Oh man, it’s getting ugly now. How do you like the gauntlet that Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of the Catholic Church’s Irish flock, has thrown down at Pope Benedict. Why? It’s because Brady is under his own cloud of abuse scandal, and smells blood in the water now that Papa Ratzi is hanging on for dear life when it comes to responsibility for child-raping priests on his watch.
The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has said he will only resign if asked by the Pope amid allegations he witnessed teenage abuse victims take vows of silence over a paedophile.
Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, admitted that he attended meetings in 1975 when two teenage boys signed oaths of silence while testifying in a Church inquiry against Father Brendan Smyth.
The priest was later uncovered as the most notorious child abuser in the Irish Catholic Church, carrying out more than 90 sexual assaults against 40 youngsters in a 20-year period. Survivors’ groups say the revelations show the cardinal colluded in the cover up of Smyth’s crimes – which, they say, allowed the cleric to continue offending - and say he must quit immediately.
Dr Brady claimed that wider society handled child abuse cases differently in the 1970s. ’There was a culture of silence about this, a culture of secrecy, that’s the way society dealt with it.’
Wow. What a defense that is—“everybody was doing it,” as priest after priest was shuffled from one diocese to another to victimize hundreds of children. I don’t know what culture of silence he’s talking about, but he, in a position of power, and as an adult with great power over the lives of innocent children, surely knew what he was doing was immoral and criminal activity. Does he feel any guilt? Hell, no.
Abuse campaigner Colm O’Gorman said Cardinal Brady ‘is now deeply personally implicated in the gross failures of the Catholic Church in the management of Smyth and his rampant sexual offending against children.’
...Cardinal Brady said yesterday that he would not be resigning because he had done nothing wrong. ‘I did act, and act effectively, in that inquiry to produce the grounds for removing Father Smyth from ministry and specifically it was underlined that he was not to hear confessions and that was very important.’
A shout-out to Cranmer, who compiled a list of shame in the post ”Is Pope Benedict XVI about to resign?” (Doubt it, they’d have to pry the Pradas off of his cold dead feet). It’s below the fold.
The Vatican spokesman, speaking to Vatican Radio and Associated Press Television News, defended Benedict.
“It’s rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
“For any objective observer, it’s clear that these efforts have failed,” Lombardi said, reiterating his statement a day earlier noting the Munich diocese has insisted that Benedict wasn’t involved in the decision while archbishop there to transfer the suspected child abuser.
Lombardi told The AP that ”there hasn’t been in the least bit any policy of silence.”
“The pope is a person whose stand on clarity, on transparency and whose decision to face these problems is above discussion,” Lombardi said, citing the comments by Scicluna, who works in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which was long headed by Benedict before his election as pontiff.
“To accuse the current pope of hiding (cases) is false and defamatory,” Scicluna said. As Vatican cardinal in charge of the policy on sex abuse, the future pope “showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases,” Scicluna said.
Wow. Do they think we’ve all forgotten how Cardinal Law was shipped out of Boston as he was about to face charges for abuse cover up, all the secret settlements? Amazing.
It is already clear that Catholic Church was covering up abuse cases as a matter of policy, thus the secrecy and the payouts. If the defense is going to be that poor Cardinal Ratzinger was forced to facilitate the coverup of child rape by priests because “everyone is doing it” or worse, that he never knew about it, will simply not fly. (NYT):
When a sex abuse scandal broke in Boston church in 2002, Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Ratzinger — was among the Vatican officials who made statements that minimized the problem and accused the news media of blowing it out of proportion.
As far as the Munich abuse cases and the decision to send a pedophile priest back out to work with children, something that the archdiocese claims Ratzinger knew nothing about, out comes the fall guy defense. That’s not flying either.
The former vicar general took full responsibility for the decision to reinstate the priest to pastoral work. “I deeply regret that this decision resulted in offenses against youths and apologize to all who were harmed by it,” he said, according to a statement posted on the archdiocese’s Web site.
There was immediate skepticism that Benedict, as archbishop, would not have known of the details of the case.
The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church, said the vicar general’s claim was not credible.
“Nonsense,” said Father Doyle, who has served as an expert witness in sexual abuse lawsuits. “Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”
This is really sad for those sick about what this is doing to the faithful, to see the hierarchy neck-deep in scandal.
At one time you might have thought what you’re about to read was an extreme looney-toon statement, but given the vortex of evil coming to light—the criminal pedophile priest protection enterprise sitting at Benedict’s door of responsibility, the pimping out of undocumented immigrants, members of the Vatican choir, Papal Gentlemen and seminarians...it’s like a bad novel come to life.
Well, this story is like a novel, The Exorcist. The Vatican’s exorcist-in-chief, who was the basis for the priest in the film, thinks there’s evil inside those walls and he’s not shy about saying it.
In the last few months, the Catholic Church have been rocked by a series of sex scandals in Ireland, Holland and, most recently, Germany.
Even the Pope’s brother, Father Georg Ratzinger, has admitted he hit choir boys.
Italian priest Fr Amorth said: “His Holiness fully believes in casting out evil.
”The Devil lives in the Vatican. Naturally it’s difficult to find proof but the true consequences are visible.
“We have cardinals who don’t believe in Christ, bishops connected with demons. Then we have these stories of paedophilia. You can see the rot when we speak of Satan’s smoke in the holy rooms of the Vatican.”
I was chatting with Mike Signorile about this hot mess. Can you imagine what is going on in the Vatican’s PR shop right now? From what I can tell, not a lot is going on because people are leaking like a wood-rotted boat, magnifying the scandal. Since the Pope is considered infallible, it’s not like anyone is going to effectively call for his resignation, no? The only one who’s going to make the UnHoly Father step aside is...Benedict himself.
So what’s the answer? I think the public relations staff have such a nightmare on their hands—who knows when a coerced rent boy’s going to emerge to tell tales of priests in all sorts of compromising positions, or more papers implicating Cardinal Ratzinger emerge that show he repeatedly allowed children to be raped and pedophile priests to remain free to victimize more?
I personally don’t think the Pope would step aside; he’s not shown to be even a tad self-aware of his image around the globe. All I can think of is we may see some sort of cloak-and-dagger end to this thing; it’s all that’s left to make the bad novel ready to hit the press.
Does this mean the Devil really does wear Prada!?
UPDATE: This story is traveling like wildfire. It’s in the New York Daily News with a photo of the exorcist that is truly frightening, as in “the power of Christ compels you” creepy.
Amorth, who told the paper, that he knows a thing or two about exorcisms having handled 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said the Holy See was infested with “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the demon.”
Amorth’s accusations come at a time when the Vatican is facing scrutiny on a number of fronts:
* One of Pope Benedict’s ceremonial ushers was among those implicated in a gay prostitution ring – after being caught on a police wiretap.
* Catholic authorities in Germany on Wednesday announced a probe into allegations the Regensburger Domspatzen Boys Choir – once led by the Pope’s older brother.
* Major pedophilia cases involving priests have also surfaced in Ireland and the United States.
With all this feminist discussion as of late---and because I live in a brand new state with brand new politicians---I’d be remiss in not talking about this David Paterson situation. Seems the trade-off is between governors who do their evil at home and those who inflict it on their constituents, as is the tradition in Texas, at least since we gave up Ann Richards. As a constituent, I prefer the former, of course. As a feminist, I must weigh in on this scandal, and why domestic violence and the aiding of it isn’t really a “personal” issue at all.
The NY Times has been building the case against Paterson for awhile now, and the latest tip off can be read here. If Gov. Paterson did pressure a girlfriend of one of his aides to drop charges of domestic assault against her, then he’s done something very serious indeed. Of course, what he did is also excruciatingly common, far more common than situations where a man beats his wife or girlfriend and faces actual consequences with his friends---which is what Paterson was to the accused, as well as his employer. What I want from this whole sordid situation is for people to understand that what happened is so common as to be mundane, and to start thinking about what it would take to really address domestic violence. I suggest that we start by considering it truly awful to beat a woman. The dirty little secret of the Paterson situation is he reacted like many and I’d guess most people that know a man who beats his partner do---by backing up the man, and blaming the woman if she makes a fuss. It’s one of those many male privileges you hear so much about.
Do people back up abusers and pressure victims to shut up and behave because they love wife-beating? No. It works the same way as rape. They just define what their friend did as somehow not the behavior in question. Real wife-beating looks like X, they tell themselves, and this looked like Y. If a victim cried too hard, protected herself, or yelled at the abuser during one of his rages, then they chalk it up to “fighting” and blame her as much if not more, even if she was actually cowering below his fists. With that in mind, let’s look at the information the NY Times gathered.
In an interview with The New York Times, the governor had characterized the fight as being “like breakups you hear about all the time.”
What are the actual accusations, though?
Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.
Well, yes, you do hear about those all the time. Domestic violence happens all the time, sadly. But what we can say is that if the accusations are true, then Paterson is a classic enabler, minimizing the abuse and using common tropes to do it.
Why does this happen? From the literature on domestic violence I’ve read and people in the know I’ve talked to, the reason is as simple as it is depressing: In most cases, the people in the couple’s social network like the abuser more. You know how you know couples and you like one more than the other, and it’s because you either know them better or find them more charming? Abusers deliberately set out to create that impression in their friends’ minds. First of all, abusers can be very charming, and in lieu of that, they can make themselves indispensable. (That’s how they got their victims to commit, after all!) Second of all, abusers find excuses to separate victims from their friends and family, not letting victims socialize much (and blaming them to others for being shy when asked about it, making people like the victim less), or letting her only socialize on his terms. This strategy can be implemented pretty subtly---making it so miserable for her when she sees her friends through complaints that she starts to roll back on those relationships, poisoning her against her friends, or even moving her away from her support system. Abusers exploit sexism, notably the sexist belief that men are fun-loving guys while women are nagging bitches. And the abuse itself also helps. Abusers can be glowing with power after they’ve forced a woman to submit, but she will be tired and depressed. Glowing people are more fun to be around than depressives, and so he gets more points against her. When the abuse finally comes out, their social network is ready to turn on her.
What Paterson purportedly did is super-duper common. But that it’s common is all the more reason for the public outcry to be strong, and for him to resign. The only way to start taking domestic violence seriously is for people to, you know, actually take it seriously. And to start blaming wife-beaters, instead of making excuses for them or finding ways to discredit or intimidate their victims when they finally speak out.
Lynn Harris has a bone-chilling article up at Salon about yet another incident of fundamentalist Christians taking their beliefs to an extreme and getting someone hurt or killed, usually and inevitably someone in a vulnerable position. In this case, the story is that of 7-year-old Lydia Schatz, whose parents beat her to death using a tool---a quarter inch plumbing supply line---recommended by the wildly popular authors Michael and Debi Pearl, who have an entire series about “child training” for evangelical Christians. Like James Dobson of Focus on Family, the Pearls are big on spanking kids, and not just small pats on the butt. In both cases, the idea is to beat the kid into submission. Dobson wrote about his preferred technique like so:
[T]he spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.
Light, swatting spankings, done in anger without courtroom dignity will make children mad because they sense that they have been bullied by an antagonists. A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain.
Naturally, some children will complain until they’re beaten to death, a situation the Pearls apparently didn’t account for. Now they’re scrambling to avoid any moral responsibility for the death of this little girl, the severe beating of two other children. (The ones who got it the hardest were adopted children from Liberia.)
Lynn describes the debate going on inside the evangelical community about the Pearls, and what is considered “too far”. It’s all very interesting, and I suggest you read her article. But I’m going to argue that the continued debating over the line between forcing someone to submit and overt abuse that goes on in this world completely misses the point. When you define entire classes of people, whether children or women, as existing to submit and suggest that willfulness is an evil brought upon your family by the devil, then abuse is inevitable. The idea itself is abusive and dehumanizing. Everything else that follows from it is simply logical.
I’m struck, when reading right wing Christian child-rearing advice, on how much the advice resembles the tactics that wife beaters use against their victims.
That’s immediately the discussion that’s forming around this situation in Austin. (Which is different from the first question I asked, which is, “Why does Austin and the area around it attract so much hellacious, random violence? The Ft. Hood shootings weren’t that long ago, you know.") My first inclination was to say no. Perhaps it was the combination of Austin with a random dude angry at the world acting out a personal grudge---my mind went to the Ft. Hood shootings and to the Charles Whitman shooting. In fact, this is highly reminiscent of the Whitman shooting. Whitman was boiling with frustration and rage and he aimed it at an institution he likely blamed for his troubles. Whitman killed his wife and mother before he went on his rampage, and Stack burned down his house (but thankfully spared his family). So that’s where my mind went, and thus I wasn’t inclined to see this as a terrorist incident.
Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.
Terrorism is all about intent, in other words. And reading the guy’s suicide note he posted online, it’s clear that he intended this to be an inspiration to others. However, his political ideology is a little hard to figure. Most anti-tax nuts come from the right, of course, but as someone from Texas I can assure you that we manage to breed all sorts of wide-eyed political lunatics, and they often have a real mish-mash of ideological beliefs . It is a state with a functioning, powerful Libertarian party, after all. That’s why we gave you both Ross Perot and Ron Paul. If I met someone there who claimed to be an anti-tax anarchist communist, I wouldn’t bat an eye. There’s just a high tolerance for weirdos in Texas. It’s both one of its charms and one of its drawbacks.
Stack’s beef with the IRS seems to have developed from personal problems stemming from possible tax evasion on his part. But it appears to have turned into a full-blown ideological stance, and again, it’s clear that he hopes others who share his ideological stance---and believe me, there are a lot of crazy right wing nuts in the area who do, and I have no doubt Stack was aware of this---will act on his wishes. This is what I mean by a mish-mash. Most of his ranting seems very left wing, but if you’re living in central Texas and you do something like this, you’re sending a signal to right wing nuts, and you know it.
And on that basis, I have to conclude that this was in fact a terrorist attack, even if there was no criminal conspiracy (and it looks like there wasn’t). I wish I could say with certainty that the whole world, including the right wing nuts, will not look to Stack as a hero and an inspiration, but I can’t. Unfortunately, he performed this deed in a part of the country that’s thick with crazy conspiracy theorists, militia types, and extreme right wing nuts. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’ll bet Alex Jones has a conspiracy theory about how the government is covering this up somehow and Stack was innocent or something like that by tomorrow. People like this go beyond thinking the government mishandled the David Koresh situation and go straight into acting like Koresh was some kind of hero. They lionize Randy Weaver, who to my mind was a nasty piece of work who deliberately provoked a confrontation with the government that got his wife and son killed. The Oklahoma federal building bombing was orchestrated on the anniversary of the Waco shootings, if you’ll recall. So while Stack may prove to be unaligned with any radical groups, he was sending a signal. And unfortunately, it’s a signal they want to hear. So yes, it was terrorism. And even if the President won’t call it that, I’m sure the FBI is going to be monitoring how militant right wing groups react to this attack very carefully.
The airplane crash is Austin is obviously dominating my thoughts right now, but I haven’t fully processed. Need to get some exercise and clear my head. In the meantime, I spent part of this afternoon as a guest on the BBC’s ”World Have Your Say”. The topic is the very one you really want to get into a heated discussion about, if you’re a masochist: Is rape ever the victim’s fault? (Just kidding! I had a fine time and was not at all tortured.)
The panelists were me, two other feminists working in victims’ services and law, and the token anti-feminist, a particularly grating Heather MacDonald. (Or maybe she just seemed that way next to the calm British commentators.) I highly recommend downloading it here and listening. The callers who called in were all very interesting, as were the other guests. Except, of course, MacDonald, who accused the vast majority of rape victims (since most rapes are committed by someone you know) of lying to cover up for their slutty, drunken behavior. The other guests and hosts called her out for conflating the campus “hook-up culture” with all acquaintance rape ever, but I felt like I had to spend time pointing out that she was full of shit about even that narrow topic.
Not to be a broken record about this, but the notion that most rapes are a matter of women making drunken choices and regretting it later doesn’t match the realities. It’s not like “the feminists” running the “campus rape industry” (I can’t wait for my checks that keep not rolling in), as MacDonald kept calling us, are just making shit up. There’s actual research into who rapes and why they do it, and it looks nothing like the picture of innocent frat boys who had consensual sex with deceitful women, as anti-feminists like to claim. A very small minority of men commit most rapes. Offenders rape because they like to rape. Contrary to the stereotype of the victims as flighty sluts who are making shit up, rape victims are often selected by rapists because the rapist feels they are sending off submissive signals, and that this means they won’t put up a fight. And yes, you can intend to consent to sex with a man and withdraw that consent, and if he keeps going, that’s rape. Anti-feminists imply women withdraw consent to be capricious. In reality, consent is withdrawn more often than not because things went from fun to weird or violent really fast. I fail to see why it’s hard to imagine a man could suddenly decide that it was going to happen without a condom, or insist that he introduce violence or other acts the woman doesn’t want, and she suddenly withdraws her consent. I mean, duh.
Eric Boehlert has an excellent piece up really slamming the mainstream media---including netroots sources like Media Matters---for covering the James O’Keefe ACORN stories without fully delving into how deceitful those videos were. Boehlert focuses on one of the most obvious missteps, which is letting the heavy editing of the video convince you that O’Keefe actually pretended to be a pimp, wearing that outrageous costume. The independent investigation reveals that O’Keefe wore business casual clothing and presented himself as a college student or an ordinary Joe just trying to help a friend. Hannah Giles’ willingness to call herself a prostitute seems shaky at first---she claimed to be a dancer, initially, but then got bolder with her prostitution story---but if you were an ACORN employee who was one of the very few who fell for this (and there were very few), it’s because you didn’t see a pimp and a prostitute, but a prostitute accompanied by a man who acted like her friend.
Boehlert and Brad Friedman have written exhaustively on how misleading the videos were, how they were heavily edited to make it look like employees were answering questions they weren’t actually asked (it seems that a lot of the “tax evasion” stuff was created in editing---employees seem to be talking about strategies to escape an abusive pimp). So read them to get the full extent of that particular angle.
What I want to talk about is the story that O’Keefe and Giles presented, and how it demonstrates what deep down horrible, rotten, broken people they are. They seemed to have variations on this story, but you’ll recognize the basic idea. I took a screenshot from the independent report.
The video implies that the advice about the 13-year-olds was given with the intent of helping a pimp control them. This doesn’t fit the circumstances. In fact, it appears that what happened was that employees were responding to requests on how to get young girls out of sex work, not keep them in.
Now, it’s unclear to me how many of the people who heard this story believed it at all. The woman they focus a lot of energy on in the video was spinning a bunch of lies at them to get them out of there, and fearing for her safety, she locked the door behind them. I don’t blame her; both Giles and O’Keefe creep me out, too, and I’m sure the ill intent was radiating off them. Also, people who think sex trafficking is a joke are scary people. The report indicates that some employees did, despite their suspicions about Giles, try to play along and be kind to her on the off chance she wasn’t full of shit, and they basically told her to reach out to domestic violence shelters to leave the life. In the Baltimore office, Giles presented as a sex worker who wanted out, and the advice was offered by an employee who took pity on her. In Brooklyn, Giles said she needed help buying a house to hide trafficked girls from a pimp; they were skeptical, but gave her information on reaching out to domestic violence shelters. In Miami, Giles once again presented herself as a prostitute under a pimp’s thumb, and once again was sent to a shelter. In this case, Giles seems to have tried to “catch” them not turning in a woman for prostitution that presented herself as a victim of sex slavery. Apparently, Giles and O’Keefe think women trapped in abusive situations deserve jail time.
The lying, the media complicity, the vicious racism of O’Keefe and his buddies have been covered elsewhere. I just want to point out what vicious misogynists they are, too. They went out of their way to turn people’s kindness towards marginalized women into a bad thing. When they encountered decent human beings who take responsibility when asked for help to stop violence against women, they brimmed over with hate for those people, and they set out to destroy them. And while they think kindness towards prostitutes is a weakness, and violence against women is a joke, they exploited the public’s horror at sex trafficking and violence against women to slur people who were the only people in the room who actually had a problem with violence against women.
A quick story for you all. A woman and a man meet up on Facebook/at a party/on an online dating site, and they feel a potential spark. So they agree to go out on a date. They meet for happy hour at a bar somewhere near both their homes. They expect only to hang out for a couple of hours, but they find they have so much to talk about and they’re having a good time. They agree to go back to one of their places for a little more privacy, maybe have another drink and talk some more. Sexual tension hangs in the air as they retreat inside, full of smiles and good time vibes.
Where are they a year and a half later? A couple of potential options:
A) He’s sitting at the defense stand hearing the jury read a verdict of not guilty. His family cheers while her family closes in around her protectively. Afterwards, jurors who are interviewed say, “Well, she should have known that could happen if she just went home with a man, after all that flirting with him. He’s no saint, but she had it coming.”
B) She and he are sitting beaming at the table listening to their family members take turns toasting them. Their wedding is tomorrow, and they couldn’t be more excited. “Good thing,” a slightly tipsy toaster says to the bride, “That you agreed to go on that date with him. We thought you’d never get married!”
If you’re intellectually honest, you know both of these results are likely, and the latter is not only as likely but probably more likely than the former one. There’s a bit of polite fiction about premarital sex---not that it doesn’t happen, but we don’t discuss it in detail around relatives---but all in all, women dating, flirting, and sleeping with men is considered a normal, healthy way to meet people, fall in love, and yes, even find someone to marry, if you’re into that sort of thing. We know that the most common thing that happens is that you date someone, sleep with them, and it doesn’t work out. But sometimes it does, so we keep plugging. But sometimes someone rapes someone else, and then all of a sudden people start acting like going out with men and allowing yourself to be alone with them---and god forbid, floating the possibility of having sex with them!---is outrageous behavior and anyone who engages in it should expect nothing short of being raped and possibly beaten severely.
I bring this up, because the BBC released a survey recording how many people, women especially, slide into “she was asking for it” territory. I posted on this at XX Factor, trying to point out that it’s statistically impossible for women who blame rape victims to have not done the exact same thing. 71% of British women surveyed said you bear “some” responsibility for getting raped if you got in bed with a guy without checking to see if he was a rapist first. Have 71% of British women refrained from not only getting alone with a man, but getting in bed with him? Have 1/3 never been alone with a man on a date, the number who said that behavior makes it your fault? Not at all. Many of the people surveyed admitted to doing the very things they think make you eligible for rape. But I doubt very many of them would think they bear even some responsibility should it happen. Like I said, we all make exceptions for ourselves. That’s why I’ve always joked that a slut is a woman who has sex with two more people than you.
Naturally, this brought out the trolls at XX Factor.
So, a twelve year old was handcuffed and detained for writing on her desk. But before the little overactive hippie civil libertarian in you gets all crazy up in arms about it, look at the foul language she wrote:
Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.
“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the girl wrote, adding the phrases “Lex was here. 2/1/10” and a smiley face.
Everyone knows that “Abby and Faith” is MS-13 code for “kill all the white bitches”. Those street gangs are clever. And oddly sentimental.
Of course, where there’s a potential civil right violation that liberals might care about, there’s Ann Althouse to add an uncomfortable patina of completely unnecessary sexual discomfort and authoritarian scapegoating.
Why make a star out of a kid that defaced school property with graffiti? She’s an especially cute girl, willing to pose with her wrists together in the handcuff position. I’m sure some readers appreciate the entertainment on that level. Do we know the whole story of why she was arrested and why handcuffs were deemed necessary?
Well, she was probably willing to do it because she was fucking handcuffed. And we do know the whole story, because, per the above linked article, the city admitted it was in the wrong.
City officials acknowledged Alexa’s arrest was a mistake.
“We’re looking at the facts,” said City Education Department spokesman David Cantor. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened.”
“Even when we’re asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary,” said police spokesman Paul Browne.
Now, yes, it is theoretically possible that this 80-pound girl whose most apparent sin was committing to loving her friends before getting out of sixth grade (junior high changes EVERYTHING, little girl) somehow pulled out a hunting knife and threatened to gut her teacher, but I’m pretty sure that would have come out at some point. The problem, however, is that this is apparently school policy.
Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.
Grant told Alexa’s mother that it wasn’t their fault that it was something they had to do,” Camacho said of her meeting with Grant at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills. “She doesn’t consider it doodling.”
I’m not entirely sure what this principal considers doodling on a desk, then. An antitrust violation?
Anyway, back to Althouse:
Is stoking the victimhood feelings of your child like this a good idea? The girl did wrong, as she knows. She should apologize, straighten up, and rededicate herself to schoolwork. The mother should not tolerate the child’s sickly overreaction — even if she believes the school is too harsh in its response to crimes committed by kids in school.
The child’s “sickly overreaction”, as Althouse put it, was crying and vomiting because she was treated like she just tried to commit armed robbery. How the fuck should twelve year olds react to their detainment for doing shit that kids have done since we started building schoolhouses?
A class action lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union last month against the city for using “excessive force” in middle school and high schools. A 12-year-old sixth-grader, identified in the lawsuit as M.M., was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.
Fine. Let the courts review the patterns and, if the schools are violating the law, provide a remedy congruent with the legal violation that leaves room for the schools to preserve discipline and good order.
Well, I’m not entirely sure how “don’t send kids to the police station for drawing on a desk” would prevent schools from enacting policies which preserve discipline and good order, but then again, I’m not a callous, soulless hack who’s willing to defend a guy who attempts to tamper with a government phone system because it’s not clear what he was going to do, but will strike the hammer down on a twelve year old girl because she’s too pretty (and because she was probably going to shiv her Spanish teacher, because that’s what those types do).
Christian conservatives in Georgia are protesting a new law that would protect child prostitutes by giving them counseling and entering them into diversionary programs rather than imprisoning them.
But, you see, this is a huge problem. Active intervention designed to benefit, say, a 13-year-old who started prostituting herself because her parents kicked her out of the house or because the guy down the street threatened to kill her if she didn’t go have sex with some of his friends is a terrible idea. And why is that?
Some opponents said the bills amounted to decriminalization, which amounted to legalization. And would lead to more prostitution, not less, they said.
“Decriminalizing that means the police would have absolutely no interest in it at all,” said Sue Ella Deadwyler, who writes a Christian conservative newsletter. “They wouldn’t arrest the girls, they wouldn’t pick the girls up, they wouldn’t protect them from influence on the street from the pimps and the johns. It would be an absolute cultural upheaval in our state. Never in the United States, as far as I known, has juvenile prostitution been legalized.”
You know what would probably protect girls more than giving them a criminal record? Arresting the people who are raping them and profiting from their rape.
But no, that’s crazy talk. Instead, apparently, the only thing that stands as a bulwark between a flood of teenagers deciding to go out and get beaten by pimps so that they can make $100 a night is the threat of arrest. After all, it’s working so well now, you know?
Very good news that Scott Roeder was hit about as hard as you can under the circumstances. The jury probably didn’t have to ding him for assault, but did, and that helps make it likely he’ll never see freedom again. While part of me wants that to be true for justice, part of it is just the fear that anti-choice nuts are highly likely to recommit, so Roeder needs to be locked away for the safety of other doctors and clinic workers. As anti-choicers are generally cowards---this includes Roeder, who spent 10 years fantasizing about this, mainly because he wanted to get away, and who assaulted two men in his desperation to escape justice---the fact that they will go to jail for their crimes will probably cool down the inclinations of the would-be copycats that activists like Jill Stanek have helpfully pointed in the direction of other doctors. The harsh reality of jail isn’t something that people who live fantasy lives really want to deal with.
That said, there will always be someone who is willing to commit violence in the anti-choice ranks, a lot of someones. The movement attracts losers like Roeder like flies to honey, because the anti-choice movement is, contrary to their self-identification, deeply hostile to life and their message sounds good to the deeply bitter. All the infrastructure that made it possible for Roeder to murder is still in place---anti-choice activists tracking doctors’ movements and feeding that information to deeply unstable people, the wink-wink attitude towards violence, the highly charged lies about why pro-choice activists and doctors do what they do. Somehow, I got on one of Randall Terry’s mailing lists, and he saw the writing on the wall during the trial---it was pretty obvious that there was only one possible verdict---and sent out an alarming email to his followers. It’s really long, but I’ll quote some of the pertinent parts. After a disingenuous claim that he’s not condoning Roeder’s actions, Terry goes on to do just that.
“We will be present to be a voice for the babies who perished at George Tiller’s hand, and to raise a series of ‘academic questions’ such as the following:
“Was John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry completely right, completely wrong, or a mix of both? Was Brown a hero or a villain?”
“Was Nat Turner’s slave rebellion completely just, completely unjust, or a mixture of both? Was Turner a hero or a villain?”
It was pointed out to me that Terry might actually, since he is such a massive racist, think the right of slaves to rebel is more ambiguous than most of would think. It’s certainly possible, since Pat Robertson only recently suggested that god has it out for Haiti because they successfully threw off the shackles of slavery. Even though the person who suggested Terry might be pro-slavery was mostly kidding, it’s something to remember---every time they compare abortion to slavery or the Holocaust, they’re suggesting that neither of those was that horrible, and implying that Jewish or black people are the equivalent of mindless fetuses.
But I do think Terry is trying to suggest that someone who kills abortion providers will go down in history as a hero, because he basically comes out and makes himself very clear.
It takes some effort to do something more ridiculous than dress up as Pimp Von Pimpington III, but James O’Keefe still did it:
Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.
Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.
What’s amazing is that it took four people to come up with an idea this stupid. You have to wonder what the ideas they didn’t use looked like.
“Hey, so, we should break into Mary Landrieu’s office and jizz all over the place.”
“Yeah, but that’ll leave all of our DNA behind.”
“Then we should jizz in their rubbing alcohol.”
“How much rubbing alcohol is the office going to have?”
“Okay, so we buy some and jizz in it and then leave it there.”
“But won’t they track rubbing alcohol purchases?”
“What about using cash?”
“I’m not going to get to an ATM until late this week.”
“Yeah, huh...how about we wiretap them?”
“Sweet!”
My favorite response is the lovingly clueless Megan McArdle, who seems to think that 24 is the new 12:
Like many 24-year olds, he may not have fully appreciated why what he was doing was wrong, but if the allegations are true, I hope that the judge explains it to him while handing down a stiff penalty.
Luckily, this sets up O’Keefe and company to write this off as a youthful indiscretion. You know, it really is difficult to make rational adult decisions after you’ve only received a college degree, held continued paying full-time employment for a few years and become a national figure in a self-designed controversy. You can’t even rent a car yet, you know. These guys were still babies! Let’s just hug them until it’s all better.
Sorry, Philly Eagles. Anything Michael Vick experienced is a result of his cowardice and cruelty in training innocent dogs to fight, then maiming, beating, shooting and abusing the ones who couldn’t “measure up.” It’s not “courage” to make a comeback in the NFL after doing time in lockup for that sadistic, sick behavior.
Michael Vick’s peers appreciate his tough journey back to the NFL. Vick won the Ed Block Courage Award, voted on by his teammates on the Philadelphia Eagles. The once-disgraced star quarterback returned to the league after spending 18 months in a federal prison for his role in a dogfighting ring.
...The Ed Block Award honors players who exemplify commitment to the principles of sportsmanship and courage. All 32 NFL teams select a recipient, and each winner will be honored at an awards ceremony in Baltimore on March 9.
”I’ve overcome a lot, more than probably one single individual can handle or bear,” Vick said. ”You ask certain people to walk through my shoes, they probably couldn’t do. Probably 95 percent of the people in this world because nobody had to endure what I’ve been through, situations I’ve been put in, situations I put myself in and decisions I have made, whether they have been good or bad.
Check out that humility. Holy mother of dog. It’s one thing to give the man a fresh start to work (some wouldn’t believe he deserved that), but to honor someone as having courage just because of the media circus he endured that evolved out of the dogfighting catastrophe makes me ill. It only tells me that his teammates and the Eagles need their moral compasses adjusted.
This might be a nominee for the best fundie plea for cash this year. Talibangelist political operative is dealing from the bottom of the deck to ensure his wallet stays plump. This is an epic shameless begging for buxxx in the vein of the late Oral Roberts. (Columbus Dispatch via Right Wing Watch):
The Rev. Rod Parsley, megapastor and televangelist, has issued a desperate plea for money, telling his flock that he is facing a “demonically inspired financial attack” that is threatening his ministry.
Parsley is asking for donations by Dec. 31, calling that date an “unavoidable deadline” during an episode of Breakthrough posted yesterday on http://www.rodparsley.com. Breakthrough is Parsley’s television show.A message titled ”Crisis—Urgent” on the Web site says ministries such as Breakthrough and World Harvest Bible College are “in jeopardy.”
The headline of the appeal for donations reads: ”Will you help me take back what the devil stole?”
Why is thy Rod in dire financial straits? Um...maybe it was that little lawsuit...
This year, the church settled for $3.1 million with a family whose son was spanked at its day-care center in 2006, to the point his buttocks and legs were covered with welts and abrasions.
The boy, then 2, said he was spanked with a “knife” by a substitute teacher. His parents, Michael and Lacey Faieta, believe it was a ruler. The Faietas said the payment was made this year. During yesterday’s Breakthrough broadcast, Parsley referred to a $3 million check he had to write from the ministry.
Oh man, it’s getting ugly now. How do you like the gauntlet that Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of the Catholic Church’s Irish flock, has thrown down at Pope Benedict. Why? It’s because Brady is under his own cloud of abuse scandal, and smells blood in the water now that Papa Ratzi is hanging on for dear life when it comes to responsibility for child-raping priests on his watch.
At one time you might have thought what you’re about to read was an extreme looney-toon statement, but given the vortex of evil coming to light—the criminal pedophile priest protection enterprise sitting at Benedict’s door of responsibility, the pimping out of undocumented immigrants, members of the Vatican choir, Papal Gentlemen and seminarians...it’s like a bad novel come to life.
With all this feminist discussion as of late---and because I live in a brand new state with brand new politicians---
A quick story for you all. A woman and a man meet up on Facebook/at a party/on an online dating site, and they feel a potential spark. So they agree to go out on a date. They meet for happy hour at a bar somewhere near both their homes. They expect only to hang out for a couple of hours, but they find they have so much to talk about and they’re having a good time. They agree to go back to one of their places for a little more privacy, maybe have another drink and talk some more. Sexual tension hangs in the air as they retreat inside, full of smiles and good time vibes.
So, a twelve year old 
Very good news that Scott Roeder was hit about as hard as you can under the circumstances. The jury probably didn’t have to ding him for assault, but did, and that helps make it likely he’ll never see freedom again. While part of me wants that to be true for justice, part of it is just the fear that anti-choice nuts are highly likely to recommit, so Roeder needs to be locked away for the safety of other doctors and clinic workers. As anti-choicers are generally cowards---this includes Roeder, who spent 10 years fantasizing about this, mainly because he wanted to get away, and who assaulted two men in his desperation to escape justice---the fact that they will go to jail for their crimes will probably cool down the inclinations of the would-be copycats that activists like Jill Stanek have helpfully pointed in the direction of other doctors. The harsh reality of jail isn’t something that people who live fantasy lives really want to deal with.
It takes some effort to do something more ridiculous than dress up as Pimp Von Pimpington III, but 
This might be a nominee for the best fundie plea for cash this year. Talibangelist political operative is dealing from the bottom of the deck to ensure his wallet stays plump. This is an epic shameless begging for buxxx in the vein of the late Oral Roberts. (