on keeping on. I shouldn’t have even opened up Douthat’s apology for the rapist-shielding church, which I knew was going to be an attempt to get some kind of “moderate” defense into the mainstream media so that the central problems of the Catholic church---namely their patriarchal, authoritarian values system that Douthat loves so much---would go untouched. I get the strong impression from Douthat and lackey Bill Donohue that if this means the rapes continue, then they will be okay with that price, even if Douthat shakes his head with disappointment.
Douthat’s defense is more troubling than Donohue’s stampede of denial, because Douthat knows well how to play the “both sides” card while actually only blaming liberals. Who apparently forced a bunch of right wing asshats in the Catholic church to rape children and to participate in the cover-up. They can’t help themselves! The liberals made them do it!
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.
In other words, it was liberal values that caused the rapes, but conservative accounting errors.
Of all the bullshit that Douthat spreads around, blaming rape on a “permissive sexual culture” may be the biggest honking lie he’s ever told. Like Atrios noted, it demonstrates that Douthat, like his other patriarchal brethren, rejects the idea that consent is a relevant aspect of sexuality. When your religion is one where a man raping a small child and a consenting couple of adults making love with a condom are basically the same, then it’s a quick jump to this sort of bullshit. And let’s face it---Douthat, Donohue and the Catholic hierarchy reserve far more of their energy condemning the latter than the former. For instance, Douthat is using this scandal to insinuate that if it weren’t for legal condoms, the children would go unraped.
His argument in fact is 100% backwards. Bill Donohue has been all over the TV telling a lot of lies and trying to confuse the issue. But in trying to promote one of his pet theories---basically that we should blame the parents and not the rapists or the people who covered up for them---he’s inadvertently tipping his hat to a historical reality. And that is that in the 50s and 60s, pressing charges for rape was a much scarier deal, because it simply wasn’t treated as a serious crime in near the same way it is now. Child sexual abuse was particularly buried. In fact, Donohue is still trying to minimize the sexual assault of children like it was the 1950s.
I already posted on this, but the hits just keep on coming. You have to feel sorry for the Catholic hierarchy, apparently. They didn’t get the memo about the modern world starting to look poorly on treating children like rape objects instead of human beings, and now they’ve been blindsided by all these nutty people acting like it’s such a big deal, helping child rapists cover up their crimes and find brand new victims when they get bored with their current ones, or the parents start getting irrationally huffy. Now the NY archbishop has come forward to set the record straight:
The leader of the nation’s second-largest diocese urged his congregation to pray for the pope, saying he was suffering some of the same unjust accusations once faced by Jesus.
Apparently, the crowd thought this was the best thing ever, and applauded for 20 seconds straight. God only knows what kind of rousing success it would be if Archbishop Dolan stopped being so mealymouthed about this. Perhaps he could suggest that child rape could be added as a brand-new sacrament. Think of the possibilities! You not only don’t have to hand your priests who rape children over to the cops because you can argue that it’s religious freedom, but you can also suggest that you’re doing god’s work by moving rapist priests around from parish to parish, keeping their victim pool fresh and non-suspicious. Parents who throw a fit over their kids getting raped could be guilt-tripped about standing between priests and their salvation. You could even insinuate that Jesus liked to touch the young stuff on occasion, to keep himself pure from the more mature and therefore real sexuality.
You may think that offering such a suggestion would cause those sitting in the pews to freak out and run for the doors. But I’d offer that you’re probably wrong. They applauded for 20 seconds at the suggestion that someone who helps cover up child rape is basically like Jesus, and anyone who objects to covering up child rape is like the people who killed Jesus. They’d probably give you a 3 minute standing ovation if you stopped being mealy-mouthed about it and suggested that child rape is not only not that big a deal, but some great thing the community should openly instead of surreptitiously support.
I hate to be that cynical, but it looks from this event like there’s no amount of shit that the rabidly devout parishioners won’t swallow if their be-frocked clergy are the ones shoveling it.
I’m not usually one to do this, but I’m going to put the image I’m talking about below the fold at the bottom of this post, because it’s so gross I don’t want to foul up the front page of Pandagon. And since we’re not really squeamish here, that’s saying a lot. I wouldn’t post it at all, but it helps to understand the discussion if you can see it. It’s a cartoon that Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom drew, and it shows Obama getting up after having just raped the Statue of Liberty, telling her she “consented” in 2008 by electing him while she sobs. He also promises to come back to gang rape her with immigration reform, amongst other things.
Jeff and SEK have posted on this, and both are sort of amazed that while Darleen acknowledged and tried to defend herself against the racism of the cartoon, the fact that this sort of joke about rape is pretty fucking sick didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. I guess that should be more surprising coming from a woman, but I’ve dealt with Darleen before, and she’s the textbook example of a female misogynist. So I’m not surprised. About this, Jeff says:
I have, thankfully, never been a victim of sexual assault, but I’ve met my share of survivors, read their stories and done my best, as a compassionate human, to understand what the attacks have done to them, and to work as an ally to make sure that I stand against those who would minimize those attacks.
I cannot speak for anyone who’s suffered through the process of dealing with assault, but I’ve yet to see anyone who’s dealt first-hand with the issue see it as a metaphor to be drug out to describe political events. It’s far too personal for that. It’s like describing a zoning decision as a Holocaust — it’s just too big to be a metaphor.
Well, it’s not the bat signal, but I figure if Jeff wants the perspective of an actual rape survivor, which I’ve been open about being, then I’ll happily oblige. The callousness to actual rape victims on display here is simply a more explicit version of a rhetorical trope that’s been in play since Obama took office, and has really escalated as the favorite metaphor used by conservatives to describe health care reform. Maybe having gone through a literal sexual assault makes me a little quicker to pick up on this, or maybe it’s just really obvious, but the non-stop bleating about how health care reform is being shoved down various throats is a rape metaphor. In its most abstract, maybe not, but they dwell on it so much that it’s hard to forget that it’s a rape metaphor, even if it’s a mainstreamed one. Every time Limbaugh squawks about having to bend over and take it? Rape metaphor. Rape is not only the favorite metaphor conservatives use for health care reform, it’s quickly becoming the only one.
How does this make me feel? I’m not really in a position to speak for most rape survivors, but what I personally feel is frustrated and pissed off. Every time I hear a conservative use rape as a metaphor where they cast themselves as the hapless victims, I want to point out that this means all their rape apology crap is clearly that---misogynist crap.
Let me explain. When it comes to actual rapes, the right wing position is that the problem of rape is way overblown, and that most rapes---most anything that gets called a date or acquaintance rape---aren’t a matter of men forcing themselves on women because they enjoy raping, but just bad sex that sluts regret later and therefore “cry rape”. Take for instance the debate on the BBC where Heather MacDonald basically denied that the vast majority of campus rapes were actual rape. It’s not fun having people imply to your face that you’re the sort of person who would lie about a good man for no reason except shame that you don’t have about sex or perhaps spite that you never felt towards the guy until he raped you. But that’s the least of the problems with this narrative. The big one is that the narrative conservatives tell obscures the fact that rapists rape because they enjoy the power trip over their victims. For whatever reason, a lot of right wingers like to push the idea that rape is a matter of innocent men getting mixed signals, which simply isn’t the reality of the situation. Rapists are predators and ordinary men are actually pretty good at understanding when a woman they’re on a date with isn’t into the sex.
But what’s both fascinating and frustrating is that when conservatives aren’t apologizing for actual rapists, it seems their understanding of what rape is reflects reality pretty well. When they use rape metaphors when describing health care, they contextualize rape as a brutal crime, a display of power over the victim for the sheer pleasure of forcing her to submit. This cartoon reflects this understanding; there’s no question that the Obama-rapist in the cartoon was confused about his Liberty-victim’s unwillingness to have sex with him. In this cartoon, in fact, the Obama-rapist gets off on the sadistic pleasure of hurting her. Which is like real life rape, but completely opposite of what conservatives say happens in these rape situations.
So, they clearly know what rape is all about, when they’re casting themselves as the victims. But when real life women are real life victims of rape, suddenly they go stupid and think it’s all a matter of too much alcohol or mixed signals. And that level of full-of-shitness pisses me off.
That they enjoy imagining themselves as the victims of a brutal metaphorical rape is the sort of fucked-up-ness that I can’t really wrap my mind around, but seems to be endemic in the hysterical wingnut population. Anyway, if you want to see the cartoon, it’s below the fold.
I feel like Captain Obvious pointing this out, but there’s so much confusion and defensiveness about religion and patriarchy out there, I’m going to have to say it: That there’s a bunch of rapist priests in the Catholic church and the Pope was involved in the cover-up should not be surprising. The Catholic church is the classic example of what feminists like me like to call ”rape culture”. Rape culture crops up when male power over women and children is exalted, when sexuality is demonized, and when men are encouraged to think of women (and children’s) bodies as their property. All these aspects of patriarchy aren’t only part of the Catholic church, they’re celebrated. The exuberant love of male dominance that is the Catholic dogma is going to turn men into rapists who get a rise out of sexually dominated people they believe are lesser than them.
Duh.
But let’s take this argument one piece at a time, looking at the similarities between secular rape culture and Catholic teachings.
In a rape culture, women are assumed to be public property. Rape culture never officially condones rape, but it condones the attitude that women exist to please men, and refusal from women to do so is bitchy. Secular rape culture is Nice Gusy® talking about women’s sexuality as something that’s handed out as a reward for good behavior. Rape culture is men thinking they have a standing right to interrupt what women are doing and hit on them, and that women who reject them straightforwardly are bitches. Rape culture is men telling strange women on the street to smile.
In secular rape culture, women are presumed up for sex with anyone who asks unless they make a big display of how not into they are. In rape culture, victims are chastised for what they were wearing, what party they went to, drinking, and even going on dates, which rape culture teaches is basically a yes to sex with whoever demands it. In rape culture, what women say they want is not considered relevant data, not compared to what they were wearing or drinking.
The Catholic church also teaches that women exist to serve men and do not have the right to say no. A sexually active woman has no right to say no to any sperm that decide to set up shop in her uterus. Catholic women are taught their bodies and their sexualities don’t belong to them, but that these things exist solely to produce more and more babies. You not only are assumed to have a standing invitation to baby-making if you’re sexually active, but they don’t even give you the slim technical right to say no that secular rape culture gives you. But really, the main difference between the two versions of rape culture is that the secular one believes that women have to take all comers, penis-wise, and the Catholic one believes this about sperm.
How can the Pope extricate himself from this evil? There’s nothing else to call it. The New York Times has extensive coverage and—there’s a document trail a mile long.
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
... it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
The priest in question was in Wisconsin—the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a school for the deaf from 1950 to 1974. One of the boys’ statements:
Then-Cardinal Ratzinger showed little interest in the criminal activity and warnings from an Archbishop:
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
What makes this story so significant is that in Pope Benedict’s letter to the Irish flock last week, he said that the church should cooperate with local law enforcement in abuse cases, something as Cardinal he clearly had no intention of doing in order to protect the church.
Pedophile Father Murphy was not only spared criminal prosecution, the Catholic Church—even after three successive archbishops were made aware of his sexual abuse of childre—he was transferred to spend the rest of his priesthood AROUND CHILDREN.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998 still a priest.
Has the Vatican responded? Well, I guess this is what you could call one, and it’s not from Benedict himself:
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.
Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.
And we’ve been hearing this excuse akin to “it was different back then”—as if it were ever OK to ignore and cover up allegations of the sexual abuse of children. This investigation has turned up documentation that shows this was the MO of the church as late as 1997.
Oh man, it’s getting ugly now. How do you like the gauntlet that Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of the Catholic Church’s Irish flock, has thrown down at Pope Benedict. Why? It’s because Brady is under his own cloud of abuse scandal, and smells blood in the water now that Papa Ratzi is hanging on for dear life when it comes to responsibility for child-raping priests on his watch.
The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has said he will only resign if asked by the Pope amid allegations he witnessed teenage abuse victims take vows of silence over a paedophile.
Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, admitted that he attended meetings in 1975 when two teenage boys signed oaths of silence while testifying in a Church inquiry against Father Brendan Smyth.
The priest was later uncovered as the most notorious child abuser in the Irish Catholic Church, carrying out more than 90 sexual assaults against 40 youngsters in a 20-year period. Survivors’ groups say the revelations show the cardinal colluded in the cover up of Smyth’s crimes – which, they say, allowed the cleric to continue offending - and say he must quit immediately.
Dr Brady claimed that wider society handled child abuse cases differently in the 1970s. ’There was a culture of silence about this, a culture of secrecy, that’s the way society dealt with it.’
Wow. What a defense that is—“everybody was doing it,” as priest after priest was shuffled from one diocese to another to victimize hundreds of children. I don’t know what culture of silence he’s talking about, but he, in a position of power, and as an adult with great power over the lives of innocent children, surely knew what he was doing was immoral and criminal activity. Does he feel any guilt? Hell, no.
Abuse campaigner Colm O’Gorman said Cardinal Brady ‘is now deeply personally implicated in the gross failures of the Catholic Church in the management of Smyth and his rampant sexual offending against children.’
...Cardinal Brady said yesterday that he would not be resigning because he had done nothing wrong. ‘I did act, and act effectively, in that inquiry to produce the grounds for removing Father Smyth from ministry and specifically it was underlined that he was not to hear confessions and that was very important.’
A shout-out to Cranmer, who compiled a list of shame in the post ”Is Pope Benedict XVI about to resign?” (Doubt it, they’d have to pry the Pradas off of his cold dead feet). It’s below the fold.
The Vatican spokesman, speaking to Vatican Radio and Associated Press Television News, defended Benedict.
“It’s rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
“For any objective observer, it’s clear that these efforts have failed,” Lombardi said, reiterating his statement a day earlier noting the Munich diocese has insisted that Benedict wasn’t involved in the decision while archbishop there to transfer the suspected child abuser.
Lombardi told The AP that ”there hasn’t been in the least bit any policy of silence.”
“The pope is a person whose stand on clarity, on transparency and whose decision to face these problems is above discussion,” Lombardi said, citing the comments by Scicluna, who works in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which was long headed by Benedict before his election as pontiff.
“To accuse the current pope of hiding (cases) is false and defamatory,” Scicluna said. As Vatican cardinal in charge of the policy on sex abuse, the future pope “showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases,” Scicluna said.
Wow. Do they think we’ve all forgotten how Cardinal Law was shipped out of Boston as he was about to face charges for abuse cover up, all the secret settlements? Amazing.
It is already clear that Catholic Church was covering up abuse cases as a matter of policy, thus the secrecy and the payouts. If the defense is going to be that poor Cardinal Ratzinger was forced to facilitate the coverup of child rape by priests because “everyone is doing it” or worse, that he never knew about it, will simply not fly. (NYT):
When a sex abuse scandal broke in Boston church in 2002, Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Ratzinger — was among the Vatican officials who made statements that minimized the problem and accused the news media of blowing it out of proportion.
As far as the Munich abuse cases and the decision to send a pedophile priest back out to work with children, something that the archdiocese claims Ratzinger knew nothing about, out comes the fall guy defense. That’s not flying either.
The former vicar general took full responsibility for the decision to reinstate the priest to pastoral work. “I deeply regret that this decision resulted in offenses against youths and apologize to all who were harmed by it,” he said, according to a statement posted on the archdiocese’s Web site.
There was immediate skepticism that Benedict, as archbishop, would not have known of the details of the case.
The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church, said the vicar general’s claim was not credible.
“Nonsense,” said Father Doyle, who has served as an expert witness in sexual abuse lawsuits. “Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”
This is really sad for those sick about what this is doing to the faithful, to see the hierarchy neck-deep in scandal.
I wish I had a more fun, cheeky thing to post on before a holiday weekend, but I can’t just let this new sex tape scandal thing slide. In the past, I’ve suggested that men who film women (with their consent) having sex and then release it (without their consent) are committing a form of sexual assault---not legally rape, of course, but indistinguishable from other forms of rape in that the intention is to use sex as a weapon to hurt and humiliate the victim. I feel that releasing a sex tape without the permission of everyone involved needs to be elevated to the level of a crime, because it has so much in common with other forms of violence against women, and simply making it a matter for the civil courts isn’t doing enough to stop this practice. The victim in this case is Kendra Wilkinson, and the story is really illustrative in this case of my point.
The bizarre, feeble attempts to beat back the scandals that are collapsing the Catholic Church continue, and in 
Benedict’s personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, spoke out Tuesday for the first time since the scandal broke, defending the pope’s prolonged silence on the German cases and charging that Benedict had done more than anyone else to crack down on abuse.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the role of the vow of celibacy in the priest child rape scandals. It ranges from the irresponsible (suggesting that rape is the result of sexual frustration, instead of the will to dominate) to the more interesting (that celibacy contorts sexuality, or that celibacy attracts criminal deviants who need cover). But most of this speculation misses the point, because it focuses on the role celibacy plays for offenders. It gives defenders of the Catholic church---who are becoming one with rape apologists very quickly---ammo to minimize the situation, because they can point to churches without celibacy requirements that nonetheless have child rape problems. And it turns attention away from the biggest issue here, which is the institutional support and protection the Catholic church has offered to child rapists. Rapists are extremely opportunistic criminals, and are far less likely to offend if they think they’re going to face consequences. So if you, like the Catholic church, offer protection and support, you’re basically encouraging rape.
The Pope can’t blame a NYT conspiracy or rumor-mongering this time. Whatever “woes” the Catholic Church is experiencing is a result of the multitude of cases of child-raping priests left free to run amok mount, leaving the church looking more like a crime syndicate than a bastion of faith.
Another big shout-out for criminal enterprise-defending Bill Donohue—in this particular case, the pedophile priest molested a young girl in his Truckee home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison. How does that fit into your “homosexual problem in the church” meme, Bill? These priests are engaging in deviant criminal behavior.
A couple of people sent me this story from 
One of the most interesting trends of the past few years is the rapid way that bullying has been redefined as an inevitable part of young life, and being treated as a problem that we should see as fixable, or at least addressable. 
I want to stop posting on this Catholic child rape scandal, I really do. But the flagrant blame-shifting and rape apologism from devoted Catholic pundits who can’t imagine not having a church to justify their seething fear of female sexuality just keeps on keeping on. I shouldn’t have even opened up 
I’m not usually one to do this, but I’m going to put the image I’m talking about below the fold at the bottom of this post, because it’s so gross I don’t want to foul up the front page of Pandagon. And since we’re not really squeamish here, that’s saying a lot. I wouldn’t post it at all, but it helps to understand the discussion if you can see it. It’s a cartoon that Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom drew, and it shows Obama getting up after having just raped the Statue of Liberty, telling her she “consented” in 2008 by electing him while she sobs. He also promises to come back to gang rape her with immigration reform, amongst other things.
I feel like Captain Obvious pointing this out, but there’s so much confusion and defensiveness about religion and patriarchy out there, I’m going to have to say it: That there’s a bunch of rapist priests in the Catholic church and the Pope was involved in the cover-up should not be surprising. The Catholic church is the classic example of what feminists like me like to call ”
Oh man, it’s getting ugly now. How do you like the gauntlet that Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of the Catholic Church’s Irish flock, has thrown down at Pope Benedict. Why? It’s because Brady 