8 IV 2023: Abusive clergy hardly newsworthy

A report published this week by the Attorney General of the State of Maryland brought to light the history of clerical sex abuse in America’s primatial see, the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It includes the usual abundant cases of abuse, long list of abusive priests, and failures of archbishops to protect their flock from these wolves. These disclosures will not have come as a surprise to anyone. When children, priests, and archbishops have been combined, the result has been almost everywhere the same. 

The Attorney General’s report contains the usual appalling figures: over a period of 60+ years, 156 abusers ruined the lives of at least 600 children. But do these figures even come close to the extent of the sexual abuse of children and administrative abuse by the Archdiocese and Curia? They are based on the victims who have come forward, and any reliable accounting would have to include victims who could not come forward. And in how many cases has ecclesiastical coverup succeeded in concealing the perpetrators of abuse. 

Could anyone come up with formulae like the following? for every ten identified victims there are another ten unidentified victims, and for every ten identified abusers there are another five unidentified abusers. Until we begin to include estimates like these, we will be unable to assess the extent of clerical sexual abuse and its clerical coverup.

5 IV 2023: Trump as tea-kettle

Well, we’ve been through what the media insist on calling “historic” indictment of a former president. It is remarkable, I guess, because unprecedented. On the other hand, does our Constitution assume that former presidents will never be guilty of a crime? We’re talking law, here, not theology.

So Trump was arraigned, ran home, and started sputtering like a tea-kettle. His “speech” at Mara Lago after the arraignment was the usual combination of lies and playground invective. Whenever I realize the amount of influence this crook has in America, I am ashamed of my country.

4 IV 2023: Not a ‘political indictment’; silly motorcade

Header on Huffpost: “Sen. Mitt Romney Criticizes ‘Political’ Indictment of Donald Trump.” No, Mitt, it’s a criminal indictment. Whatever part politics may have played, Trump’s crimes are real and listed in the indictment.

I think the motorcade of ten SUVs was too much. How much security does anyone need? I would like to know the lengths of the motorcades that accompanied leading Mafia figures to arraignment. Ten vehicles is typical Trump bombast.

1 IV 2023: Do it by the book

There is an article on Huffpost today that remarks apropos of Trump’s coming arraignment:

“Since no former president had ever been charged with a crime, there’s no rulebook for booking the defendant.”

This invites the question “Why would we expect there to be a special rulebook for booking a defendant who happens to have been President?” For all the phony glitter surrounding him, Trump remains a common criminal, and despite all the MAGA histrionics about his indictment, treating Trump any differently from a common criminal would be an attack on the foundations of the United States.

30 III 2023: Lions, and tigers, and transsexuals, Oh my!

The Missouri State Legislature is currently passing as many laws as they can think up to show how much they don’t like transsexual people. For some legislators this is only a posture assumed to please the “Christian vote,” but some legislators want to persecute LGBTQ people because, they say, that is what Jesus wants.

Never mind about Jesus, the United States Catholic bishops, in a pronouncement entitled, “Moral Limits to the Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” have jumped onto the bandwagon and forbidden Catholic hospitals to provide gender transition care or to do research in this field. I’m not surprised. The bishops are pre-occupied with sexuality and are always quick to forbid anything that in their view might be a threat to “the Family,” i.e., patriarchy. 

What these self-righteous people fear is a destabilizing of the male/female binary. They cannot do without binaries, good/bad, black/white, up/down, right/left, good/bad, and, especially, the stark binary male/female, the bedrock of patriarchy. Therefore they react with fear and anger at anything that might blur distinctions between their contrived notions of male and female. They are dog-whistling fear of transsexuals to their reactionary dupes. Whatever are parents to think of their daughter if she falls in love with a young man who is transsexual? Far worse, what are they to say if their son falls in love with a young woman who is transsexual?

24 III 2023: Republican Nuremberg Laws

Republicans are persecuting trans people, their families and physicians as enthusiastically and comprehensively as the Nazis went after the Jews. The Nazis enacted their Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Republicans in state legislatures are enacting their anti-trans laws of 2023, both vicious, reprehensible, intolerable.

19 III 2023: Mike is Mike

Mike Pence has not strayed very far from his old self. He is denouncing any indictment of Trump as “politically motivated,” and asserting Americans’ “right to peaceably assemble.” This is based on Instruction #4 of the Trumpian Handbook: “Don’t say anything that might offend any part of the base, for there are good people on both sides.”

And just as Trump stood up for the Nazis of Charlottesville, Pence is, by way of anticipation, standing up for people who would protest the arrest of an insurrectionist, Russian tool, and traitor.

The right wing has had plenty of time to form a selection of dodges around the Stormy Daniels affair.

1) Stormy is lying, as is everyone who takes her seriously, for Trump would never involve himself in anything so sordid, just as he has told us.

2) It could have happened, but that would have been before Trump was “saved.”

3) O.K., it happened, but it’s a free country where a rich man can do anything he wants, just as I would if I were rich.

4) Who wouldn’t pay hush money, do anything at all, to remove an impediment to the progress of the MAGA Movement?

I would prefer that prosecution of Trump in connection with the Stormy Daniels affair, the least of Trump’s crimes, be postponed after prosecution for greater crimes, sc., his  attempts to subvert the Constitution and his theft of government property. But as the cliché goes, “They got Al Capone for tax evasion.”

Of course, it may be that no amount of prosecution can be counted on to prevent Trump’s re-election. America cannot commit suicide without him.

18 III 2023: If a former president is a criminal, we must indict him or fail as a nation

For a long time now people have been carrying on as if the President of the United States were not a citizen who once held office, but a sacrosanct king who could do no wrong. A criminal is a criminal and must be prosecuted, and if this criminal is some sort of muckety-muck, someone notorious and wealthy, there is all the more reason that he must be prosecuted.

Oh, but Trumpy is anticipating the next stage of his persecution. As if it had been divinely revealed to him, he is predicting the date of his arrest and his mistreatment at the hands of the high priests and pharisees. He is summoning his worshippers to come to his aid, telling them “Protest, take our nation back,” which, being interpreted means: “Stage a revolt and keep me out of jail.”

And if his devotees riot because of his shocking grievances, and do violence at his bidding as on Jan 6, he won’t be to blame. No, he’ll again follow the Nazi public relations model. They denied party responsibility for the manifold brutality of Kristalnacht, and attributed the beating, pillaging, and murder of Jews to the righteous anger of “racial comrades” among the German people.

16 III 2023: “Parents’ Bill of Rights”

There is a bill before Congress that its authors and proponents call “The Parents Bill of Rights Act.” They claim this novel legislation will provide parents with a greater say in what educators teach. The authors of this bill are pandering to people whom they themselves have frightened by misrepresenting current trends in education. 

They are trying to disguise their bid for hegemony by misappropriating the title Bill of Rights. Parents do have a right and a duty to provide and direct the education of their children. However, they have no right to force public school curricula to coincide with their own beliefs or prejudices. Our public schools are responsible to the entire pluralistic community, not to any sect or political party. 

If parents find public school curricula offensive or inadequate they must found their own schools. Nineteenth-century Roman Catholics considered the public schools incompatible with Catholic teachings and educational philosophy, and so they created an alternative school system. Segregationists reacted to mandated integration of schools by founding their own segregated schools or “Christian academies.” Advocates of educational methodologies and curricula unavailable in public schools have founded their own schools, as have parents who were simply not content with the quality of education provided by public schools.

This “Parents Bill of Rights Act” is an attempt to provide the cover of law for efforts by Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs and their will on their fellow citizens. They like to claim that “America is a Christian country,” but if America is subjected to the control of these people, it will no longer be the United States of America nor in any way Christian.

15 III 2023: The vicious and stupid at play

1) “San Francisco Considers $5 Million Reparations Payouts To Eligible Black Adults.”  OK, but I think that in a Western state first consideration should be given to the few native Americans that remain. And, come on, $5 Million is chicken feed.

2) A state legislator in South Carolina (the home of the Confederacy, remember) has proposed a bill that would impose the death penalty for abortions. He had 23 co-sponsors for the bill. Imitators in the other barbarian states will probably try to outdo South Carolina by enacting laws that anyone who has an abortion will go to Hell.

3) Minnesota state senator Steve Drazkowski voted against a free lunch for children bill because “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry.”