California Supreme Ct overturns Gay Marriage Ba

[Mink]

Jgaffney:
"How about this as a solution: heterosexuals get married, and gays enter into civil unions? The civil union will carry with it the same tax status, and will give partners the same status when it comes to medical, death and insurance decisions."
_____________________________________________
That is reasonable, but then your brother brings up a point that heckheckle brought up too---divorce, what then? Many court cases and what about the kids?

I'm sorry if I don't remember and don't have the time to see who also brought up other scenarios...example polygamy. Just look at the situation in Texas right now. The children don't understand why they are taken from their parents, now they were allowed back. What happens when these people want a divorce?

Personally, I just don't want to vote on this.

[The New Guy]

oh, it was such a beautiful day monday. gays of all types were liing up to get married. an elderly couple, together for 55 years were finally able to tie the knot. the mayor presided over the ceremony and there was much pomp and circumstance offered up by the fawning news reporters. what you may have missed is the opinion of the elderly lezzies over all this.

from the mouth of phyllis lyon herself:

"I don't think we would have gotten married if we'd gotten corralled into it," Lyon, 83, says with a laugh. It won't make a difference in her relationship with Martin, 87. They have their wills in place. They share common property, including their home overlooking the city that they bought for $11,000 in 1955. "

oops! looks like gay marriage really wasn't that big a deal to the old gals. they already had practically everything that marriage provides like community property, wills, tax bennies, etc. it seems the only things has changed is that they will now be able to say they are "married."

www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-06-16-gaymarriage_N.htm

[Mink]

For some reason this couple didn't bother me. Maybe it's because when they got together, times were different and their expression was kept to themselves or maybe it's that they looked so normal?

My kids laugh at me for my "homophobia", they say I have. I guess it's because they have grown up seeing the results of "coming out" years before they were born. They don't understand the disdain, not that they support it either........"let it be" is the best I can decipher.

[heckheckle]

JG:There is no reason to try to create an alternate path for Qveers. There are all kinds of laws to protect all of the People of the United States of America. The question should never have been brought up. I don't want the outcome to eventually be brought to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court should not have to decide if Deviant Sexual Behavior must be accepted by Christian People. I also don't believe that Qveers should be allowed to adopt children as there
personal "Playthings". They are trying to gain a "Bunch" of benefits all at one time, instead of going through the Political Process of gaining whatever benefits they want,by Trying to get enacted those benefits that affect them alone, and not try to have a bunch of laws attached to Homosexuality. Marriage is between MAN and WOMAN Worlwide. What right do Qveers have for Dirtying up the the Institution of Marriage? What right do they have to flaunt their dirty habits on good Christian People? And Yes, It's time to get rid of those Closet Judges.

[heckheckle]

Same Sex Marriage. Pfaw! They want to legitimize Same Sex. Why don't they call it by it's real name, "Deviant Sex Marriage"? I will say it again, "They say they want Equal rights with people who enter into NORMAL MARRIAGE". Well, they have the exact same rights. all they have to do is marry someone of the opposite sex.

[heckheckle]

::)Such a shame. The dope heads are trying to make an end run around the Federal Pot Law. Id Est: You can't raise pot, use pot,
smoke pot, own pot, buy pot, sell pot, etc. But where are the Feds? This crap is all over the country. Even Quacks [Real name of Drs. who write prescriptions for this shi t] have caused the biggest end run by announcing that there is medical value in Pot.
This is the biggest load of BS ever foisted off on the People. This situation is in the same state as the mafia takeover of the booze business in the 20's. Anyone get in the way, "BOOM" you're dead.
Even Little kids sleeping in their beds are shot, dead by thugs going down the street shooting off guns at their rivals with no
consideration of innocent people.

These Quack doctors who write these prescriptions should be serving big time sentences in prison. They are just "Pushing"
illegal drugs.

Why is this Post in here? Because of the way the Laws are being subverted by people with their own agenda. Including the Politicians and Judges in power. By Judges who would make Law, including the US Supreme Court.

Now for the qweers of those categories who are trying an end run around the Institution of Marriage In the United States of America. The Qweer Pols, Judges, and the qweers themselves,
etc., and sadly, some who call themselves Christians, etc.

The People of California have said NO QWEER MARRIAGES and yet
the pro-qweer people are trying to legitimize deviant qweer sexual habits by usin the Ipso Facto Bul l shi t. Their acts may be FACT, but but they are far from legitimate.

By the way, how many Qweer Catholic Priests are in jail for doing
nasty stuff to kids?

[jgaffney]

Sept 5, 2010 19:57:35 GMT -5 heckheckle said:

By the way, how many Qweer Catholic Priests are in jail for doing
nasty stuff to kids?

As a practicing Catholic, I refuse to believe that pedophelia is limited to the Catholic clergy. It just makes better press.

If the issue was defined in terms of homosexuality, just imagine how the argument would change.

[subdjoe]

Sept 8, 2010 12:11:27 GMT -5 jgaffney said:

Sept 5, 2010 19:57:35 GMT -5 heckheckle said:

By the way, how many Qweer Catholic Priests are in jail for doing
nasty stuff to kids?

As a practicing Catholic, I refuse to believe that pedophelia is limited to the Catholic clergy. It just makes better press.

If the issue was defined in terms of homosexuality, just imagine how the argument would change.

If you do a bit of digging online you will find credible numbers of about 4% to 6% of RC clergy abuse children. A few studies show as low as 2%. There is little study of other denominations, but what little there is seems to suggest that the percentages are about the same.

Compare that to about 3% to 4% of males in the general population.

And 6% to 10% of teachers. (Now there is a story that should get the same attention as the RC priests, but somehow I doubt that it will become the sensationalized issue that the RCC is)

Part of the perception that a huge percentage of priests molest children comes from the mania early this decade for what seemed like every other person dredging up 30 or 40 year old memories, real or imagined. A few cases came to light, started a feeding frenzy by the bigoted anti-Catholic and, truth be told, anti-Christian media, with Mikey Moore style reporting and news stories. People moved in to sue the RCC, which is portrayed in the media as rolling in cash. So there were 40 years worth of cases, real or imagined, being brought to light in a very short time.

And, attitudes change:

Attitudes about child molestation have changed enormously over time, Jenkins said.

“No one looks at whether the attitudes of secular professionals in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were any less wrong than the church’s,” Jenkins said. “Commonplace therapeutic views until the 1970s were that pedophiles were curable and unlikely to repeat if removed from the setting. A dominant theme of the 1960s was that there was no significant damage to children in these cases.”

The Catholic Church is the only institution being scrutinized by the standards of today for decisions made 30 years ago, Jenkins said.

Here is a piece by a non-RC on the subject:

Myth of a Catholic Crisis

The truth about “pedophile priests”

Philip Jenkins

Is the Roman Catholic Church a cover for the world’s largest criminal sex ring? Over the past few months, a steady stream of news stories seems to have confirmed the bleakest possible vision of global conspiracy, the most extreme claims of anticlerical propaganda through the ages. Even moderate commentators are writing as if priests around the world have taken secret vows of conspiracy, perversion, and omerta. Worse, this deviance is allegedly built into the church’s structures of command and control. According to the darkest visions, clergy are almost encouraged to pursue careers of abuse and pedophilia, secure in the knowledge that their crimes will be sheltered by fellow molesters in the hierarchy, all the way to the Vatican itself, with Pope Benedict as the boss of all bosses. Suddenly, even the rants of Maureen Dowd and Katha Pollitt appear almost plausible.

If all this seems far-fetched, it is. Sexual abuse by clergy is a reality, and a real problem demands a response. But the problem is vastly different from that described so enthusiastically by the media, and most of the critical measures have already been taken.

Although the alleged crisis is now being portrayed in global terms, I will focus on the U.S. experience because this is by far the most intensely studied aspect. The American abuse scandal, now a quarter-century old, has produced rock-solid quantitative evidence that allows us to make general statements about abuse by clergy and to dispel myths.

Most tellingly, we can say one thing quite confidently, however strongly it goes against prevailing wisdom: there is no credible evidence that Roman Catholic clergy abuse young people at a rate different from that of clergy of any other denomination or from members of secular professions who deal with children. If anyone believes that such evidence exists, the burden is upon him to present it.

By far the best quantitative evidence derives from the survey carried out by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York in 2004, entitled “The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States.” Specifically, it examined all plausible complaints of sexual abuse by U.S. clergy between 1950 and 2002, a cohort of around 110,000 men. Although this study was sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the researchers were independent, and the final report was widely praised.

By social science standards, this was an impressively thorough study, and the sample size was immense. Obviously, the John Jay researchers failed to detect many cases, including those that had not come to light by 2004, and other acts that would never be reported. But they worked hard to compensate for such omissions by using a strikingly low standard of proof for the allegations that were known. Investigators counted all charges “not withdrawn or known to be false,” and total exoneration is a very high standard. The list thus includes allegations that would not have surfaced except in the furor of 2002-03, following the dreadful scandals in the Boston Archdiocese.

A couple of points leap out about the allegations, particularly about the image of the “pedophile priest” pursuing his decades-long career of crime under the de facto protection of the Church. The John Jay study concluded that in this period, perhaps 4 percent of all U.S. priests had been plausibly accused of at least one act of sexual misconduct with a minor. But of the 4,392 accused priests, almost 56 percent faced only one misconduct allegation, and at least some of these would certainly vanish under detailed scrutiny.

Very few of the accused priests were pedophiles, in the sense of having abused a minor under the age of puberty, say 12 or 13 for a boy. In the U.S. at least, the great majority of cases of sexual misconduct by priests involve older boys, often aged between 15 and 17, or even older. This behavior is illegal, harmful, and sinful, but it is not pedophilia. The technical name for this kind of act is ephebophilia, but many would call it pederasty or even homosexuality. Drawing this distinction certainly does not excuse or minimize the behavior, but it is critically important for understanding the statistics. Pedophiles are compulsive offenders who are highly likely to repeat their acts, often claiming hundreds of victims. The fact that true pedophile priests formed such a minority of offenders meant that the overall number of victims was mercifully far smaller than it might have been.

Pedophile priests certainly did exist, but in tiny numbers. At the heart of the clergy abuse crisis was a core of highly persistent serial pedophiles, who massively “over-produced” criminal behavior, and some were the targets of hundreds of plausible complaints. Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all the allegations of clergy abuse. These 149 super-predators also explain the surprisingly large number of very young victims that the study reported. The average age of offenders for the whole era has been gravely distorted by counting the sizable number of child victims assaulted by these reprehensible serial pedophiles.

Nor was clerical misconduct a persistent or steady-state phenomenon, as we would expect if abusive behavior resulted inevitably from the agonies of the celibate lifestyle. In the U.S. at least, recorded malfeasance was quite rare until an explosion of criminal activity in one short period, namely between 1975 and 1980. These six years accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of all the alleged acts of clerical abuse for the 52-year period under examination. Just why these years were so horrific is open to debate, but there seems to have been a sharp decline in the moral and disciplinary controls that higher authorities exercised over priests. Also, clergy in the 1970s were vulnerable to powerful social pressures encouraging sexual experimentation, the sense that old injunctions against adultery or pederasty were destined to perish in the new age of ethical relativism[/u], and some priests succumbed to temptation. Of the priests ordained in the year 1970, a startling 10 percent would ultimately be the focus of abuse allegations. But the crisis was a byproduct of a specific historical era, not of some essential quality of the clerical status or of the Church’s structures.

Let’s put all this in context. In any given year between 1950 and 2002, the Catholic Church in the United States averaged around 50,000 priests, serving 45 to 55 million members. Assuming all the charges reported by the Jay study were true, then each year, an average of around 200 children were abused or molested by priests nationwide. Obviously, given what we know about the under-reporting of molestation, that figure must be a gross underestimate, and even if it was not, the problem would still be appalling: 200 instances of priestly victimization is 200 too many. But the documented evidence for clerical crime is far less extensive than is widely believed. Even in the overheated and litigious atmosphere following the Boston scandals, the Jay study reported no allegations against 24 priests out of every 25.

To say that X percent of Catholic priests might have engaged in abuse or molestation might be troubling, but the figure is meaningless unless we can compare it with some other group. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we could say confidently that priests abuse at a rate 10 or 100 times larger than Presbyterian ministers or Jewish rabbis or than the male population as a whole. Then we could begin to seek the roots of the Catholic problem, whether we located them in the fact of celibacy or in the secretive clerical subculture. Unfortunately, we have not the slightest point of comparison with any other group. As a result of the furious investigations of the past decades, and particularly the Jay study, the U.S. Catholic clergy are now the only major group on the planet that has ever been subjected to such a detailed examination of abuse complaints, using internal evidence that could not have come to light in any other way. Nothing vaguely comparable exists for other groups, for Presbyterian pastors or Lutheran clergy or, indeed, journalists.

Actually, that is not entirely true. Before commenting on the priestly situation, any observer should read the writings of Professor Charol Shakeshaft of Virginia Commonwealth University, who for years has been studying sexual and physical abuse by America’s public-school teachers. The volume of misconduct she reports is staggering and far exceeds the rate of documented abuse by Catholic clergy. Hard to imagine, public schools sometimes deal with their problem faculty by quietly transferring them to other institutions without warning the new employers of the dangers they face. It sounds a lot like the worst charges against Catholic dioceses, doesn’t it? Thank heaven we don’t worry too much about the sexual dangers facing our children in the schools, or else we might have to think seriously about this issue.

So if Catholic priests are no worse than other professions in this regard—and maybe a lot better—why do we hear so much about them being abusers? Several reasons explain this focus, none of which necessarily reflect any anti-Catholic bias in courts or media. By far the most important factor involves the way in which cases come to light, which is through civil litigation. An individual accuses a particular priest of abuse, and quite possibly, the charge is perfectly true. Lawyers then use that case as a means of forcing a diocese to disclose ever more information about past charges against other priests, which might date back into the 1940s or ’50s and which can also lead into other jurisdictions. One case thus becomes the basis for a whole network of interlocking investigations, which proceed ad infinitum. The Catholic Church suffers acutely from its pack-rat character, of being a highly bureaucratic institution that prides itself on preserving records of institutional continuity.

In contrast, imagine a charge against a Baptist or Pentecostal minister, who has no such institutional framework and little institutional memory, whose church has no deep pockets, so that the case begins and ends with him. Not to pick on any particular denomination, but stories of abuse by clergy of all sorts surfaced regularly through the 1990s, until most groups became massively more proactive in preventing and detecting abuse threats. Partly the new vigilance reflected intensified consciousness of threats to children, but at least as significant were the demands of insurance companies: either you adopt stringent new policies to safeguard minors, or kiss your liability protection goodbye. That was an offer no church could reasonably refuse.

For Catholics, though, with their distinctive structural set-up, the new environment offered no protection from old allegations that continued to surface, often involving alleged acts from 40 or 50 years ago. Even today, Catholic churches are still trying desperately to defend their actions in the distant past, when social attitudes to child sexual abuse were radically different from what we today regard as normal. In those bygone years, molestation was trivialized in both expert and public opinion, and offenders were commonly treated with kid gloves. Only the Catholic Church, however, is held to account for the decisions it took in this very different world of so long ago. Only the Catholic Church is subjected to the unforgiving standards of 20/20 hindsight.

Catholics, like other denominations, have made massive progress in preventing abuse by clergy. In the U.S. at least, very few of the cases that have come to public attention in the past few years refer to acts alleged to have occurred since 1990. Yet litigation resulting from earlier eras means that “pedophile priests” remain in the news almost daily, and that fact shapes (and mis-shapes) popular stereotypes.

Europe is not the U.S., and it is difficult to generalize across countries within Europe. Legal systems differ, as do social assumptions and sexual attitudes. Theoretically, it is possible to imagine that in some particular nation, the Catholic clergy became so vicious and corrupted that they preyed systematically on the young and conspired to hide their misdeeds. But any awareness of the American situation, and the florid mythology it has produced, must make us very careful about giving credence to any such nightmare interpretation.
__________________________________________

Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis and, most recently, Jesus Wars.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: [e-mail]

And, the John Jay Report that was referred to above.

So, what we have is a bigoted, biased witch hunt against the RCC, conducted by and anti-religion, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian media.

I'm not condoning sexual activity by adults with minors here. Once case of abuse, by anyone - priest, teacher, dentist, or the lady down the street boffing the paperboy - is wrong. I'm just tired of the hate filled bigots like Heckle spreading lies, distortions, and filth.

By the way, I was raised RC, left it in my teens. Was actively agnostic for a number of years, and am now Eastern Orthodox.

[heckheckle]

I'm glad subjoe isn't refering to me, Heckheckle, when he states,"he is tired of the hate filled
bigots like Heckle spreading lies, distortions, and filth". I don't know of anyone named Heckle on this forum, but if the reference is to me, I think subjoe has blown a fuse in his brain and should cite the Posts of which he states the above. The above lengthy defense of the Catholic Priests has nothing to do with what I feel. and have stated. I do feel that Anyone who has sexually abused a child should go on the Preditors list and go to jail.

[subdjoe]

Oct 1, 2010 4:16:34 GMT -5 heckheckle said:

I'm glad subjoe isn't refering to me, Heckheckle, when he states,"he is tired of the hate filled
bigots like Heckle spreading lies, distortions, and filth". I don't know of anyone named Heckle on this forum, but if the reference is to me, I think subjoe has blown a fuse in his brain and should cite the Posts of which he states the above. The above lengthy defense of the Catholic Priests has nothing to do with what I feel. and have stated. I do feel that Anyone who has sexually abused a child should go on the Preditors list and go to jail.

Yes, I was. In response to your

By the way, how many Qweer Catholic Priests are in jail for doing
nasty stuff to kids?

which was not the first time on this site that you have taken a shot at the RCC on this subject. It may not have anything to do with how you feel, but it is spot on with how you post.

[heckheckle]

Just to inform the Uninformed, I have great respect for the Catholic Teachers in Catholic Schools. I have always felt that they do a good job of keeping many people on the "Path that is straight". That idea does not allow me to condone the actions of pedofile priests. They should be in prison.

[heckheckle]

Subjoe: Consistency is in the Bible. The only trouble seems to be that too many "Christians"
have adopted the way "Law" has been changed to suit anyone who doesn't like a particular Law. Real Christians should get back to Basics. Read the Bible, and encourage others to do the same. The Bible is the Book of Truth.