Bill Donohues Straight Talk, by Susan Campbell, The Hartford Courant, April 11, 2011

Bill Donohue's Straight Talk

By Susan Campbell
The Hartford Courant
April 11, 2011

http://blogs.courant.com/susan_campbell/2011/04/bill-donohues-straight-talk.html

Today's New York Times carries a full-page ad titled "Straight Talk About the Catholic Church," from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League.

Maybe the ad is not just in the Times. Perhaps donors to the Catholic League have the scratch to run the ad elsewhere. I went looking for it in other newspapers online, to no avail.

The ad contains Donohue's usual tropes about how unfair it is to target the Catholic Church when speaking about childhood sexual abuse, and he blames the media for fostering the idea that there is a widespread sexual abuse problem in the church today. He makes good points about the need for mandatory reporting, and the damage often done by the so-called therapeutic approach, which operates under the assumption that a pedophile can be "cured."

But his long essay also contains this rather startling statement:

"The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let's get it straight -- they weren't children and they weren't raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though that is, it is not rape)."

I have not seen Donohue in Courtroom 3B, Waterbury Superior Court, but I invite him to sit in on the testimony from the victims of George Reardon, former head of St. Francis Hospital endocrinology. Reardon's victims were often children -- 8, 9, 10 years old. And they were raped.

Court resumes at 10 a.m. tomorrow, Mr. Donohue.