Cardinal who fled Boston at height of child-molestation scandal dies in Rome

the second link Adam posted

That's why I have no problem relegating that old scumbag to whatever hell he ends up in.

Yeah, how dare people criticize the guy who enabled hundreds of cases of kids being raped!!1

Given the position of power and influence of the church in the region at the time of these crimes, he was really the only, best option to stop it. He didn't and many people's lives were ruined. I can have plenty of room in my heart to despise both Law AND the pedophiles - it's not an either or situation.

Or do you think Paul Shanley would get a free pass from these same commenters if he were the one being discussed? I mean, really?

Are you? Law was not anything resembling a human being. A real human being would have stopped those men, not moved them around to different parishes.

Then, yes. Dying doesn't make them less of a malicious shitbag, it just ends their ability to act as a malicious shitbag. Some things are irredeemable and death is never a redeeming trait anyways.

Picked him and one of his boys up at the complex in Brighton to take him to Donna Morrissey's little jerk off gala where the Catholics who fuck people every day in business got to feel good about it by throwing money at Law.

They had a little girl in the car with them and when the girl noticed the decanter in the back of the stretch with the Scotch in it, she asked Law what was in it.

"Medicine" was his reply. I wonder how many priests told how many kids that they needed the medicine to make the sugar go down. In His name.

I give religion another century, tops, with only the least civilized still clinging to it then. I look forward to more churches being turned into condos and restaurants. Journalism will be around forever, thankfully, in some form or another.

I think that one cuts to the chase

Though researchers settled this question decades ago, it’s still a popular talking point among right wing, low information, conservatives. Left unchallenged, Fish would have you believe that homosexuals can be fixed and, if in fact they couldn’t, they are a blight on God’s America that would inevitably drag us all to hell.

These days, about the only time we hear a connection between pedophiles and gay men is when it’s coming from far right-wing “family values” organizations. People such as Fish use it to instill fear and perpetuate bigotry and ignorance. At the core of their beliefs is the idea that unless LGBT people turn from their gayness, they will end up as destitute child molesters in hell.

There are factual studies that undermine their bigoted beliefs. For example, the National Research Council completed an exhaustive study of the correlation between homosexuality and child abuse (in 1993). They found that “the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual child molesters relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation. In fact, their research found that molesters of boys do not report sexual interest in adult men.”

In 1982, Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, a leading researcher, wrote:“Are homosexual adults in general sexually attracted to children and are preadolescent children at greater risk of molestation from homosexual adults than from heterosexual adults? He concluded that there is no reason to believe so.

Dr. Groth’s research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation. There is no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.

So the question becomes: where does this idea of a link between homosexuality and child molestation come from?

In the early 70s, Christian fundamentalist Anita Bryant began her “Save the Children” campaign, which sought to unite the conservative church against the gay community and deny gay people the right to hold jobs in public schools. Her fear tactics, claiming that gay men were molesters in teacher’s clothing, gained her a huge following and raised a lot of money. The same tactics are still used today, with much of the same misinformation used by Bryant.

A precursory Google search on the topic turns up a list of right-wing, fundamentalist Christian organizations, often affiliated with or supporting “ex-gay” ministries and reparative therapy counseling centers, that perpetuate this unscientific notion. The right wing Traditional Values organization said, “While they [homosexuals] comprise only 1-2% of the population, they are responsible for upwards of a third or more of all sexual molestations of children.”

World News Daily (one of Fish’s reference sources for all things fake) titled a 2002 article (emphasis theirs) PEDOPHILIA MORE COMMON AMONG ‘GAYS’, and then proceeded to quote a religious organization’s “findings,” though none of those same statistics could been found in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals.

Not surprisingly, the anti-gay group Family Research Council states unequivocally that gay people are “committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children,” though it doesn’t state where it gets its information. Also not surprising, they supply a long list of resources on their website that state nothing more than most child molesters are male and then make the gigantic leap that male child molesters who molest boys are gay men.

What Fish is unable or unwilling to accept is the idea homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality, as research has shown time and time again. LGBT people have no more of a propensity for child molestation than their straight counterparts. The mythical “gay agenda” doesn’t exist, except maybe to be able to simply live life like everyone else.

Fish is who he is - not very smart, a racist, homophobe, and a notorious, proven liar. Most of the time it is best to ignored him as I, like others, see his bullshit and trolling for what it is…in this case, however, he injects himself in an emotionally charged-issue for the mere purpose of perpetuate a proven lie. I just cannot let his comments stand without rebuttal.