I guess the Vatican figured they’d pick somebody who really knew the subject matter. I’d quote from the article itself, but the bullet headline and bullet points unfortunately suffice:
Roman Catholic church’s paedophile investigator jailed for possessing thousands of child porn images
Church orders review of child protection across the South West of England
Father-of-four was responsible for children’s safety at 120 churches and community groups for nine years
Police found more than 4,000 child porn images on his church-supplied computer
Contact: John Becker, Director of Communications and Development
Phone: 920-265-6023
Email: john@truthwinsout.org
Activist Who Exposed Marcus Bachmann’s Clinic for Practicing ‘Ex-Gay’ Therapy Brings Truth Wins Out to Progressive Catholic Gathering
MILWAUKEE, Wis. – Truth Wins Out, the national nonprofit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism and the “ex-gay” myth, announced today that it is sending activist John Becker to the Call to Action National Conference at Milwaukee’s Frontier Airlines Center from November 4-6. Becker conducted a recent hidden-camera sting operation that proved that the clinic run by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, practices so-called “ex-gay” therapy.
“I’m thrilled to travel to the Call to Action conference and meet with progressive Catholics from around the country who are fed up with the aggressive anti-LGBT agenda of their religious leaders,” said Becker, Director of Communications and Development for Truth Wins Out. “In the face of unrelenting bigotry from the Catholic hierarchy, right-wing Catholic laypeople, and the Knights of Columbus, it’s critical for equality-minded Catholics to stand up for inclusive values and speak out against religious extremism.”
The Catholic Church and its affiliates vociferously push an insidious anti-gay agenda. New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was the most outspoken opponent of that state’s marriage equality law. Minnesota’s Catholic bishops are currently leading the charge to add an anti-gay amendment to the state constitution, calling the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples a “top priority” in 2012 and using tax-exempt church resources for political purposes. The Knights of Columbus bankrolls the National Organization for Marriage, a group that fights against the civil rights of LGBT people across the country. And the Catholic Church even has its own “apostolate” for gay people, called Courage, that counsels members to abandon their natural sexuality for a lifetime of celibacy and endorses the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, a leading proponent of “ex-gay” conversion therapy.
“This extremism is totally out of step with the values of the vast majority of American Catholics,” said Becker. “I look forward to introducing attendees at the Call to Action conference to the important work of Truth Wins Out and encouraging them to continue standing up for LGBT equality in their churches and dioceses.”
Truth Wins Out (TWO) is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves. TWO monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes their leaders. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Really? Hippie-punching? Does the Vatican think this is going to work?
A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.
Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
[...]
The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
Of course. Because when you and I hear this…
We think peace and love and maybe we just like Joni Mitchell a whole lot and will take any excuse to post one of her songs.
But when Catholic priests hear it…
They diddle kids? Really? This is what the Catholic Church is going with?
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 arenotconnected. 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.
It’s refreshing when major extremist Christian leaders wear their professional victim status on their sleeves, or in this case, their elaborate frocks:
VATICAN CITY (RNS) A Vatican official told a United Nations body on Tuesday (March 22) that people who openly object to homosexual behavior are at risk of losing their human rights when they are prosecuted or stigmatized for their beliefs.
“People are being attacked for taking positions that do not support sexual behavior between people of the same sex,” said Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“When they express their moral beliefs or beliefs about human nature, which may also be expressions of religious convictions, or state opinions about scientific claims, they are stigmatized, and worse — they are vilified, and prosecuted,” Tomasi said.
“The truth is, these attacks are violations of fundamental human rights, and cannot be justified under any circumstances.”
In his statement, Tomasi said the Vatican “condemn(ed) all violence that is targeted against people because of their sexual feelings and thoughts, or sexual behaviors.” The Vatican also rejects all legal discrimination “based just on the person’s feelings and thoughts, including sexual thoughts and feelings.”
Their HUMAN RIGHTS?! Please, Archbishop Whoever, tell me about the extremist anti-gay Christians who have been denied housing, bullied, murdered, jailed for being bigots having a “moral objection to homosexuality.” No, seriously.
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.
Could this be part of why the Vatican promotes policies in Africa and around the world that kill people?
The Belgian Primate, André-Joseph Léonard, has again courted controversy. In a new book the Belgian Archbishop says that the disease AIDS is “a form of justice”.
[...]
The Archbishop who is seen as a conservative does not pull his punches. Speaking about AIDS he says that this is a kind “immanent justice”.
He compares AIDS with environmental challenges and points to man’s responsibility for global warming.
I note that the archbishop is probably mortal, and appears to be aging. If he someday suffers miserably from a prostate cancer that is ripping his guts apart, I hope he finds comfort in it as a kind of “immanent justice”. If he should suffer a massive stroke and his brain should bleed and fail, I hope he has a last moment of awareness to appreciate the “immanent justice” of his fate. I hope that if one day he is crossing the street and suddenly finds a bus roaring implacably in his direction, that the destination on the bus’s sign reads “Immanent Justice”.
The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld an appellate court ruling that the Vatican can be sued for sexual cleared the way for St. Paul lawyer Jeff Anderson to sue Pope Benedict on behalf of sex-abuse victims when it refused Monday to hear the Vatican’s appeal of an Oregon lawsuit. …
In declining to hear the case, the court upheld an appeals court ruling that the Vatican can be sued for sexual abuse if church officials knowingly reassign priests who have been accused of such acts in their previous parishes. The Vatican appeal had argued that the U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction over the Rome-based church.
This is great news — but it comes too late for countless youths who have been sexually abused by the likes of ex-gay activist Mike Jones — whose Michigan-based Corduroy Stone ministry was a veteran member of Exodus International. Truth Wins Out exposed Jones’ wrongdoing last year — but Exodus did not sever ties with Jones until nine months later. Not only has Jones not faced justice; Jones’ abusive activities have been hosted for free on Michigan State University’s web site. Like other member abusers, Jones was sheltered by Exodus long after his abuses were publicly exposed.
And the Supreme Court decision also comes too late for countless youths who were detained by Exodus’ flagship Love In Action-Refuge boot camp in Tennessee. For years, LIA reportedly exposed youths to potential predators during counseling sessions and hired untrained amateurs to control youths’ access to vital medications. By 2005, Tennessee regulators became alarmed by these reports and sought to take action. But in 2007, state officials — who again are funded and kept in office by Christian Right lobbies — overruled the regulators, effectively determining that the “religious freedom” of Christian Rightists serves as an absolute defense against Christian Rightists’ felony abuse of youths and against the freedom of religious minorities. To this day, LIA’s “Families and Friends Weekends” train relatives and peers to stubbornly trust in defamations about their loved ones despite all factual evidence to the contrary.
In both situations, government officials — intimidated or funded by Christian Right lobbyists — failed to prosecute and convict sexual, physical, and religious abuse.
The latest Supreme Court ruling gives hope to hundreds of thousands of clergy sex abuse victims. But until state and federal officials shed their financial and political ties to the Christian Right, victims of “ex-gay” abusers will continue to watch Exodus shield its abusive counselors. These victims also will continue to be shunned by the public officials who were elected and employed to ensure freedom, safety, and justice for all — not just for the Christian Right.
Without further ado, and inspired by the hilarity of the Vatican blaming child rape on gays (funny, since gays, and liberals in general, are the ones exposing these scandals most consistently and most thoroughly), Ranker made a list of the seven craziest things blamed on gays. Numbers one and two are Catholic child rape and 9/11, and you’ll have to click the clicky to read the rest. But the entire piece can be summed up in one sentence from entry number four:
It seems that fundamentalists blame that which they don’t accept or understand (science) on other things they don’t accept or understand (homosexuality).
Yep yep yep! All religious fundamentalists do this, be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or whatever else. Because they’re fundamentally incurious people, and because many of them actually believe that their worldview, however insane and discredited, is correct, things that don’t easily fit, like science, gays, magnets (how do THEY work?) and rainbows have to be awkwardly explained within the confines of their beliefs. The results are absurd.
Things that they don’t like are blamed on gays, blacks, feminists, liberals, Yurp, etc., while things they do like are attributed to, yes, miracles.
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the world’s most prominent atheist intellectuals, are seeking means to try the pope for crimes against humanity, their lawyers confirmed this weekend.
The pair are said to be working with British lawyers to see if the pope can be arrested for his part in the alleged cover-up of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during a visit to the United Kingdom in September
The Vatican has suggested that the pope is immune to prosecution as he is a head of state – Dawkins and Hitchens suggest that he is not immune as the Vatican is not represented at the United Nations.
Hitchens told the Sunday Times of London: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”
Dawkins and Hitchens are correct to assert that the Pope is not above or outside the law. Anyone connected to covering-up child rape ought to pay the societal consequences.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
