What’s the Matter With Pennsylvania?

No disrespect intended to the people of Pennsylvania, but honestly: Since I started this blog, I’ve noticed that no state outdoes Pennsylvania in the number of news-reported sex attacks by clergy. What’s that about?

I don’t live anywhere near the Keystone State (sometimes called the Quaker State, take your pick), so it’s probably not a matter of Google reading my IP address and serving up search results that emphasize the state.

pennsylvania

By the way, I have no known biases against Pennsylvania. I’ve traveled through it many a time, and feel neither exceedingly positive nor terribly negative about it.

I’m also not trying to suggest a link between religiosity and crime; if that were my goal, I’d try another state, because Pennsylvania is the tenth-least-religious state in the union, according to this 2008 Gallup poll.

My observation regarding sex crimes in Pennsylvania is entirely anecdotal, based on just two months of closely following news of religious crimes, so it may not translate into actual statistics. If there is a correlation, I doubt I’d be able to explain it, but I’m inviting anybody with a decent theory to chime in.

Priest Flees After Alleged Shrine Sex Attack

Father flees best:

A new priest-abuse lawsuit accuses church and local authorities of letting a Philadelphia-area priest flee to Poland during a stalled investigation. The lawsuit says the priest assaulted a woman last year while counseling her at a Roman Catholic shrine in Bucks County. The woman volunteered at Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.

The Associated Press is not naming the accused priest because he could not be reached for comment. He belongs to the Pauline Fathers, a religious order at the shrine. A woman who answered the phone Wednesday said the Pauline supervisors were “in prayer” and not available for comment.

Rabbi, Do You Copy?

And here I thought that Thou shalt not steal was a revered commandment by Jews as as well as Christians. From Haaretz:

France’s Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim acknowledged that he plagiarized several parts of his latest book. Bernheim said Tuesday in a statement that parts of the 2011 book “Forty Jewish Meditations” were taken from other sources.

Loose translation of the headline: "We have lost our understanding of what it means to be moral."

Bernheim before the scandal (condemning gay marriage): “We have lost our understanding of what it means to be moral.” Thanks for that, Rabbi.

Even more disturbing may be that when confronted with his plagiarism, he lied about what he did — and smeared a dead man in doing so.

The affair started in early March when the Strass de la Philosophie blog revealed that a passage on hasidic exegesis from Bernheim’s work was almost identical to an interview of the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard that appears in the 1996 book “Questioning Judaism” by Elisabeth Weber.

Soon after the disclosure, Bernheim said some of the meditations in his book were transcripts of lessons he gave in the 1980s while he was a chaplain for French Jewish students. He said the lessons were often recorded and that copies of his personal notes were distributed to the listeners, implying that Lyotard, who died in 1998, plagiarized him and not the opposite.

His version was contradicted by Weber, who interviewed Lyotard and specified that the philosopher answered her questions without a single note.

Bernheim still hasn’t come clean. While nominally accepting responsibility for the plagiarism in a “the bucks stops here” kind of way, he insists that he didn’t know about the pilfered passages in his book; he was hoodwinked by his “ghostwriter,” he claims. Reminds me of how copyright infringers on the web always claim that it’s the webmaster’s fault.

We will learn the truth, I think, especially now that the investigation is getting crowd-sourced following allegations that Bernheim has been at this for some time:

Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, suggested on his website that Bernheim also might have plagiarized books by other authors such as Elie Wiesel, Jean-Marie Domenach and Charles Dobzynski.

[image via la-croix.com

One Hundred Ten Thousand Views…In One Day!

Two weeks ago, our page views shot up to 6,000 in a day, and we were excited.

Five days later, the number doubled to more than 12,000, and we were getting giddy.

And now we’re elated, because yesterday brought this gobsmacking six-figure milestone (thanks to Reddit and redditors’ more than 2,000 upvotes):

Screen shot 2013-04-02 at 11.59.58 PM

And it wasn’t all Reddit. Richard Dawkins also linked to Moral Compass from his website yesterday. Sweet.

The numbers could have been even higher if our servers had been able to keep up with demand. Unfortunately, as the traffic got heavy, Moral Compass got grindingly slow for a few hours in the evening. I imagine we tested people’s patience, and inadvertently chased some visitors away when they couldn’t get our pages to load in a timely fashion. Sorry about that. We’ll be looking into measures to keep the site quick and responsive.

There’s something you can do, too, if you wish. Actually, there are six things you can do. Pick and choose:

1. Tell others about Moral Compass.
2. Join and ‘like’ the Moral Compass page on Facebook (if that link doesn’t take you to the right place, search Facebook for “moralcompassmyfoot.”
3. Bookmark us in your browser(s).
4. Subscribe to our RSS feed (top right).
5. Subscribe to this blog by e-mail, so you’ll be notified of new posts as soon as they go live. Look for “Moral Compass by email” in the column on the right.
6. Find Twitter user MoralCompassWeb. Follow our Tweets, and don’t forget to say hi.

Also, feedback is always welcome.

Thanks again!

UPDATE: Today, we bought triple the previous bandwidth allotment. That should do nicely, but please feel free to try to prove us wrong!

N. Carolina Lawmakers Break the (Highest) Law

Does this look familiar to you?

congress shall make no law - Google Search

The Establishment Clause part of the First Amendment might as well have been written in Serbo-Croatian, where North Carolina legislators are concerned. The highest law of the land is an apparent mystery to them. They’re equally non-plussed, I have to assume, by the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

So here’s what a group of neener-neener Christianist Representatives introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly on Monday. (I know Monday was Aprils Fool’s day, but if this was some kind of prank, no one told the local media, who are reporting on the measure more than a day later as if it’s real — and from what I can tell, it is.* See here, and here, and here.)

We’re talking about House Joint Resolution 494, otherwise known as the Rowan County Defense of Religion Act of 2013. The bill was filed by Representatives Carl Ford and Harry Warren. In total, eleven House Republicans signed on to sponsor the resolution.

The crux of it (read the whole one-page document here):

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

So what that does is to allow the state of North Carolina to declare an official religion. Oooooh, I wonder which one they’ll pick!

To put the judicially somewhat baffling move in perspective, the bill is the direct result of a federal lawsuit filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In that suit, the ACLU alleges that the board has illegally opened 97% of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

House Joint Resolution 494, then, is meant to give a big fat North Carolina middle finger to the ACLU and its commie Godless pansies who want to stick their city-slicking noses into the good old boys’ business.

Of course, 494 won’t go anywhere. The whole thing is patently, hilariously unconstitutional, and if the Assembly members live anywhere near the realm that I call reality, they know this. In effect, the bill is just a bit of absurdist political theater, performed by a faction of fundies who don’t mind beclowning themselves in an effort to win praise and re-election from their evangelical base.

Still, you have to wonder if these lawmakers would be so brazen as to declare their intent to break any other federal law on the books. Me, I look forward to future legislation in which they allow themselves to take bribes, rob banks, evade taxes, and beat up homos. Check back soon.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

* To make sure I wasn’t being punk’d, I called the newsroom of the Raleigh-based News & Observer, one of the two leading newspapers in North Carolina, and spoke to a reporter at the political desk. He confirmed that H.J.R. 494 is real — not an April Fool’s joke. I asked if the bill, which the Assembly referred to the Rules and Calendar Committee yesterday, would actually be scheduled for a floor vote at some point. His response: “I would be surprised, but then, I’ve been surprised by the Assembly many times.”

Anyone can check the current status of the bill here.

Connecticut’s High Priest

People had begun telling Father Kevin Wallin to stay away from methamphetamine. So he bought a fifteen-foot straw.

Heh-heh.  But srsly:

A suspended Roman Catholic priest pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal drug charge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Connecticut announced. The Rev. Kevin Wallin, 61, of Waterbury, Connecticut, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute crystal methamphetamine. With the plea, he admitted that he received and distributed 1.7 kilograms of the drug, U.S. Attorney David B. Fein said in a statement.

Wallin was arrested January 3 after an investigation that involved wiretaps, confidential sources and an undercover officer, Fein’s announcement said. A search of Wallin’s apartment found meth, drug paraphernalia and drug packaging materials, said Thomas Carson, Fein’s spokesman. Wallin sold meth to the undercover officer six times between September and January, Fein said.

In addition to a great fondness for meth, the saintly Father Wallin had some seriously colorful sexual appetites and preferences. Previous Moral Compass post on the rascal here.

Re: Adopted Kids. Here Are Mine. Any Objections?

Walter Olson’s guest post, below, hit a nerve with me — I guess because the sad trend he writes about casts my two adopted daughters, and my family, as both less whole and less wholesome than “regular” (biological) families.

Evidently, the National Organization for Marriage wants it that way. Although my own marriage (straight and strong, 18 years and counting) presumably passes muster with NOM, I don’t plan to sidle up to the organization anytime soon. I’ve written in favor of marriage equality many times, which presumably puts me on NOM’s shit list (and, not to be too holy about it, it is on my shit list too). That’s all fine.

But here’s my problem (and Walter’s): Big chunks of the religious right have gone from supporting adoption to using it as a opportunistic weapon against gay marriage. And that hurts families with adopted kids — whether the parents are gay or straight. That’s not fine. This one, for me, hits closer to home than ever.

So here’s what I’ve decided: If people honestly decide to argue that my family somehow falls short in moral standing, or lacks legitimacy in any way, I’d like to invite them to emerge from their digital lair and engage me and my wife and kids face to face.

mygirls1

Please understand that this is not a mere gauntlet slap, but an effort to exchange ideas and perhaps spread some clarity. How about it, NOM?

That’s a photo of my girls (and that’s me on the left). Look at their faces and then, any of you, please come to our home and explain to us why we are not a real family, and why my marriage isn’t as genuine as yours. Or we can do this by Skype, if you’d prefer.

Seriously, consider this a social offer. Come visit if you can. I’ll cook. We’ll talk. I will try to meet any of your objections with logic and reason; and when our brains begin to throb and our throats get sore, we’ll switch track, and the four members of my family, me included, will simply be living proof of our familial love. Observe us for a few hours. We won’t mind.

I hope you will then report back to your base what you found.

Open invitation. Anytime, anyplace.

Families With Adopted Kids: Collateral Damage in the Religious Right’s War on Gay Marriage

(This is a guest post by Cato Institute senior fellow and Overlawyered blogger Walter Olson. Olson, who is an adoptive parent, and who helped bring about Maryland’s pro-gay-marriage election result in November, wrote this piece for IGF Culturewatch. It is re-published on Moral Compass with his permission. The original article is here. — T.F.)


You may have noticed — I certainly have — that for the past year or two, the National Organization for Marriage/Witherspoon Institute/Princeton crowd’s campaign against gay marriage has been steadily reorganizing itself as a campaign against gay parenthood.

Increasingly, as a powerful Esquire piece by Tom Junod argues, that campaign is resulting in the belittlement of non-biologically-based family forms — and among the targets to suffer collateral damage are adoptive families whether straight or gay.

Until lately, NOM and its friends had actually spent little time criticizing adoption by gays, and some had even put in a kind word for it. Many anti-gay activists were also active in the anti-abortion movement, which generally regards adoption as an extremely good thing. But with the new strategy shift a distinctly harsher line has emerged. Any parental structure other than a married biological mother and father, it is now argued, should be presumed to inflict damage on kids.

anlc

There began a search for evidence to back up this thesis. When the exceedingly weak Regnerus study burst on the scene last year — purporting to find that children of gay parents do much less well on a range of social health indicators — critics quickly shredded its methodology, and noted that it had been financed by a $695,000 Witherspoon Institute grant; more recently it was confirmed that in the study’s rush to publication, sponsors had one eye on the likelihood of its use in a Supreme Court case. And sure enough, the much-refuted Regnerus study is now the centerpiece of “empirical” social-conservative arguments in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases. Adding a reality-television dimension, when internal documents from the National Organization for Marriage were disclosed in litigation last year, they revealed that, as I noted at the time, “NOM had budgeted $120,000 for a project to locate children of gay households willing to denounce their parents on camera.”

Junod was taken aback to find NOM’s literature, as it extolled the “natural family,” casually denigrate the role of nonbiological parents:

The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.

Even if you’ve come to expect the attacks, the sheer virulence can surprise. Jennifer Roback Morse, who directs NOM’s research affiliate Ruth Institute, has publicly termed it a “breach of faith” for orphanages to place children with gay parents — though as she surely is aware the alternative for many orphanage children is never to find parents at all. In the Witherspoon Institute publication Public Discourse, favorite NOM author Robert Oscar Lopez goes so far as to denounce international adoption as “trafficking” — an attack that in its viciousness cannot by its nature be limited just to those adopters who are gay, since straight and gay intending parents alike navigate the international adoption process in the same ways using the same agencies and methods.

Last year, when Catholic League founder and perennial anti-gay commentator Bill Donohue insulted Hilary Rosen’s adoptive family — he wrote that Rosen “had to adopt kids,” in contrast to Ann Romney who “raised five of her own” — I wrote the following:

There are lessons for gays, I think, in the long and heartening story of how adoption came to lose the social stigma once attached to it. Before “love makes a family” was ever a gay-rights slogan, it was a truth to which adoptive families had been given special access. Lurking behind both disapproval of adoptive families and disapproval of gays is the prejudice that in the final analysis only biological, “natural” ways of forging family connections really count. Only a generation or two ago, during the same general period that most gays were constrained to lead lives of deep concealment, it was common for adoptive parents to conceal the fact of adoption, not only from neighbors and teachers, but even from children themselves. We now realize that an obligation to keep big secrets, especially secrets about love and commitment and the supposed shame that should attach to family structure, is too great a burden to carry around without good reason.

We do not need the Catholic League’s offensive tweets to remind us that anti-adoption attitudes are still with us. In many parts of the world, especially those where a more tribal approach to family life has not yet yielded to modernity, adoption is culturally or even legally disapproved and raw biology does rule the day, to the great detriment of stray children who languish on the streets or in institutions. When modernist views of adoption advance, and likewise when same-sex marriage advances, more people find “forever families” to love and to commit to their care. That is why both march alongside in the genuine pro-family cause.

P.S. On how gays succeeded in becoming parents in large numbers before opponents really took notice of the trend and could organize to block it — a remarkable instance of the benefits of America’s open order, in which social innovations are generally legal unless affirmatively banned rather than the reverse — don’t miss a new Washington Monthly article by Alison Gash.

[image via Adoption Network Law Center]

Death Threats for ‘Stomp on Jesus’ Professor

The Florida professor who offended millions by allegedly making students “stomp” on a piece of paper with the word Jesus on it has broken his silence.

No doubt he’s got plenty of time for interviews now that, after a deluge of death threats, his university has decided to place him on leave.

The mid-March kerfuffle at Florida Atlantic University happened when the instructor, Dr. Deandre Poole, who taught an intercultural communications class, asked his students to write the word Jesus on a sheet of paper and then step on it. One Mormon student refused and was suspended by the university. Soon, outside protests came pouring in, including a scathing letter from Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott. The school then apologized for both the disciplinary action and the professor’s exercise.

So far, we’ve had little but the student’s version of events to go on, but now Poole (photo) has told his side of the story to Inside Higher Ed.

poole

And what do we learn?

• Far from being a Jesus-mocking heathen, Poole is a lifelong church-going Christian and former Sunday-school teacher who describes himself as “very religious.”

• The student exercise, Poole says, involved stepping (not “stomping,” as Fox News and others alleged) on the sheet of paper.

• The exercise was meant to demonstrate that some students would feel inhibited about stepping on something that 15 seconds earlier had been a random, insignificant piece of paper. This would give everyone an opening to discuss symbols and their meaning.

• Poole says it made no difference to him whether the students stepped on the paper or not. Most didn’t, and that was fine, he explains, as their discomfort was intended precisely to jumpstart the discussion.

• The suspension of the angry student was the result of the student’s aggressive behavior after class, claims Poole. The young man allegedly slammed his fist into his palm and told the instructor he wanted to hit him (although the student’s attorney denies this ever happened). Alarmed, Poole notified campus security and filed a report on the student.

In revisiting this Christian tempest in a teapot, we can see that at the very least, things are a little less clear-cut than the Christian-right outrage machine made them seem.

Now let’s look at what America’s very own Taliban had to say when they contacted Poole.

He said he has received hate mail and death threats, some of them coming in forms particularly hurtful to an African American. “One of the threats said that I might find myself hanging from a tree,” he said. [H]e has had some days that he did not feel safe at his home and so stayed elsewhere.

On Friday, Florida Atlantic University announced that the threats against the professor had become so numerous that

Poole has been placed on paid leave because his safety could not be assured on campus.

Yet again, the love of Jesus’ followers shines through bright and clear.

[photo via Inside Higher Ed]

God Less Likely To Perform Tricks for Educated

If you want to witness a miracle, it helps if you’re not too edumacated, televangelist Pat Robertson opined yesterday.

On Monday’s episode of CBN’s The 700 Club, Robertson responded to a viewer who wanted to know why “amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?”

“People overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools,” the TV preacher laughed. “We’re so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real.”

“We have been inundated with skepticism and secularism,” he conintued. “And overseas, they’re simple, humble. You tell ‘em God loves ‘em and they say, ‘Okay, he loves me.’ You say God will do miracles and they say, ‘Okay, we believe him.’”

textbooks-bible-300

I actually don’t disagree with Robertson on this one. Undoubtedly, the best antidote to superstition and religious flimflam is critical thinking, which correlates with education. An uneducated man sees a faith-healing trick and says “Praise God.” An educated man sees the same trick and says “Nice try.”

As regular readers of this blog know, the countries with the highest populations of atheists also score best for IQ. Moreover, the higher the overall levels of education, the less religious adherence. One study found that each additional year of school leads to a four-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that a person identifies as religious.

Incidentally, I wonder — I’m genuinely curious here — if the same effect is true for students at highly religious schools. Anyone know?

[image via lawyers.com]

Jesus-Loving African Witch Hunters Target Kids

Via Hemant Mehta.

‘Derogatory’ Bloggers in Custody in Bangladesh

Glad police in Bangladesh are cracking down on dangerous crime.

mohammedprotest

Police arrested three persons, including a student of Dhaka University, from different parts of the capital Monday night for writing “derogatory contents about Islam and Prophet Mohammad (pbuh)” on different Internet platforms.

The arrests came hot on the heels of a campaign by radical Islamist organisations which threatened of non-stop shutdown and tougher agitation if “atheist bloggers”, as they termed them, are not executed.

[image via slantedright]