Have bishops “narrowed” their “privacy zones?”

Reuters reports “Bill Cosby's forthright views on black parenting came back to haunt him this week when a U.S. judge called the comedian a ‘public moralist’ who had lost the right of personal privacy in a 2005 civil sexual assault case.”

Judge Eduardo Robreno of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said that Cosby “has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, childrearing, family life, education and crime,” and that by doing so, “he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.”

The result: Cosby’s damaging long-sealed deposition in a civil lawsuit has been unsealed. And more people now realize what a criminal he is.

Let’s hope legal advocates for abuse victims start using this argument in clergy abuse and cover up cases. Surely church officials are perhaps the oldest and loudest “public moralists,” aren’t they?