UNITED STATES
Salon
August 16, 2018
By Amanda Marcotte
Both sexual predation and anti-choice politics are rooted in patriarchal ideology and a culture of sexual shame
The Catholic Church sex abuse scandals are often talked about as if they are in the past, but this summer has been a reminder that this horror show continues to unspool, 16 years after the Boston Globe’s famous “Spotlight” series exposing the cover-up first ran. This week, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a report accusing more than 300 priests of abusing more than 1,000 children over seven decades. The details are almost incomprehensibly awful, including accusations of repeated rape, child pornography and priests who marked their victims with jewelry to alert other predators that these children had been “groomed” to accept abuse.
“The cover-up was sophisticated. And all the while, shockingly, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a press conference, in which he shared some of the worst details of the allegations. “These documents, from the dioceses’ own ‘Secret Archives,’ formed the backbone of this investigation.”
As political science professor Scott Lemieux said in a post at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, these revelations are especially important right now, when Donald Trump is trying to remake the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Lemieux notes that “the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania was a driving force behind bad legislation restricting abortion rights” during the same period the church was actively covering up for systematic child rape. Furthermore, that legislation “was the basis for a lawsuit from the state’s governor that severely damaged Roe v. Wade and very nearly resulted in it being overruled altogether.”
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