News on Religion in Our Goverments

But the Church, as an organization, is complicit. That's the problem. Instead of cleaning its house, the Church has merely whitewashed it. If it was (as I hope it is) a "small minority", and the Church, becoming aware of the problem, had done something about it apart from try to hush it up, then it wouldn't be a scandal against the Church as such.Instead of shooting the messenger, surely there's something lay Catholics such as yourself can do to urge changes in this purely administrative practice of the Church? If you don't like hearing people complain about this stuff, then do something to make sure it doesn't happen again.

No and yes, respectively --- racists are jerks, and everyone should get their shit together.But where your analogy breaks down is that unlike the Roman Catholic Church blacks do not constitute a hierarchical institution with the ability to dismiss or unfrock its members. If they did, I would be asking similar questions. I'd be saying --- why doesn't the Chief Black (the Blope, the Blontiff) give orders to his Blishops to deblackinate any black known to them to be a crack dealer and turn him in to the police instead of just moving him to to a different "turf" where the police don't know him? If they were an institution, and the institution was covering up and protecting its venal members, I'd be criticizing it like I criticize the R.C.C.And for the same reason, when I do criticize the R.C.C. I am not saying a single word against Catholics in general as though they were the blacks of your analogy; nothing I say is an imputation against you or my brother-in-law or any other Catholic not personally complicit; it's the institution that I'm criticizing.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes, especially if their employees sexually abuse children and the people at the top know about it and cover it up. How would pointing that out and condemning it be a slur on black people in general? If you have information to that effect, and make it public, I for one will acknowledge you as a public benefactor rather than condemning you as racist. That depends on what you mean. The workers in the unions have, after all, some measure of control over what the unions do. Well, they don't have to vote Democrat; whereas black people have to be black whatever NAACP does. If the Democrats start herding Jews into gas chambers then to criticize that would be to implicitly criticize people who continue to vote for them; and rightly so. Certainly. Knock yourself out. When did I ask to have a monarch? That depends what you're criticizing them for. If it's for being gay, for example, then we might have a problem. Well, don't "you guys" as he put it, have some measure of responsibility? You could speak up for reform; or you could leave the Church. Or you could wait for someone else to agitate for reform, fair enough, we can't all shoulder all the problems of the world, but while you wait for someone else to sort this out, you could also not waste any effort complaining about the "haters" who suggest that someone should.

You asked about the legislators, not the legislation. If someone is against legislation giving gay people equal rights, I would have to think they had some sort of agenda against giving gay people equal rights. And then I'd wonder if they decided which groups shouldn't have equal rights just by flipping a coin, or if there was something else that led them to pick gay people. Well, I really don't know what the Catholic laity can do about this apart from stopping being the Catholic laity ... which might well go unnoticed. Perhaps the media will have better luck ...

This article caught my attention. The Catholic Church's Secret Sex-Crime Files: I think part of the problem here is that the Church itself is part of Catholic theology. Indeed, the very word Catholic refers to this position --- that there is one Catholic (i.e. universal) Church, and that this is it.---Anyway, perhaps we're drifting from the topic, since I suppose that we're all in agreement that the state gets to prosecute pedophile priests.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I'm not so sure. If these things are to get support (and I don't think they should, but if) then surely it should be funded proportionally to the numbers of servicemen being served by the event.

"No one is forced to go to church — they can choose fines or incarceration instead."