Month: March 2010

This is incredible:

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The Big Picture collects photos from Haiti.

Yesterday the NYT reported that a group of abused "deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral." Amy Davidson is outraged:

[W]hat did these kids have to do to get noticed? You can blame the influence of the Church for why the police and prosecutors and parishioners, who may not have wanted to take a leaflet from some sad deaf man, didn’t listen—but only so far. It sounds as though there were many, many young Kitty Genoveses in Milwaukee, asking loudly for help, and that they were surrounded by adults who were, in the sense that really mattered, truly the deaf ones.

That is what Rozen reported yesterday:

“Apparently Bibi is very nervous, frantically calling his ‘seven,’ trying to figure out what to do,” one Washington Middle East hand said Wednesday. “The word I heard most today was ‘panic.’"

Today on the Dish, Andrew thought through the new rape case involving the pope and 200 deaf children. Reader feedback here. NRO mouthpieced for the Vatican, Bill Donohue blamed the NYT, Marian Wang talked to Globe muckraker Walter Robinson, and readers further discussed celibacy.

In other scandals, the UK kicked out an Israeli diplomat over Mossad's passports, Haaretz laid into Netanyahu, and Andrew dove into the WaPo archives on settlements. James Joyner and Ezra Klein worried about the Palin crazies, Joe Klein remarked on the hippified right, and readers laughed at NRO's Churchill comparison. The polls kept looking good for Obama.

The Dish surveyed the Google/China showdown, the conservative AEI fired Frum, Petraeus said no already, Bernstein wanted to bury the Sunday shows, Andrew owned up to a poor prediction, Kinsley continued the inflation thread, and readers kept up the dissent over Choi's tactics. Dan Zak spotlighted Alexa Meade and her amazing paintings while the Wansinks counted the calories of the Last Suppers.

I wanna hang with this dog.

— C.B.

[Re-posted from earlier today].

What's fascinating in the steady onslaught of new incidences of previous cover-ups of child rape and molestation in the Catholic hierarchy is the notion that the hierarchs tended to see child rape as a sin rather than a crime. Hence the emphasis on forgiveness, therapy, repentance – rather than removal, prosecution and investigation. Obviously, there's one reason for this: they were defending the reputation of the church by hiding its darkest secrets, and they were using the authority of religion to do so. But I suspect it's also true that this is how they genuinely thought of child rape or abuse.

How could that be, one asks? Well: imagine you are a young gay Catholic teen coming into his sexuality and utterly convinced that it's vile and evil. What do you do? I can tell you from my own experience. You bury it. But of course, you can't bury it. So you objectify sex; and masturbate. You cannot have sexual or even emotional contact with a teenage girl, because it is simply impossible, and you certainly cannot have sex with another teenage boy or you will burn in hell for ever … so you have sex with images in your own head. Your sex life becomes completely solitary. It can be empowered by pornography or simply teenage imagination. Some shard of beauty, some aspect of sensuality, some vision of desire will keep you sexually energized for days.

Now suppose your powers of suppression and attachment to religious authority are also strong – perhaps stronger because you feel so adrift you need something solid to cling onto in your psyche. And you know you cannot marry a woman. But you want to have status and cover as a single man. If this is the 1950s and 1960s, it's into the Church you go. You think it will cure you. In fact, it only makes you sicker because your denial is buttressed by their collective denial. And the whole thing becomes one big and deepening spiral of lies and corruption.

Many of these tormented men have arrested sexual and emotional development. They have never had a sexual or intimate relationship with any other human being. Sex for them is an abstraction, a sin, not an interaction with an equal. And their sexuality has been frozen at the first real moment of internal terror: their early teens. So they tend to be attracted still to those who are in their own stage of development: teenage boys. And in their new positions, they are given total access to these kids who revere them for their power.

So they use these children to express themselves sexually. They barely see these children as young and vulnerable human beings, incapable of true consent. Because they have never had a real sexual relationship, have never had to deal with the core issue of human equality and dignity in sex, they don't see the children as victims. Like the tortured gay man, Michael Jackson, they see them as friends. They are even gifted at interacting with them in non-sexual ways. One theme you find in many of these stories is that until these screwed up priests' abuse and molestation is revealed, they often have a great reputation as pastors. As emotionally developed as your average fourteen year old wanting to be loved, they sublimate a lot of their lives into clerical service. But they also act out sexually all the time.

And they know that many around them have the same patterns, and so a truly sick subculture perpetuates this. In the end, it is all about themselves and their pathologies, how to express them and how to hide them. As social sexual tolerance advances, and as fewer straight men are prepared to give up sex for life to become priests, the proportion of screwed up pastors increases. In this self-protective environment, these priests do not even see the children as fellow humans. They remain like those solitary abstract images in their heads. So they cannot fully grasp the enormity of the crime they are committing and see it merely as another part of the vortex of their sexual sin.

So they cover up for one another; they fear that if one of them falls, they will all fall; even those who are not totally screwed up about sex are eager to prevent the church's secret from being exposed. But the more they cover up, the bigger the calamity when it all emerges. And when it's clear that at the center of this kind of pathological secrecy and shame is the current Pope, then it is clear that the entire institution is corrupt from the top down.

These men are too objectively disordered to run a church. They bask in self-denial, while they wage a culture war against gay men who have actually dealt with their sexuality, who have owned it, and celebrated it and even found ways to channel it into adult relationships and even civil marriage.

We all know this game is now over. The current Pope is now found directly responsible for two clear incidents of covering up or ignoring child abuse and rape. As head of the organization that took responsibility for investigating these cases for so long, his complicity in this vast and twisted criminal conspiracy is not in dispute. If he were the head of a secular organization, he would have already resigned and be cooperating with the police.

But he is the Vicar of Christ on earth.

It's hard to imagine a deeper crisis for the Catholic hierarchy than this. If the church is to survive – and it will because it is the vessel of eternal truth – it will have to go through a wrenching transformation.

Beginning with the resignation of this Pope and an end to priestly celibacy.

Not that this can be in any way a surprise:

An initial statement on the matter issued earlier this month by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising placed full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties on Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber. But the memo, whose existence was confirmed by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest’s reassignment.

How can someone who is the problem also be the solution to it?

Marc Lynch has a sharp article on the Iraqi elections in The National. A taste:

American analysts, who have a difficult time imagining an Iraq without a large-scale US military ­presence, are anxiously scanning the political landscape in search of a reason why the United States cannot possibly withdraw its troops. But they miss the wider picture of an Iraqi public which no longer wants or needs their supposedly stabilising role. Whatever the private feelings of Iraqi leaders – many of whom may well fear for their political obsolescence, if not their physical safety, after American troops depart – the electoral campaign has made clear the strong nationalist current in Iraqi politics. No request for an extension of the US presence or a renegotiation of the agreement dictating troops depart by the end of 2012 is likely to be forthcoming.

Chait's takeaway:

Democrats ought to learn the correct lesson, which is that reciprocity is generally the majority party's best approach. A strategy of partisan cohesion is best met with a counter-strategy of partisan cohesion. Demonstrating their willingness to hold together in the face of united opposition has softened the opposition and made bipartisanship possible. Which is to say, if Democrats had abandoned health care reform on the grounds that it lacked bipartisan support, then the prospects for bipartisan support in the future would have been dimmer than they are. If some Republicans are willing to negotiate on financial regulation, as they appear to be, Democrats ought to reciprocate.