Free Republic

In a troubling trend, police in Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana have arrested a number of church leaders in separate cases for failing to report alleged child abuse. The wave of cases, which have arisen in the last month, raises questions about church and ministry accountability and their legal and moral obligations to protect children in their care, specifically by alerting civil authorities when leaders suspect abuse. This basic duty has been a fixture of American law for well over half a century. Since 1967, every state has enacted some form of mandatory child-abuse reporting law. But in nearly...

FULL TITLE: Jury awards $35 million to a woman who says Jehovah's Witnesses covered up her sexual abuse as a child by a congregation member he Jehovah's Witnesses must pay $35 million to a woman who says the church covered up her sexual abuse as a child at the hands of a congregation member. Issued by a jury in Montana on Wednesday, both the Thompson Falls congregation and the national organization, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, was ordered to pay $4 million in compensation and $31 million in punitive damages. The 21-year-old accuser said higher-ups told local...

Contradiction is no stranger to the mainstream media, and it is on full display in their treatment of the Catholic priest sexual abuse story. Normally, the media take pains to point out that transgressors should not be used to typify the group with which they're associated. For instance, when terrorism is covered, we're told that the jihadists of the world constitute just a small group of "extremists" and do not represent Islam -- that is, when the media can't manage to identify such people only as "youths" and must actually address the issue in the first place. Yet with the...