Posted on 03/25/2013 4:36:18 PM PDT by Starman417
Unless you're living in a cave, by now you probably heard that we have a new Pope. Personally, I'm glad he arrived for no other reason than we no longer have the continuous coverage filling the news cycle. Yes, I understand the importance of the event, but I don't think that it needed to dominate the news as it did. Hopefully there were no aliens (sorry, undocumented Americans) from outer space monitoring our airwaves, because if there were they are probably wondering why the Catholic Church is allowed to exist. From my informal, completely unscientific observations, had I known nothing of the church I would have thought that it's reasons for existence are to promote sexual abuse of children, malice toward gays and repression of women. Apparently it wasn't just me - The The Media Research Center did a study of the coverage and pretty much had the same observation.
I remembered some years back hearing about a study showing that sexual abuse is far more rampant in public schools than in the church, citing that The figures suggest the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests, said Shakshaft, according to Education Week. We hear about teacher abuse scandals on a semi-regular basis, but the 100 times number seemed high. So I did that crazy, extremist action that is an anathema to the left when facing data that seems too convenient in supporting an assumption, I looked at the source report to validate the claims. In fact, the original report backed up my hunch.
To make a long story short, at the top of the report it mentions that the study doesn't clearly differentiate between sexual abuse and sexual misconduct that makes its stats confusing at times. The report also doesn't break out (at least I didn't see it - didn't have time to read all 156 pages) between public and private/parochial schools. Fair enough. Let's say that the number is "only" 50 times greater, or double the rate reported by the Church, or even equal. How come we don't see similar hand wringing whenever a new Secretary of Education is named? I'm going to guess that our public school system affects far more Americans than the Catholic Church does, so shouldn't something of this magnitude be worthy of at least the similar coverage? I was curious myself, so I ran a few searches on Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education since 2009. Searching on his name alone just turned up some bio info, and searching on "Arne Duncan Sex Scandals" revealed more information about Duncan. Just skimming the headlines in the results I learned that he supports gay marriage, is appalled about what happened at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky, and that he supports gun control. Strangely enough there were no results dedicated to tying Duncan to the rampant sexual abuse in our school system. What if today a mainstream news outlet were to cover the head of our DOE in the same sneering, condescending tone that it uses to report on the Pope. I'm envisioning a TV broadcast from a field reporter out of Southern California...
Fresh off of the embarrassment of having to remove a quote from a mass murderer from the Department of Education's web site, the embattled Arne Duncan continues to struggle as the head of an agency that fights to adapt to modern times and is mired in sexual abuse scandals. Despite frequent claims from educators that what they do is for the children, this is difficult to reconcile in the face of teachers guilty of sexual misconduct who can not be terminated from their lucrative contracts at a time that so many local municipalities struggle to make budgetary ends meet. For that matter, even as these scandals continue to plague our school system the only event that warranted comment from the Secretary seemed to be only because the Penn State Sandusky scandal was one of a magnitude that even his own office could no longer ignore.
(excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
I really don’t care if one is worse than the other.
I spent twelve years in public school. I never had any one of my peers get diddled by a teacher—at least that I know of.
I have four, yes four, peers that I know personally, who have been diddled by priests.
I also have first hand knowledge of the crap our Bishop did in diddling young boys, and covering up the mis-deeds of not one, not two, but three of MY own parish priests over twenty years.
And not one of them is in jail because of the cover ups and obfuscations of the Princes of my church.
There is no excuse for what these men did. There is no amount of media outrage that is too much.
They are evil incarnate.
My experience with ministers’ issues have been with adultery. The few cases I have seen in our area were not predatory, and in fact, were consensual.
The ministers got the boot. No crime was committed.
Like the priests such men bear more than a little responsibility in their offices and claims of representing Christ.
The ministers in my experience suffered public humiliation, and banishment from their “flock.” What they did was immoral but not illegal.
They paid a higher price than did any of the priests in the little cabal that ruled Western MA.
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