Apparently the Onion needed to weigh in on what one would think would be a no-brainer, but isn’t to some people.

Pearson fielded several questions from reporters, such as whether it is okay, when one sees a boy being raped, to wait until after lunch before contacting police, or if it is acceptable to simply inform the rapist in a firm tone that what he is doing is wrong and then leave it at that. The 10-year-old confirmed neither course of action was adequate.

Additionally, Pearson attempted to clear up any confusion as to whether an individual should contact the police even if he or she has been personally acquainted with the rapist for many years.

“We understand the delicacy of the situation when the person committing the rape is a coworker or otherwise someone you know quite well, but as 10-year-old boys with very few ways of protecting ourselves, we still have to insist that you go to the police,” Pearson said.

According to Pearson, even if one merely suspects he or she has seen a 10-year-old boy being raped, but is not absolutely certain, it is still a good idea to play it safe and allow police investigators to sort out the situation.

“Wouldn’t you be left with egg on your face if that little boy was actually being raped and you didn’t tell the police!” said Pearson, drawing a big laugh from the gathered crowd.

The nation’s 10-year-olds unanimously echoed Pearson’s sentiments, imploring people to contact police not only when they see prepubescent boys being raped, but, in fact, when they see anyone at all being raped, in any context.

[h/t Box Turtle Bulletin]

This is disgusting, even for pathetic hate group leader Peter “Porno Pete” LaBarbera.  Despite the fact that NO credible source, by which I mean, NO credible, scientifically sound source links homosexuality to being sexually abused as a child, Peter got up today and decided to use the tragedy of the molestation CNN anchor Don Lemon experienced as a child in order to try to score points for his pigheaded, hateful agenda.  Here’s Pete’s sub-headline:

Deluded out-and-proud ‘gays’ reject pedophilia as causing their sexual confusion

Slowly, with emphasis, Peter:  I was never molested as a child, and my dad and I were just fine when I was younger. Wayne played lots of sports [while I was a musical gay...diversity!], was never molested, and has a fantastic relationship with his parents, who have been together for forty-one years. My parents have been together for almost thirty-six.

How’s your little theory feeling now?

CNN evening anchor Don Lemon has declared his homosexuality — to the surprise of few who have followed his biased reporting on homosexuality issues

Peter’s media gay-dar is GREAT, y’all. It’s almost like a glittery light goes off in his head.

What is perplexing is that Lemon, like so many self-styled “gay” men, apparently does not view his molestation as a major causative factor in his homosexual identity and behavior.

Because everybody who isn’t a childish wingnut understands that science [not Creashun Science, Pete] has conclusively shown that the two don’t have a damn thing to do with each other? Maybe this is what separates us, as journalists, from you, as Porno Pete.

To me, there is no greater proof of the perverse self-deception of homosexuality than to behold how sexually confused adults incorporate their victimization at the hands of pedophiles into their out-and-proud “gay” identity.

Yeah, just like all the straight people who were molested as children and somehow don’t claim that was what made them heterosexual…

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t pull the “child rape made people gay” card and then refuse to explain the thousands of straight men who were abused as children by Catholic priests. I mean, you can, if you’re a disingenuous wingnut, but The Smart Side Of The Internet is going to pay attention, correct, point and then laugh.

Which is to say — even before reading his book: ”Don, you are not ‘gay,’ but the victim of a homosexual child molester, who corrupted your mind, body and soul — and innocence — at a tender young age!”

Nope, he’s a gay guy who happens to have suffered childhood abuse, but who has made a happier, more successful, more beautiful life for himself than Peter LaBarbera ever will.  How dare he cheapen and minimize the actual experiences of people who have had to live with sexual abuse they suffered as children to try to demonize gay people?  Absolutely disgusting, even for such a common troll.

Done.  Onto an actual story…

Disturbing news out of my home state of Wisconsin: Yesterday in the central Wisconsin town of Waupaca, 71-year-old former bus driver Delton Gorges was sentenced after being convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault of a child. Waupaca County Circuit Court Judge Philip Kirk made the following remarks from the bench while delivering the sentence:

I was looking for it here, Mr. Gorges, in one of the three reports I got, I couldn’t find it, but it described you as, or your self-description, as a heterosexual. That’s about the only piece of information in these three reports that I would correct as patently incorrect. Listening to all this stuff, it seems to me that… if you give [a] $10 bill to somebody and you buy $4 worth of goods, you ask for 2 threes back or one six. I think you were born gayer than a sweet-smelling jock strap, and I think that if anyone believes that in the last 10 years or 15 years, all of a sudden you developed an interest in homosexuality and young boys, then, uh, I must have looked ravishing in my prom dress this year. It is just wrong.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. “Gayer than a sweet-smelling jock strap?” Judge Kirk doth protest too much, methinks. The image is so vivid that I can’t help but wonder how often visions of sweet-smelling jock straps sassily sashay through his honor’s subconscious. How many hours of research went into his sweaty, stereotype-filled statement?

Kidding aside, Judge Kirk’s homophobic comments were unprofessional and inexcusable. In addition, they show that the spurious conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia remains so thoroughly embedded in popular culture that even an ostensibly well-educated circuit court judge has internalized the myth. As Equality Matters points out, this roundly-discredited meme is “one of the most cherished smears” of anti-gay groups like NARTH, the Family Research Council, Porno Pete’s AFTAH, and the American Family Association (and even the Vatican!). We at Truth Wins Out are all too familiar with these organizations — we spend a huge amount of time fighting back against their pernicious propaganda, so we find it incredibly disturbing that Judge Kirk would use the bully pulpit of the bench to spread their lies, regardless of whether or not he intended to do so.

Finally, many have rightly pointed out that Judge Kirk went on to make seemingly sympathetic remarks about the plight of gay people forced by society to remain closeted. That’s all well and good, but in our fervent search to find a silver lining, let’s make sure we don’t forget the facts: Delton Gorges is a convicted child molester. Homosexuality and child molestation are not connected. Kirk should never have linked the two in the first place. Saying that his later, friendlier remarks somehow mitigate the earlier, offensive ones, or taking them as evidence that Judge Kirk “means well,” makes just about as much sense as putting lipstick on a pig or gold plating on a pile of dung.

A few days back, we had a little fun with Dr. Michael Brown, who was bellyaching about the fact that he wrote a 700 page book on how much he hates gay people [he calls it "love," but we're all about accuracy here], but nobody cared.  Indeed, publishers wouldn’t even touch it, probably because it was boring.  If I were in the mood to read 700 pages of blah blah blah, discredited “research,” fundamentalist bigotry euphemized as “Christian love,” I would review it for you.  I, however, would rather pick up sticks in the backyard and poke myself with them repeatedly.  As you know, I’d probably snark it up, do a little skewering, etc. 

Fortunately, Kathy Baldock has done the painful work of reading and reviewing it, and it’s funny.  Kathy takes a very different approach to things from me, but she reaches basically the same conclusions.  Kathy is a deeply committed Christian, and as she goes, chapter by chapter, through the book, she keeps looking for genuine love from this man, but can only go so far as to find that he thinks he loves people. 

Most egregious is the chapter where he starts by saying he’s not equating homosexuality with pedophilia, but then, according to Kathy, spends a good forty pages talking about pedophiles.  At times like these, it’s useful to remember that Michael Brown and his ideological cohorts know their audience.  They know how to blow dogwhistles that will send anti-gay wingnuts clutching their misunderstood Bibles in fear of The Gays.  Here’s Kathy’s summary of that section:

The chapter starts with : “MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT EQUATING HOMOSEXUAL PRACTICE WITH PEDOPHILIA. MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT CALLING ALL HOMOSEXUALS PEDOPHILES”

However, the next FORTY pages are about pedophilia. So repulsive, it amazed me that Dr. Brown would include it. Why does he say he included it then? Pedophiles say they are born that way and the slippery slope to including homosexuals with equal status will open the doors to pedophiles wanting equality and acceptance too.

This section made me angry. Just because you say “I am not saying this . . . ” and then publish FORTY pages of trash in the midst of a book on the dangers/damage of/by homosexuals does not negate the impact of the natural association that people will make to homosexuality. This is one of the most disgusting ploys, intentional or not, of the entire book. Dr. Brown could have stated his concerns in one paragraph, yet, I was subjected to reading the NAMBLA boy-love trash???

How many already anti-gay readers will duct tape the whole yucky mess onto the GLBT community? How many potential GLBT readers will you thoroughly offend by this most egregious, don’t-think-about-the-pink-elephant tactic? So offensive and incredibly subtly manipulative. Completely gratuitous porn. No wonder no publisher would touch this manuscript. This may have been one of the two major disqualifiers from options other than self publish.

Yes, I know: “MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT EQUATING HOMOSEXUAL PRACTICE WITH PEDOPHILIA. MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT CALLING ALL HOMOSEXUALS PEDOPHILES” but, what will your readers hear? What will they remember? Horrid. You should have left it unspeakable.

This is classic Michael Brown, though. He’s probably one of the most vitriolic anti-gay voices out there, but he’s been taught [brainwashed] to believe that if he “reaches out” wanting “dialogue,” and is moreover “polite” about it, then he is blameless for spewing unrepentantly incorrect anti-gay bullshit to his drooling readers, because he was “nice.” This is a fundamental difference between religious conservative wingnuts and reality-based dwellers. THEY are obsessed with tone. WE are obsessed with truth, and some of us do it in a nice way, others hurl F-bombs, and everything in between, but at the end of the day, what matters is what is actually, verifably correct. Michael Brown, on the other hand, sweetly insinuates that homosexuality and pedophilia are inextricably linked [something EVERY grown-up real-life study on the subject has shown to be false] by writing a million words about it in a book that’s supposed to be about gay people. What a troll.

Elsewhere, he devotes a chapter to the consumer fraud known as the “ex-gay” industrial complex, citing sources like NARTH [RentBoy say what?] and the gay-obsessed shame of the Presbyterian church, Rob Gagnon. According to Kathy, though, that sort of takes second billing to his whiny recounting of all the times Wayne Besen has been mean to him over the years. [Why you so mean to Michael Brown, Wayne?] Here’s Kathy’s section on “ex-gay”ness in Brown’s book:

It is a fact that the ex-gay movement does exist. It is a fact that some people find reconciliation of faith and sexuality in these groups. It is a fact that some people do get heterosexually married or remain celibate for the rest of their lives.

It is fiction however, that people change their orientation. When I see the footnotes and quotes citing Nicolosi, NARTH and Gagnon, I know Dr. Brown has gone to the extremes for his research. Even Alan Chambers of Exodus would have told Dr. Brown that no one can change their orientation and Alan Chambers is supposed to be the Christian church world expert. Anything out of NARTH as a resource? Rent Boy ring a bell? Please Dr. Brown, call Michael Bussee and talk to him. One of Exodus originals. Ask him why he got discouraged by the lies of those around him. Or Darlene Bogle, one of the Exodus speakers, leaders, author of two or their books, counselor for fifteen years. She lives with her wife in San Jose. Or John Smid who ran Love in Action, a residence program for reparative therapy for twenty two years.

Dr. Brown instead focuses on Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out, gay activist extraordinaire and recounts the tiffs he and Wayne have had.

Well, if you know you’ve got no argument, might as well try to paint the experts in a bad light. Or maybe Brown just has a crush on Wayne.

Anyway, that’s just two of the chapters of this, again, SEVEN HUNDRED PAGE BOOK on how gays are icky. Go read the rest of Kathy’s review to see what else she found.

Next to the public park with the kids playing.

But he totally wasn’t jerking off to the kids, honest!

Reverend Grant Storms was booked on Friday after his arrest at Lafreniere Park. Witnesses told investigators they saw the man fondling himself in his van while watching children on the playground.

JPSO authorities said Storms admitted to the offense. He denies the charge and says no children were around.

Right.

You’ll remember from yesterday that this is the fundamentalist pastor who runs around Southern Decadence in New Orleans [and other places] preaching with huge signs listing the various kinds of people [including peodphiles] who will be burning in hell. His original story is that he was urinating in a bottle, which is strange in and of itself in the middle of a day in a van next to a park where kids are playing…

The thing about wingnuts is that everything they disagree with is, in their minds, endowed with superpowers and possibly capable of bringing about the very apocalypse they simultaneously fear and desperately wish for. Consider this bit of mildly positive news about HUD:

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking steps to ensure gays and lesbians don’t face discrimination when applying for federal housing assistance.

HUD has unveiled a series of proposed rule changes that would prohibit lenders from using sexual orientation or gender identity as a way of determining a borrower’s eligibility. The rule change would state that eligible families have the opportunity to participate in HUD-based programs regardless of marital status or sexual orientation.

The new rules, if adopted, also would prohibit owners and operators of HUD-funded housing from asking applicants or household occupants about sexual orientation or gender identity.

The proposals must undergo a 60-day public comment period before formal implementation.

So, that’s nice. Not a huge change, but a small step to ensure fair treatment for all people.

Now, let’s watch Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association absolutely weeing all over himself over this news. The headline:

HUD projects now hunting grounds for homosexual child molesters

Religious Right figures bitch when we call them homophobes, but this is why. Can you not just smell the abject, night-sweat-producing fear in that headline? It’s bizarre, like all irrational prejudice against entire groups of people is bizarre, but there you go.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is proposing a new rule that would require that homosexuals, transsexuals, transgenders, and cross-dressing transvestites be given the same access to taxpayer-funded HUD programs that sexually normal people have.

I don’t know that I would call fundamentalists “sexually normal.” I mean, the English language is evolving, but come on now.

No “arbitrary exclusion” would be allowed, as if taking sexual deviancy into account is something capricious. But we know that homosexual behavior poses the same health risks that intravenous drug use and prostitution pose

Liar or stupid…liar or stupid? [Both.]

Survey after survey indicates that homosexuals have higher levels of income and education than sexually normal individuals, meaning they have a greater range of housing choices than normal folk as it is.

See, now we run into the dual nature of homophobia. In Bryan’s world, where cognitive dissonance does not exist [words too big, cannot process], gays are BOTH dangerous, dead-end, diseased health risks like lepers, but ALSO we are the richest, smartest damn lepers on the planet. We saw this during the fight to repeal DADT, when wingnuts like Bryan simultaneously made jokes [meant to prop up their thin images of their own masculinity] about gay people “feminizing” the military, making us weaker, etc., but also warned that gays are More Brutal Than Nazis and will “take over” the armed forces. We are that powerful with our pink curtains and stuff, you see. Wingnuts turn their ideological opponents into superheroes, while at the same time desperately trying to convince themselves and others that they are the ones holding moral and physical authority. It’s funny to watch, and kind of sad, sort of like when upon a summer’s day, you happen to chance upon a bumblebee repeatedly flying into a window, slamming up against it, coming back, slamming up against it again, never learning, etc.

So this really isn’t about access to housing; it’s about forcing the rest of us to accept homosexual behavior as normative, something no sane society should ever do.

Canada, Sweden, etc. = insane.

Iran = epitome of sanity.

[Bryan and pals: Seriously, just convert to Islam and move there. It's not like your religious beliefs have anything to do with the figure of Jesus anyway.]

The second thing at work here is that not only will this rule demonstrate government endorsement of homosexual behavior – which is the real goal of homosexual activists – it will give activists a way to punish, marginalize, and silence any landlords with deeply held moral and religious convictions who won’t cravenly capitulate to political correctness.

In other words, if this is going to be a “rule,” there have to be penalties for breaking it. Ultimately, this is about inflicting Inquisition-type pain on any HUD landlord who holds time-honored convictions about human sexuality. The vicious homosexual lobby wants to make them pay, and pay they will.

Being forced to follow the law in a free country, by not discriminating against entire groups of people = “Inquisition-type pain” for fundamentalists. Because they are weak people.

Now, for the obligatory quote combining the wingnut victim complex with their constant obsession with gay sexytime:

This has already happened in England, where an elderly couple has just been dragged into court, convicted, and fined for refusing to rent a room with just one bed to a pair of homosexuals looking for a countryside tryst.

Straight couple going to bed and breakfast = vacay.

Gay couple going to bed and breakfast = ILLICIT COUNTRYSIDE TRYST!

So funny.

There are two more reasons why this is a perfectly bad idea. (I brought both of these up with the writer of the Christian Post article, but they did not make it into the published piece.) One, many young boys living in HUD housing are already in troubled domestic situations, many with no father presence in the home. The last thing they need is suddenly to be living next door to two males modeling a sexually abnormal lifestyle. Role models matter immensely to young boys, and they don’t need any more adults around them setting bad examples. They’ve already been exposed to enough of that.

Bryan Fischer thinks of the poor first, you see, as long as he can use his dim charitable instinct to bolster his case for hating gay people.

And we know – despite the howls of protest to the contrary – that male homosexuals molest young boys at a hugely exaggerated rate. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, did a study of its own priests who molested children, and found that 81% of the victims were boys.

Stupid, or liar? Stupid, or liar? [Still both.]

For slow members of the class: No credible study has linked homosexuality to pedophilia. Moreover, anyone with half a brain and a perfunctory knowledge of the subject knows that pedophilia is not about sexual orientation, i.e. the gender of the child does not matter. It’s about power, and it’s a sickness, and the reason there are more boy victims in the Catholic church is that [I cannot believe I'm having to explain this] priests have more access to young boys! [Duh.] Because of the gender separation reinforced by the patriarchy, priests have always been given beaucoups access to boys, so when they’re feeling molest-y, as so many of them so often do, the victims they have access to are boys.

That’s enough Bryan for now.  I truly think he may be the world’s stupidest, most fearful wingnut.

For the Catholic Church these days, no news is good news, because all the news that comes out makes them look worse and worse:

A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims’ groups described as “the smoking gun” needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.

The newly revealed letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland’s first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities.
Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

From the very top of the Vatican, the church’s image has always been more important than a few thousand raped children. And yet people continue to defend them.

[h/t PZ Myers]

Bill Donohue is a sick, twisted individual.  Herein, the latest proof of that statement, as Bill Donohue explains that a young boy molested by a priest wasn’t “raped,” but merely “rubbed,” that since the abuse started when the victim was thirteen, it wasn’t pedophilia, and that really, if the victim had a problem with it, he should have said something:

On September 28, the Chicago Tribune reported that “former Chicago priest and convicted sex offender Daniel McCormick sexually abused him [Doe] while he was a grammar school student.” We then learn that the student was really a middle-school student, in the eighth grade, when the abuse began. The abuse reportedly continued for five years. According to the lawsuit, “McCormack inappropriately sexually touched, hugged, rubbed and/or abused Doe.”

It’s time to ask some tough questions. Why did this young man not object earlier? Why did he allow the “abuse” to continue until he was 18? The use of the quotes is deliberate: the charge against the former priest is not rape, but rubbing. While still objectionable, there is a glacial difference between being rubbed and raped.

Here’s what we know. We know that this case, like most of them, was the work of a homosexual, not a pedophile. And like most of the cases of priestly sexual misconduct, there was no rape involved. Inappropriate touching is morally wrong, and the offenders should be punished, but the time has come to object to all those pundits who like to say that the scandal is all about child rape. Most of the cases did not involve children—they were post-pubescent males—and most weren’t raped.

Why does this matter? Because those looking to sue the Catholic Church for being inappropriately rubbed decades ago are not exactly the poster boys for the victims of child rape. And because those who hate the Church continue to use the term child rape as a way of discrediting the Church. They lie about this being a pedophilia problem and they lie about the nature of the misconduct. That’s reason enough to call them on it.

Bill Donohue is a pig who defends rape. And yes, Bill, that is rape.  My god, what kind of moron doesn’t understand that inappropriately touching a child in any way is child rape?!  I understand why Bill Donohue is completely devoid of morality, though; he was raised under the abusive thumb of the Catholic Church, where child rape is so prevalent as to be mundane.

[h/t Kyle]

I meant to highlight this over the weekend, but it slipped my mind.  P.Z. Myers points out a stunning finding about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Belgium:

Investigators, working with the support of the Belgian Catholic Church received 475 complaints of child abuse committed in the 1950s through to the late 1980s by Catholic clergy.

“We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members,” the commission concluded.

The 200-page report, published on Friday, contains testimonies from some 124 anonymous victims, revealing that abuse for most began at the age of 12.

It noted a “high number of suicides” with 13 deaths and six attempts attributed to “sexual abuse by a cleric”.

“We are talking here about anal and oral abuse, forced and mutual masturbation,” said Peter Adriaenssens, the psychiatric specialist in paedophilia who chaired the commission.

There’s your moral authority for the world, the Roman Catholic Church.

P.Z. sums it up:

Every congregation has a horror story about an abusive priest. That says something. This isn’t about a rare event — it’s about a common risk associated with growing up Catholic in Belgium.

Sick and scary, isn’t it? And unless further investigation reveals a nefarious Vatican plot to send all the child molesters to Belgium, it’s frightening to think what similar investigations in other nations will turn up.

Because Satan can only be so many places at once, you see.

“The devil tempts everyone — people in politics, in economics, in sport. And naturally, he tempts, above all, the religious leaders, so you shouldn’t be surprised if the devil tempts those in the Vatican. That’s his job.”

Father Gabriele Amorth isn’t speaking metaphorically when he says that. The 85-year-old priest means people can be tempted and literally possessed by Satan.

(…)

And as the chief exorcist of the Roman Catholic Church, it’s his job to expel the devil when someone is possessed. Amorth, the founder of the International Association of Exorcists, has performed more than 70,000 exorcisms in his career, he estimates.

But there is a difference between possession — where the devil takes hold of someone’s body and actions — and temptation, where Satan lures a person into doing evil, he said.

As a child abuse scandal sweeps across Europe, with accusations being made against priests in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, Amorth said the pedophiles are tempted, not possessed.

He has never done an exorcism on a child molester, he said.

“I have carried out exorcisms on some priests who had been molested by the devil,” he said, without going into details.
“But cases of pedophilia exorcised, no. … Pedophiles are not possessed by the devil, they are tempted by the devil,” he said.

Setting aside the utterly insane idea that people’s bodies are possessed or inhabited by invisible evil spirits for just a moment…

So, this exorcist (oh, to be paid throughout life for doing nothing) has done his monkey business on priests who have been “molested by the devil”?

I wasn’t aware the devil was into guys.

Any-hoo, I think it’s great that the Roman Catholic Church continues to talk about these things, because they just keep saying crazier and crazier things! And none of it is moving an inch toward exculpating the thugs! As far as I can see, it’s having the opposite effect, and each day and each new grotesque revelation are doing their part to continue chipping away at the moral authority of the Catholic Church, and the faster that happens, the better off the world will be.

(h/t Allison Kilkenny)