By Bridgette P. Lavictoire
Lez Get Real
April 11, 2011
http://lezgetreal.com/2011/04/bill-donohue-blames-the-victims-gays-for-catholic-sex-abuse-scandal-once-again/
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"What accounts for the relentless attacks on the Church? Let's face it: if its teachings were pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-women clergy, the dogs would have been called off years ago." Have no doubt that Bill Donohue wants to believe what he wrote there. Imagine if, instead of being a reactionary force in the world, the Catholic Church was radical? Would the fact that priests who molested children were moved from parish to parish with nothing more than an internal review of the allegations against them and a "I've known this guy for over a decade, he would never molest a child" defense be enough to satisfy the Liberals of the world or the victims?
No.
While Donohue does have a point that there comes a time when the validity of a case has to be questioned, he loses that whole message in the entirety of his rant against Liberals and his attempts to divert attention away from the problem with the Catholic Church. Simply put, the Church has done little to actually address the problem, and that is to let there be open and honest police investigations into these allegations. Instead, the Church has done what it can to hide the fact that these priests have been molesting children.
It is not the fact that there are child molesting priests out there that has people upset, but rather the fact that the Church has done all it can to blame others and to hide the crimes from the public that has caused the outrage. Child molesting priests often abuse hundreds of victims, often repeatedly, and over the course of years. Their superiors do little to combat the problem other than move these predators from parish to parish so that they can continue to victimize other children, and then they claim that they knew nothing about it. They avoid responsibility.
TalkingPointsMemo notes:
"There is no other group in the U.S. which is subjected to such gross unfairness," Donohue writes, of priests.
Donohue claims "some are exploiting this issue for ideological and financial profit," and tries to combat specific points he takes exception to. He writes that he finds two problems with the "refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church."
[L]et'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 this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that "more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia." In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.
Actually, they were coerced, and it is called either pederasty or ephebophilia, and it is still sexual molestation. A child does not have to be raped to be molested. This, of course, shows that Donohue knows nothing about child sexual abuse. These are still victims, but then again, Donohue seems to want to believe that the problem is homosexuality rather than something deeper within the Catholic Church. He ignores that large numbers of the victims are girls after a certain point, but that there was a time when they were almost all boys because boys were easier to get a hold of for a priest.
TPM also notes:
In the letter, Donohue says the claims of abuse that are surfacing today "are almost all old cases [italics his]." He cites a "landmark study" conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004 (a study that was funded by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) to argue that "most of the abuse occurred during the heyday of the sexual revolution, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s."
"Why are priests being singled out when the sexual abuse of minors among other segments of the population is on-going today?" Donohue writes.
Because the Church hid the abuse. School principles typically do not. The reason why most of the cases right now are from the 1960's-1980's is not because of what Donohue wants to claim, incidentally. Most molestation victims do not remember being molested for long periods of time, especially if they are coerced into 'forgetting' through various bribes and threats. For some, it can be twenty, thirty, forty years before they remember or are even willing to come forward, and then there are the cases that did come forward but were 'dealt with' by the Church.
TPM talked to David Clohessy, the National Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Donohue blames SNAP and other victims' advocates for much of the focus on child molesting priests. TPM wrote:
David Clohessy, National Director of SNAP, told TPM in an interview that Donohue's letter is "ludicrous" and an attempt to "shift attention elsewhere."
"There is little Catholic officials can do to impact the leadership of sports and camp and daycare officials," he said. "There's tons Catholic officials can do to make their own institutions safer for kids."
"There's a need to pay more attention on child molesters in every walk of life, of course," Clohessy said. "But are priests being unfairly targeted? Absolutely not."
Clohessy said the "biggest and most tragic miss" in what Donohue wrote is that the issue isn't about particular priests.
"The crux of this crisis has always been the complicity of top church supervisors," he said. "So one reason there's attention on predator priests is because they tend to get by with their crimes and molest more kids. Because bishops ignore and conceal their crimes."
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